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Title: What it Means to be a Disciple of Jesus
Speaker: Jonathan Bailey
Location: Four Corners Church
Plano, Texas
Date: July 6, 2008
This is post-resurrection.
Jesus is out of the grave.
The disciples are excited again.
This kingdom movement, this Jesus movement is moving on.
I want to talk for a second about the Great Commission.
Jesus is going to give us some directions, some instructions to these disciples on what it means for the church to go forward.
This address, this little teaching from Jesus gives us some shape, some vision for what we as disciples are to do.
I think about how important that time was, and I always want to ask these questions: “What do you tell these disciples to do?
What kind of instructions do you give them?”
Here's what Jesus says: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.”
In other words, “I'm in charge.
I have say over everything.”
Here's the important phrase: “Therefore, go and make disciples of My name.
Not converts; not people who confess or profess a few things about Me; not churchgoers; not Bible thumpers; but disciples of My name, students of Jesus.”
We live in a strange time where we don't hear too much about that anymore.
There's a great quote from Dallas Willard where he says, “We have divorced being a Christian from being a disciple.”
So there's no real natural connection, and now discipleship is kind of an option in the Christian life.
It's kind of an addendum we add on.
It's for the real serious Christians or the real hard-core Christians.
It's not an addendum.
Jesus tells us that discipleship is not an option; it's a commission.
It's something He commissioned us to do.
This morning I want to talk about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.
There's a lot of confusion about that.
In some Christian circles it could mean memorizing the Greek and Hebrew Bible.
In other Christian circles it could just mean showing up for Sunday school and going to Wednesday night church.
For others it could be the infamous quiet time, or it could be reading a Psalm or reading a Proverb every day.
Who knows?
Or it could be our smorgasbord of groups: Accountability groups, care groups, life groups, home groups, cell groups.
This morning I want to talk about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.
I want us to think about a disciple as not someone who is learning information and just soaking it in, but someone who is out in the field learning.
I want you to try on a new word: “Apprentice.”
“Apprentice” has a little more teeth to it.
It says a little something more than “disciple.”
I have a cousin who is studying to be an electrician in Marshall, Texas.
He doesn't wake up every morning and get his electricity books out and read about electricity, lights, and plugs.
He goes out every day with the master electrician.
He goes with him and he learns how the wires work.
He's dropping plugs, hanging cables, and he's with him, learning to be like him.
The master apprentice is saying, “Now you try.
I just dropped this; I just did this; now you give it a try.”
That's the clearest picture we have in the gospels of what it means to be a disciple.
When Peter is sitting there and Jesus says, “Come on out; get in this water with me; I'm doing it; you do it,” that's what discipleship is all about.
I want to give you a definition before we get started of what a disciple is.
A disciple of Jesus is someone who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to be with Jesus, learning to be like Jesus.
That's what a disciple is all about.
I wish I had more time to talk about just what it means to be with Him, because He ascended into heaven, and He's not with us like He was with the disciples.
There are so many ways we are with Jesus now.
One way that we are always with Jesus is we immerse ourselves in the Gospel stories.
We baptize ourselves into those stories.
There is rarely a day that goes by that I am not reading what Jesus is doing in the Gospels.
I'm constantly soaking it in, reading about it, and I'm always asking questions.
A disciple is someone who is asking questions because they're trying to learn, they're trying to become.
I'm always asking questions like, “What in the world does that mean, Jesus?
Why would You say that?”
The most important question I could ask is, “How do I do that?”
That's one way that we are with Jesus.
This morning, I'm going to talk about Luke 14:25-35.
I want to walk through those 11 verses verse by verse and talk about what each verse means.
It's almost self explanatory.
That's why I like teaching exactly what Jesus taught because I don't have to come up with anything, and that's a good thing.
Let me pray before we jump into the text.
Jesus, I am painfully aware that my words will not be enough this morning to change anyone's heart.
Only You and Your Spirit can do that.
I ask now that Your Spirit will come and forcefully impress on every one sitting in this room the beauty of being a disciple of Jesus.
Lead us and guide us as we go from this room.
It's in Your great name we pray, Amen.
Just to give you a little bit of context on this passage, this teaching from Jesus comes after some pretty significant miracles.
He has healed the lady whose back was bent over.
He healed a guy from dropsy.
Some more notable miracles are He calmed the storm.
In one right after that, He fed the five thousand.
When you take into the account the women and children, we're talking about 15,000 to 20,000 He fed.
So we get a clue in the first verse of what preempts this teaching from Jesus, because it's a pretty severe teaching.
That's why I like it so much.
Starting with verse 25:
25“Now large crowds were going along with Him; and He turned and said to them,”
Key phrase: Large crowds.
Luke wants us to know that before we jump right in to Jesus’ teaching.
It could be that maybe some of these people were coming to see a miracle.
Maybe they were coming to see Jesus to get healed by Him.
Maybe they were coming just to get some of that fish or that bread that He had made for everybody.
Maybe they were seeking some kind of experience rather than seeking Jesus.
One of the things that I really love about Jesus is that He doesn't seem very impressed with crowds.
It's kind of the opposite for us today.
Crowds validate who we are.
Crowds validate what I'm saying.
When we see crowds, we say, “I have to go see what's going on there.”
Jesus was almost always deterring people, or at least He wanted them to know what the deal was before they got all excited or hyped up about what was happening.
For a disciple of Jesus, the question that we always want to keep in front of us is this: Are we in it for Jesus, or are we in it for ourselves?
Growing up, I would always go to these stadium crusades, youth camps, Christian conferences – these big, large-crowd gatherings.
I was always seeking some great, life transforming experience.
Can anyone relate to that?
You get hyped up, you have a lot of emotion, and then you come back, and three or four days later you're back to your old life.
That probably happened four or five times before finally I said, “That kind of Christianity is a sham.”
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