Disciple

DISCIPLE!

The past few days have been crazy. I started working at a local church recently and have been putting in 12+ hour days. I know many of you probably do that on a regular basis - and my hat is off to you. On top of that my wife is traveling this whole week so I'm juggling 3 kids with no back-up. On top of that our 3 year old crawled into bed with me last night (since Mama is gone) and in the middle of the night he rolled out of bed and ripped his chin open on the nightstand... 7 stitches later, our baby is now officially a little boy. All that is to say that I'm sorry for promising my follow-up post to Matthew 28:18-20 "Having Gone Through" a couple days ago, but not delivering on that promise...

Hopefully your take away from the last blog entry "Having Gone Through" was that Jesus was not commanding the 11 remaining disciples to "Go and make disciples," but instead to understand that His emphasis was on what those 11 men had been BROUGHT through over the past 3 years - The Great Filtration. 

Please don't mistakenly twist what I'm saying here to assume I'm diminishing the biblical imperative for evangelism and global mission. Those things are IMPERATIVE, but that's not what Jesus is emphasizing in Matthew 28:19. Jesus is emphasizing the fact that what these 11 men have been BROUGHT THROUGH (remember poruomai is the Greek verb where we get the English word porous from) is the foundation, genesis, starting point, and prerequisite for the CENTRAL verb of this entire passage - "Disciple."

With that in mind...

In my first semester of seminary I took a class called "Contemporary Evangelism." In that class the professor had us share our salvation testimony - how we came to know Christ as LORD. I volunteered to go first because I'd only been saved a couple years before and I was eager to share. As each of the men went up it almost seemed like a contest to see who could top the previous story in terms of dramatic content. 

Then the one female in our class went up. She was a very quiet, unassuming, young lady - about 22 years old. Instead of telling us a cinematic epic tale about her salvation - she told about a trip she'd just made to China a few months prior. She told us that in China that baby girls are a liability, therefore many impoverished families will take them into fields or just throw them away with their trash right after they've been born (see photo). The organization this young lady was working with tried desperately to find these baby girls before they were snatched up by people who would raise them like cattle and sell them into the sex trade.

This young lady was at a tea house in China and 3 men drugged her tea when she left her drink unattended to use the restroom. She woke up several hours later - alone in a hotel room after having been raped repeatedly. As if that wasn't bad enough - after she got home to the United States she found out that she had been infected with the HIV virus.

12 seminary guys had spent several minutes shining the spotlight on ourselves - not God. Our testimonies were selfish accounts of me, myself, and I. Then one young lady got up and shared that she'd been raped repeatedly and was now HIV positive. She concluded with a statement something like this, "I'm thankful for what God has brought me through, because NOW I have an answer to my prayer, 'God, how can I best serve you?' Now I know that God wants to use me to minister to women who have been raped, abused, or infected with HIV." That's what a testimony sounds like.

So often we think that our "testimony" is about us - about what God did for us in gifting us with faith by grace, but that selfish account is not a testimony at all. Our testimony can only be about what God has BROUGHT US THROUGH, like this young lady and like the 11 disciples. It is not about "our" salvation, but rather what we do with it. It's about the circumstances that God Almighty BRINGS US THROUGH - the refiners fire - which prepares us to fulfill Jesus' subsequent imperative command to actively "disciple all the peoples."

So when the authentic disciples of Christ stop and ask, "What does discipleship look like?" First and foremost we have to look in the rear-view mirror and look at what God has BROUGHT US THROUGH. In reflecting on what God has done - it shapes the scope of our ministry and service to the Body of Christ. If we've been through nothing then we have nothing to offer others. If our prayers are constantly and continually for God to shield us from pain and discomfort; to magically deliver us from our circumstances rather than teach us through them; to insulate us from the reality of life... then we have not the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us. Jesus did not ask for deliverance from the Cross, but to do the will of His Father through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.

How often do we look at Jesus as the Ultimate Disciple? How often do we look at Him as someone who truly died to self and relied upon the Holy Spirit's power to manifest His love for the Father into perfect obedience? That's what Jesus taught those 11 men for three years. That's what Jesus BROUGHT THEM THROUGH; and in having brought them through - they were now ready to "disciple all the people." All the people who doubted... all the people who were self-righteous... all the people who fought about who would be "first" in heaven... all the people who betrayed and abandoned Jesus in the face of adversity...

Those 11 men had been BROUGHT THROUGH and then went on to "disciple all the peoples," which rocked Judaism, the Roman Empire, and the entire world...

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I won't promise that it will be tomorrow, but I do promise that when God blesses me with a few moments to pluck away at the keys of my laptop... I'll be back to finish this blog on Matthew 28:18-20. If not, then I'll see you top-side!

Blessings,

-Kevin