Do you know the very first command God gave mankind right after He created them in His image? Be fruitful and multiply. The ultimate goal of Jesus when he came to the earth in the flesh was to save mankind who in a sense fell out of His image through sin. He had to be the perfect sacrifice. But what was his goal while he ministered on the earth? Did you ever think about that? Yeah he’s the saviour and his death and resurrection confirm that, but what about the three years between his baptism and his death. He was all about making disciples and in essence reproducing himself. He was very fruitful and He multiplied.
Last week we talked about making disciples in the Great Commission, but what does disciple-making really mean. Yes we are to baptise them and teach them to obey God, but if you really think about it, disciple-making is reproduction. Jesus spent three years reproducing himself in 12 men and (many women by the way), and the 12 then set out to reproduce themselves as Disciples of Christ in the world. So it seems to me that making disciples is essentially reproducing Christ or God’s image in the world.
Let me put it to you this way. How many of you saw the truth project a couple years ago. He spoke about this, let me show you Matthew 10:40, “Anyone who receives you receives me, and anyone who receives me receives the Father who sent me.”
Did you see that? Jesus is equating the Father, Himself and us. He has also made it very clear that he lives in us through the Holy Spirit, so I am going to be very blunt here. When Jesus ascended to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to believers, in a very real sense he made believers participants in the Trinity. Now obviously we are imperfect members, but as adopted children we are fully empowered by the Holy Spirit.
But look at the verses before this in the NLT, “If you love your mother or father more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me you are not worthy of being mine. If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.”
What is he saying in all this? Well, first let me explain what I. taking up your cross means. In the most simplistic way, it means to publicly identify with Jesus, willing to experience what he experienced. This is also why baptism is so important in the Bible, often even being equated with salvation. Back a few verses Jesus says, “Everyone who acknowledges me publicly here on earth, I will also acknowledge before my father in heaven. But everyone who denies me here on earth, I will also deny before my Father in heaven”.
Are you getting this? Very rarely does Jesus talk about accepting his salvation. He always talks about believing me, obeying me, and witnessing about me, or representing me. You see, his goal was to bring salvation to all people, to seek and save the lost.
Could he have done this by himself? Probably. But instead he did the work he had to do to offer the acceptable sacrifice, and then he left, only to send the Holy Spirit later.
He started the church empowered by the Holy Spirit to finish the work he began. Paul talks a lot about this. By doing this he reproduces himself in human beings with the Holy Spirit in them, just like Him in the flesh, in his image.
And though we plainly hear in Paul’s letters that we should strive for unity in the church, Jesus says straight up, I did not come to bring peace between people close to each other, even families, but a sword. What does the sword represent? Division, the sword according to Hebrews 4:12 divides soul and spirit, joints and marrow.
Jesus came to bring division even in families, because when someone in the family really becomes a believer and takes up their cross, and obeys all His commandments, they are now separated from those who do not, and are made one with Christ. You are either Christ’s or the world’s, you can’t be both. One or the other has ownership over you. Jesus brings division so that at the end, the wheat and the weeds are separated for their eternal destinies.
Let’s go back now a little further in Matthew 10 to verse 24, “Students (or disciples) are not greater than their teacher, and slaves are not greater than their master. Students are to be like their teacher, and slaves are to be like their master. And since I, the master of the household, have been called the prince of demons, the members of my household will be called even worse names.” Again he equates himself with his believers.
If we are truly members of his household we are like his slaves, but he says in John that we are no longer slaves but friends. The point is, we are part of the family but we are still to behave like slaves doing all that he commands, only we do it because we want to out of love, not because we have to. And thank God for that because then we can live our lives through his perfect will and wisdom, we don’t have to run the show when we are obviously not qualified as this world clearly shows.
Now listen to the end of this verse 25, “the members of my household will be called even worse names!” Why? Because we publicly identify with and proclaim allegiance to the one who suffered, and if we are a reproduction of him we will suffer and be called names too. But this sounds much like a couple other more positive things Jesus said in the book of John because of this association with Him.
Chapter 20 where Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, says “As the father has sent me, so I am sending you. Then he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins they are forgiven, if you don’t they are not forgiven.” As long as the Holy Spirit is in his disciples they actually have the ability to forgive or not forgive under the authority of Jesus. WHAT?
But to me this one is the kicker in terms of what we’re talking about today. John 14 verses 10-14. Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I speak are not my own, but my Father who lives in me does his work through me. 11 Just believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or at least believe because of the works you have seen me do.
Do you see the parallel he is again making there, the Father is in him and he is in the Father just as we who believe are in Christ and the Holy Spirit is in us. How is this known, through the works that the Father does through Him, and that the Spirit does through us. Then he continues and shows the result of this.
12 “I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done, and even greater works, because I am going to be with the Father. 13 You can ask for anything in my name, and I will do it, so that the Son can bring glory to the Father. 14 Yes, ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it!”
He says I will do it, not you will do it, because it is him through the Holy Spirit that will do it if it is in His name or His will, and the Holy Spirit is always in His will, just as it was his Father who did it through Jesus. Humans can’t do God’s work without the spirit of God living in them. But when they have the Spirit they are capable of doing all that Jesus could do, and more. Jesus said that, do you believe it, do I believe it?
Can there be any doubt now, is there any other scripture that refutes what we have just heard? We are as much a participants in the Trinity in the flesh as Jesus was in his human body. We are temples of the Holy Spirit, so when the Holy Spirit lives in us, we are in essence one with Him. But the key as we heard earlier is that we have given up our life to live by the Spirit.
Now I am willing to be stoned as a heretic for that conclusion, but I am very confident that is what Jesus himself is saying all through his teachings. There’s no other way he could leave his work up to mere human beings once he left. We are his body, his children. If this teaching scares you, or you think I am making a false assumption here, I think like me, you are simply scared to acknowledge this fact and live as if it’s true like the early disciples did. He decided to follow and so can we.
If we don’t believe this, how can we say we believe other things Jesus says. We can’t choose to believe some things he said, and not others. He says we are one with Him, that he lives in us just as the Father was in Him.
So to finish off my first point here. We are to take up our cross and follow him, which means to completely identify with him and become more and more conformed to his image, witnessing him as he lives through us in reality by His Spirit that we have surrendered to by losing our life, and gaining true life. So a disciple is one who lives by the Holy Spirit as completely submitted as possible, publicly identifying with and representing Jesus Christ. Jesus is reproducing himself through every believer who does this. And I just want to say, everywhere Jesus went he made sure people knew who he was, and that is the goal of his disciple.
So the first thing we do in reproducing ourselves is to be reproductions of Jesus by taking up the cross. Secondly then we need to reproduce. If John 14 tells us how to be reproductions of Jesus, then maybe John 15 tells us how to create reproductions of ourselves as disciples. First by remaining in his love which is what we will cover next week, but also in verses 18-27 we must identify with and II. witness about him.
“If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. 19 The world would love you as one of its own if you belonged to it, but you are no longer part of the world (wait a minute, is this saying if we are not hated by the world, we must still be part of it?). I chose you to come out of the world, so it hates you. 20. Do you remember what I told you? ‘A slave is not greater than the master.’ Since they persecuted me, naturally they will persecute you. And if they had listened to me, they would listen to you.
21 They will do all this to you because of me, for they have rejected the one who sent me. 22 They would not be guilty if I had not come and spoken to them (or if we don’t speak to them). But now they have no excuse for their sin. 23 Anyone who hates me also hates my Father. (Stop there for a minute. Doesn’t that mean that if we are truly being Jesus followers, representing Jesus publicly, that we will be hated because they hated Jesus?)
24 If I hadn’t done such miraculous signs among them that no one else could do (and He says He can also do through us), they would not be guilty. But as it is, they have seen everything I did, yet they still hate me and my Father. (remember they will hate you too if you’re like Jesus, and if we show them everything Jesus did) 25 This fulfills what is written in their Scriptures: ‘They hated me without cause.’
26 “But I will send you the Advocate—the Spirit of truth. He will come to you from the Father and will testify all about me. 27 And you must also testify about me because you have been with me from the beginning of my ministry.
Is he talking to us? Have we been with him from the beginning of his ministry? Obviously not, but the Holy Spirit living inside us has been, and we can read all about his ministry from before the beginning, in the Bible.
So if we were to summarize these two points it goes like this. A disciple is someone who reproduces him or herself through being like Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, and telling people all about Jesus, again through the power of the Holy Spirit. And, by golly look at our mission statement: reach people with the message of Christ, and reach our potential to be like Christ, through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Good mission statement.
Ok, now we return to the Great Commission from last week. How do we as a church make disciples, in other words replicate ourselves once we’re disciples, so that we are growing other disciples who will also replicate themselves?
I’ll use a model from Bill Hull, one of the most prominent authors on disciple making. He looked at the process that Jesus used with the twelve over the three years he had with them and came up with four basic stages of reproduction.
The first was come and see. Simply an invitation to see who Jesus is. He just said come and see for yourself. Two great examples of disciples doing this very quickly after they discover who Jesus is, are Andrew and the woman at the well.
In John 1:39, Jesus responds to the few people following him when they asked where he was staying, he says,“Come and see”. Then Andrew who was one of these people, obviously believes who Jesus is and he goes to get his brother Simon (who would be Peter) saying come see, we have found the Messiah, and Andrew brought Simon to meet Jesus.
The woman at the well in John 4 is another great example. She has this rather strange conversation with Jesus, and as soon as she believes who He is because he knew everything about her, she runs back to the village telling everyone to “come and see this man, could he possibly be the messiah?”
A disciple, a believer doesn’t hesitate to tell everyone to come and see this Jesus. For the church, this is why we gather, so that hopefully we are out inviting people to come see, and when they come, they actually see Him and who he is through our worship services, our Bible studies and so on. This is really the information stage. But we need to invite them.
Once they have come and see and believe who He is, the next step is come follow me. He has their attention, they believe he is who he says he is, and now the training begins. This is where Jesus says, OK, I have fed you, you say you believe me, now prove it. Here’s what I require of people, that they follow me. This is where the Christian becomes active or remains a spectator. The church is there at this stage to not only show people what it means to follow Christ, but to do it with them through small groups, ministry teams, mentors, and so on.
It took a while before Jesus sent His replicas into the world without him. He did it with them while teaching them for a good part of the three years. Then when they were committed to the training, he says OK, now come and be with me. This is where the twelve really were identified, the ones who said there is no where else I want to be but with you. This is where the believer rises up and takes a leadership role in the church, teaching, being an elder and so on. It is really where the person says, OK now I am completely giving my life to Jesus, my whole purpose is not only to follow his ways, but to serve him daily as if I were with him every minute of the day.
And the final stage is remain in me because I am going. You are now practically indistinguishable from me as much as a person of flesh can be, off you go on your own, but remain in me, don’t go back to what you were. Like I said, I’ll go into more detail about this next week, and that will finish this Jesus Way series.
Now the perfect teacher led his disciples through this process daily over three years and even then, it wasn’t until they received the Holy Spirit, that they put it all into action. We get the Holy Spirit at the beginning of our journey, but we also usually don’t leave our lives behind to follow Him. But still, you should be noticeably well along your way to becoming a reproducing disciple by the end of three years if you are committed and you have a church that teaches and disciples you.
That’s pretty much how it worked for me. Now I’m not saying my path is the way but I can relate to this process, and that is about the amount of time it took me to be well on my way to leaving my old life behind and pursuing a life of pastoral ministry.
My question to you as I close today, is would you want other new Christians being the replica of you as a Christian today? Do you think it would be a good thing if you were reproducing yourself in the church?
After a few years of being a Christian you should be working on passing the baton by discipling others. This can be done as a mentor, a small group or Bible study leader, planting a church. After a few years you should be a Christian leader. But you say your shy, or not a natural leader. Well do you know the Bible well, and can you maybe take another shy person and teach them, encourage them, love them, walk with them? It doesn’t mean you have to be a public leader.
The main reason we don’t disciple others is because we know that we have not done what it takes to become real disciples ourselves. Jesus isn’t really living through us and we sure don’t want to be creating replicas of ourselves without Him. Are you playing the Christian game or are you deeply committed to Jesus and being a reproducing disciple? You’re action plan is simply to determine what needs change for you to become one?
I know this is where many people tune out, you don’t want to hear this, and even if you say Amen to all this, you are content to just keep doing your Christianity as you’ve always done it. You nod your head in agreement and leave it all on this side of the door.
Oh I want us all to know that Jesus died for us and because of his sacrifice on the cross we are forgiven for our sins past, present and future. There is nothing we can do to earn salvation other than believing in Christ and accepting it. Grace is grace and it is a free gift for those who receive it.
Does it change you? Because you have experienced it, do you want to share it? Do you want to be a minister of this grace? The church is nothing if it isn’t a training ground. It is not just a salvation dispensary.
So we all need to ask ourselves, do I want to be a Spirit-filled, Spirit-led disciple of Christ seeking to reproduce myself through evangelising and discipling others? Or am I content just being a Church goer basking in my own salvation. Let me just say, one of those is the Jesus Way, and the other isn’t.
