Sermon Tone Analysis

Happy New Year

Last week, we saw a glimpse of the new chapter that God is unfolding for us as a church.

This week, we take our first steps of that journey.

And the first thing that we need to understand is that this is a journey that makes disciples who make disciples.

This is the reason that Christians are still on earth.

To share the Gospel, and to help new believers become mature disciples of Jesus Christ.

But what is a disciple?

And what is discipleship?

Well, the definition of a disciple has become muddied over time.

Some Christians have emphasized the knowledge part of discipleship, i.e., theology, doctrine, Scripture, history, and so on.

Others have emphasized the following aspect of discipleship, that is, serving, missions, and the like.

And when it comes to discipleship, its even less clear.

Can anyone here define discipleship as something more than the teaching aspect or the serving aspect?

I suppose we might say that discipleship is modeling spiritual maturity for others, and that is a part of discipleship, but its not the whole thing.

Jesus very clearly articulate what a disciple is, and what it looks like to be discipled, and this is where we start our journey.

If we are going to effectively and faithfully and obediently reach the people of Bristol in Jesus’ name, we’ve got to make sure that the main thing stays the main thing.

Because the last thing we should want is to bring a false or counterfeit gospel, or an errant caricature of Jesus to a lost city that needs the real thing.

Pray

The scribes who approached Jesus and asked him this question were sincere.

If you read the previous verses, you’ll see that Jesus had just answered another question about the resurrection, and, being impressed with that answer, this scribe posits a question of his own.

Now, at the time, rabbis of the day numbered 613 individual statutes in the law.

613 rules to follow to the letter.

365 were negative, and 248 were positive.

Many attempts were made to determine which laws were more important than others, and here the inquisitive scribe wants to settle the debate.

Jesus answers him that the Greatest Commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

If this is the Greatest Commandment, then this is the one thing Jesus wants His followers to make sure they obey, over everything else.

Why?

Because everything else flows out of this.

Jesus says as much when He says that the second greatest commandment is like it, “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus is teaching that loving each other is a result of loving God.

A disciple is a Christian who loves God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength in increasing measure over the course of their lives.

Discipleship, then, is believers helping other believers to grow in those four areas:

Heart, Soul, Mind, & Strength

Simple.

Discipleship includes knowledge, but it also includes our passion and will, our spiritual maturity, and our physical manifestations of our spiritual health (i.e.

strength).

Think of a disciple like a physical body, and that physical body has 4 organs, and each organ does its part to complete the whole person:

(need body picture for screen)

Heart - Passion, Will, Volition - Surrendered to Jesus

Soul - Our true identity, who we really are - In Jesus

Mind - Knowledge of God - About Jesus

Strength - Service, Sacrifice - Empowered by Jesus

As we disciple each other, we need to have this at the top of our minds so that we can best know how to help each other grow as a disciple.

If discipleship and what it means to be a disciple is clear, why does it seem like we are lacking in this way?

Why are so many Christians stuck in spiritual infancy and biblical illiteracy?

I want to suggest to you today that the problem is that

we have confused the concepts and practices of priority and primacy.

Priority and Primacy

There is a difference

Webster’s dictionary:

Priority: Something given or meriting attention before competing alternatives

Primacy: To be supreme, dominant, paramount; transcending

The difference is subtle, but significant.

Concerning priority, there are possible, competing alternatives

Concerning primacy, nothing can compete or overtake

Priority is in a class among others

Primacy is a class all by itself

When something has primacy, its will must be satisfied, and there is no other acceptable solution.

When you are merging onto the freeway, the act that has primacy in that moment is increasing your speed to that of freeway traffic.

And those drivers who take their sweet time put the rest of us in danger, and we are always kind enough to let them know how we feel about them, aren’t we?

When we are merging onto the freeway, everything we do is subject to what has primacy at that time.

There are not a bunch of competing speeds that might work, we need to reach the speed of traffic.

The scribe in Mark is asking Jesus to tell him what commandment has primacy, what is the most important of all, under which everything else has its place.

And Jesus responds by telling him that loving God with everything is the commandment that has primacy over and above else.

In other words, the commandment of primacy (the greatest commandment) is a command to give God primacy in your life.

The problem is that we often make God a priority in our lives, but He does not get the place of primacy in our lives.

This is why we stay immature in our faith, illiterate concerning Scripture, and often times stuck holding onto pain and frustration that we might overcome if we truly gave it to God, but instead, for whatever reason, we give ourselves primacy, and God gets priority.

Table illustration

Personal passions

Talents, Gifts

Ministry Efforts (missions, evangelism, discipleship)

Family

Money

Its easy to confuse what we are personally passionate about with what is actually

This is the reason that we say we “don’t have time” to read the Bible everyday.

God is a priority, but He doesn’t have primacy.

This is why our prayer lives suffer.

God is a priority in our lives, He doesn’t have primacy over our lives.

You see, the difference between priority and primacy is really the difference between horizontal and vertical.

When the table, using our example, is like this, it is horizontal, and all the powers of life are beside each other.

No one power is over another, including God.

One of the things we’ve gotten used to in this horizontal priority scenario, is taking God and putting Him here on the end.

Granted, a place of visibility in our lives, but again, not a place of primacy.

And what we do is we take a few things from our lives and put them in our “God-space.”

And then we feel better because we gave that over to God.

But, when something in our lives shifts, we can be tempted to take one or more of these things back because, all-of-a-sudden, God isn’t doing it right.

And isn’t like we are on this never ending roller coaster of spiritual life, highs and lows, peaks and valleys, and while trying to manage those, we are overwhelmed as we try to “make time” for God in the midst of all the tyrannical chaos that is our life.

But this is the horizontal, priority-driven way of trying to be a disciple.

What if we tried vertical disciple-living?

What if, instead of juggling priorities, we put everything under the primacy, the Bible would describe it as, Lordship, of Christ?

What if we surrendered to Jesus in such a way that He was no longer one power among many competing powers, but rather, He was THE Power over all of our lives?

It would look like this (put everything under table)

Now, of course, this does not mean that we no longer are tempted, sin still affects us and can influence us in this life.

What it does mean is that we will put everything under Jesus’ control, including our sin.

And

When Jesus is one priority among many, we don’t always go to Him with our sin, do we?

We go to Christian counselors, our friends, or maybe a vice or habit that we cling to emotionally.

There’s nothing wrong with Christian counselors, or counselors in general, they do a lot of good.

But they can’t defeat sin in your life.

Neither can your friends.