In April we spent some time as a congregation talking about reaching out to the community, and really what we were talking about was a question.
That question, which follows from the events right after the resurrection of Jesus, is rooted in a command, not a suggestion, a command...that Jesus gave His disciples just before He was taken up into heaven:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20.
We talked about this, and then after our worship service we gathered to unpack what it was that Jesus is calling us to do specifically in our community in response to His command.
I expected maybe 4 or 5 people at the most to choose to be involved in that conversation.
I think that wasn’t an unrealistic expectation, perhaps 8-10% of a congregation being interested in a given topic and then actually having the time after the service to stick around.
Well, I wasn’t disappointed. 20 of you participated in that conversation. that’s about 1/3 of those who were there on that particular Sunday. A few weeks after that we met again to flesh out more of what that means. I’ve gotta say I’m really very encouraged that so many of us are hearing the same thing, that we need to reach out beyond ourselves, that we are not here merely for ourselves.
We’re here as agents of the Kingdom, we’re here on a mission. We’re here as disciples who are called by Jesus to make disciples.
I’ve been thinking, though, that as much as we do spend time together reflecting on what it means to serve God and to be committed to live our lives as faithful gospel people, it’s been a while since we’ve taken an extended look at what it means to BE a disciple. You’ve heard it said that we’re not human doings, we are human beings. So before we spend much more time talking about making disciples, DOING something, let’s spend some time considering afresh what it means to BE a disciple.
The very first, the very most important quality of being a disciple is to be a follower, a follower of Jesus. Jesus equates fruitfulness with the capacity to follow. He said to Peter and Andrew: Matthew 4:19, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.Nicodemus is a very important person in the gospels. He was a leader among his people, with a plum position in the Sanhedrin, a group that controlled the way people thought and acted.
Nicodemus was ready to take his relationship with Jesus to another level, but it wasn’t that easy. It never is. There would be much to lose if he went public as a follower of Jesus. What would people think if they found out that Nicodemus was an admirer of this homeless-carpenter-turned-rabbi from a nothing town called Galilee?
At the very least he would lose his position in the Sanhedrin and his reputation as a religious leader. Being a secret admirer of Jesus cost him nothing, but becoming a follower came with a high price tag.
It always does. Matthew 16:24Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.
So it’s important to understand that to be a disciple, one must be a follower of Jesus. To be a follower of Jesus is much more that simply making a decision for Christ, asking Jesus to come into your heart.
It begins with a decision that Jesus is Lord. That He deserves that position, and that He deserves that position in your life.
I get a little nervous with the language of ‘asking Jesus into your heart’, IF that is not expressed in a Biblical way, if we’re not letting people know the cost of following Jesus. We don’t ever want to be accused of ‘bait and switch’ or inauthentically presenting the gospel as purely an emotional thing. As disciples of Jesus, we are people who have chosen to follow Jesus, period.
To follow Jesus begins with a decision to do so, but it MUST be followed with the daily choice to walk after Jesus, to follow His ways, to live His teachings, to grow to love the way He loves. So is following Jesus a decision that you make or a direction that you go? It is, it must be, both.
Of course, if we really think about it, the challenge involved in following Jesus is too much for any of us to bear alone. That is why we need each other, we need other Christians to help us in our journey, and to ourselves help others.
We need the body of Christ. Belonging to a church community, a regular gathering of believers is not in any way optional for believers. “We should not stop gathering together with other believers, as some of you are doing. Instead, we must continue to encourage each other even more as we see the day of the Lord coming. [Heb 10:25]”.
In order to actually follow Jesus, we need one another. That’s why we need to grow together. That’s why as a family we need to grow. That’s why we’re having conversations, in addition to talking about Outreach, where we discuss ‘in-reach’ or how we are to grow together as a spiritual family.
So, first we are followers of Jesus. There’s a whole lot more to be said about that, and we’ll explore that in future weeks. But there’s 4 key things we also need to understand and consider as we think about what it means to be disciples of Jesus.
Romans 8:29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
The general topic of predestination is a bit of a landmine among Christians, and we’ve sometimes let it be a wedge that drives us apart, which is sad. The point that’s often missed in discussions about this subject is what we are predestined for. Here, we’re discussing the fact that we are predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son.
In a lot of ways I’m different from my dad. My dad only repented of his sins and was saved in the last few months of life, so he lived for most of his life without faith of any kind in God. He was easily persuaded as a young man by someone who told him the Bible was full of contradictions, and he didn’t do any study to discover that there actually aren’t any, just tensions intended to get us to dig deeper and understand some things at a deeper level.
But when I think about it, I grew up watching him. I grew up knowing him, I grew up in the sphere of his influence. So certain things really matter to me that also mattered to him.
Some of my values reflect some of his, although in my case I hope my what I consider to be important has been filtered through God’s word. If it conforms to God’s word, it stays. If it doesn’t it goes. That’s been my general practice.If you think about your life, what you consider to be important in life – it was shaped by those closest to you when you grew up.
Your values, to a significant extent, are either a result of accepting or rejecting what you were raised with. Obviously I rejected my parents’ atheism, their materialistic worldview (in the sense that all that matters is what you can see).
But if you are here today and you are a disciple of Jesus, one who believes that He died for your sins and has accepted Him as Lord and Saviour, that means that YOU are predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son.
It means that you WILL be like Jesus. You ARE becoming like Him as you serve Him. You are changing as You read His Word and as you seek His face.
The things that matter to you are increasingly shifting from what they were to now reflecting more the things that matter to Him.
I hope you seek to act justly – to be truthful and fair in all your dealings with EVERYONE, to let your heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God (poverty, injustice, slave trade, abortion).
I hope you love mercy – that when you see people treated with dignity and perhaps treated better than you might think they deserve – that you appreciate that and do not resent it.And I hope you walk humbly with God. I hope you have an accurate notion of who you are and how truly dependant you are on God’s love and mercy.
So, the fact that you are predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son…does that encourage you? Does that help you to see that, as a follower of Jesus, EVERYTHING that you have gone through and are going through God is using to make you more like Jesus. Food for thought.
CALLED
As a person who is predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son, you are called. There is a purpose to your life that you didn’t invent. God did. God made you for a reason, He saved you for a reason, and He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Phil 1:6).
About 5 months ago I returned from my sabbatical. I was given 5 ½ months including vacation time where I was away from here. I rested, I studied cello, I spent time with my Mom, I worked around the house. I practiced my other instruments.
But after a while I grew very restless. I realized that I wasn’t at all comfortable living in isolation from this community. I grew anxious to return, and when I did, everything returned to the proper balance, the correct equilibrium.
I was called to this place by God. I was called to this community, this people by God. I was called to serve. I was called to shepherd. I was called to encourage. Living as I did for those 5 ½ months in a sense away from my calling started to feel very lean, kinda empty.
Once I was back I realized that I would not want to go away like that again. It’s too hard to be away from the people and the place and the ministry that God has called me to.
We’re a called people. For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Eph 2:10). Sometimes we struggle with our calling. “What has God called me to do? I have no idea what my calling is”. I have news for you, if that’s how you feel.
God is sovereign over everything. He is sovereign over your whole life. Where you are right now in your life is where you are called – called to be faithful, called to worship Him, called to love those around you, called to live a lifestyle that honours your Saviour, called to do justice and walk humbly with your God.
Sometimes we wait and wait and wait for God’s calling. Christian…Christ-follower – God has already called you. Are you listening? Are you being obedient where you are now? When you stumble where you are now, and you will stumble if you have a pulse, do you repent of your sin and turn to God where you are now?
If the possibility exists that as followers of Jesus that we it’s possible to NOT live within God’s call, it’s only as we choose to persist in sin; it’s only if we fail to acknowledge our sin and its impact that we can get stuck.
Repentance is not a popular word these days. I don’t know how many dozen of Facebook posts I’ve read say something to the effect of: “I regret nothing”, as if that’s a strong way to live. Every time I see or hear anything like that I think: Really? No regrets? No remorse? No capacity to examine your life, to be sorry for your mistakes, your sins, no felt need to go to God in humility and repentance? No will to get right with God so you can truly move forward in your life, having learned how dependent you are on God to live right?
I know someone who says he doesn’t ever learn from his mistakes. He also hates the idea of the cross of Christ and the Christian practice of repentance. He is also, by his own admission, stuck in a causality loop and completely able to make any positive change in his life.
If he would learn to turn to God and away from his self-destructive pattern of living, and constant poor choices, and sins, he would start to really live, to really change, to really begin to experience life as God intends. Pray for him, please.
JUSTIFIED
Justified, or Justification is a big, beautiful word. As someone predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, you have also been justified. The Book of Romans is particularly helpful here:
Romans 3:23 “…All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we[a] have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Romans 5:9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!
Romans 10: 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
Let's say you were caught speeding down Gerrard, right in in front of the church.
You were doing 70 kph, obviously out of the acceptable speeding window. You go to court and just as the judge is about to throw the book at you, someone steps forward and says, "I will pay the fine. I will take the punishment."
And you get off, without paying the fine, without any punishment at all. You have been justified, Made right in the eyes of the law. It doesn't change the fact that you were speeding, but the court sees you as innocent.
That is what Christ did for us. But even more…It’s the declared purpose of God to regard and treat those sinners who believe in Jesus Christ as if they had not sinned, on the ground of the merits of the Savior.
It is not just being pardoned, the way President Nixon was pardoned. Pardon is a free forgiveness of past offenses. It’s about sins being forgiven and blotted out. Theologian Albert Barnes said this: Justification has respect to the law, and to God's future dealings with the sinner.
It is an act by which God determines to treat a person forever more as righteous--as if he had not sinned. The basis for this is the merit of the Lord Jesus Christ, merit that we can plead as if it were our own. He has taken our place and died in our stead.
As the gavel comes down to pronounce God’s just judgment on us for our sin, Jesus has met the descending stroke of justice, which would have fallen on our own heads if He had not intervened. And it fell upon Him. The Son of God took our punishment on Himself. Through faith in Him, as the Holy Bible says, we are justified through His blood. Cool, eh?
Let’s pause for a moment. That was a whole lot of words, but if you are a follower of Jesus, this has an enormous impact on your life. What does it mean to you that you have been justified by Jesus sacrifice? By Jesus blood shed for you?
[After] Justification is a big, beautiful word. As we see, if means the world to us. It’s what enables us to live free of condemnation from God for the sins of our youth, the sins of our past. Thank you, Jesus, for this amazing gift!
GLORIFIED
The first thing about being a disciple is that the disciple is a follower of Jesus. As Jesus lived, so we seek to live. We don’t put ourselves first, we don’t store up treasures for ourselves that can only waste away here on earth.
We don’t seek to satisfy our needs and wants using ourselves as our moral compass. When we do that it’s a little like it would be if we strapped a large magnet to our chests and tried to use an old school compass.
Where would the compass point to? Us. What would forever set our direction? Us. What would determine if we were off course?
It would appear that we were never off course because it would always point to us. Where would we be in reality?
Wildly off course. Living in no relationship to true or magnetic north. We’d never actually get anywhere. It would always seem like we’d arrived. A lot of folks live kinda like that. But for the believer, Jesus Christ is our moral compass. He is our spiritual compass.
24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” (Matthew 16:24). It begins and ends with following Jesus.
And where does following Jesus lead us? Where will we end up as we follow the path set out before us by Jesus? Glory. In God’s presence. Look at the person to your left and say: PPT As a follower of Jesus, you are headed for glory! Look to the person on your right and say the same thing! The end of the thing is known to us.
As we live as disciples, as what we believe and what we do – that’s what faith actually is, you know – it’s believing and living what we believe.
As we do this, we have PROFOUND assurance that our destination will be that which we have been predestined for. Our destination is to live forever in intimate communion with Jesus whose image, by His grace, we are being conformed to.
So, we are disciples of Jesus called by Jesus to be makers of disciples. Perhaps you are here today and you have not taken that first step of becoming a disciple, perhaps you have not yet come to believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins.
Perhaps you have not yet received Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. For the sake of the one or two who may be here, now, and who may wish to welcome Jesus Christ into your life as King, let us pray together.
I’ll lead in a prayer, thanking God for His good gift to us of Jesus Christ, where I’ll express that we believe in Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for our sins. Then we’ll pray a prayer of turning – turning from sin and turning to God – that’s what we call repentence. Then I’ll pray a receiving prayer – to receive Jesus as Lord and Saviour.
If that’s something you’d like to do and it’s something you mean with all your heart and soul, then let’s pray together.
