The True Cost of Discipleship

I want to finish with Matthew chapter 28, verses 19 and 20. And I want to focus on the issue that Jesus raises with us. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I will be with you always to the very end of the age. I think anybody who's been to church very often hears that passage said, quoted and oftentimes emphasized because it is such a popular passage. We seem to know it by heart. And yet, when you look at what happens in churches, the Southern Baptist churches is our closest example of this, and we count on our records, you know, millions of people who are in our churches, who have come forward into church and said, I give my life to Jesus Christ. And yet of those people, millions of them, I don't know, maybe somebody knows exactly how many million Southern Baptists there are. Do you know, Carol, how many there are? Fifteen million Southern Baptists, and I think they say that about five million of them are in church on Sunday, and there are millions of them that we don't even know where they are. We have them on our own record. People have come and said, I give my life to Christ and we don't know them in three or four years. We don't know if they're still here. You don't know if they move somewhere. They don't know if they're doing anything. Obviously, the circumstances of us making disciples is in question. What is it that Jesus asked us to do here that is currently really not done? I think one of the problems is that we witness to people not to make disciples, but we witness to them to get them to say some words that we want them to say. And so we have sinners prayers that people pray. And they talk these words and they say, I want Jesus to save me. And they say, I give my life to Christ. But it appears as if there is no permanent change in their life or their circumstances or their condition. What Jesus was telling us to be careful to do is to make disciples. We must change the things that we do in the process of making disciples if it doesn't work. If we're having people who have the assurance of their salvation when they don't have salvation, we have actually done a great disservice to them instead of helping them. And many of our churches are filled with people who have absolute confidence and assurance that they're going to heaven without any evidence that they're genuine disciples of God. This is an alarming circumstance. If we could count all these people, we're certainly safe to be in heaven when they died. It would be a wonderful thing. But when you compare what Jesus asked of his disciples with what people are prepared to do, there is such a great difference between those. It causes us to want to stop and go back and say, what does it really mean to make a disciple? What is the process by which a disciple is actually made a follower of Christ? Well, when you look at this process of what Jesus is talking about, as you look at his own life, he was very careful when he talked to people about entering what he called the kingdom of God. That's what he called it instead of making a disciple. He did tell them at one time what his witnessing model was. His witnessing model is simple. Deny yourself, take up your cross and learn to live the way I live. Seldom do we witness to people in such fashion. People are afraid to make a requirement of someone who wants to enter the kingdom of God. I was teaching a course one time and witnessing and I was talking about Jesus' method of telling people to do something that would cause them to live a sacrificial life, asking them, you know, all the stories where Jesus told a man to sell everything he had and give it away, where he told another fellow if he went back and talked to his family instead of coming with Jesus as he asked him to do, he was not worthy to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus was very, very hard on the people. He said, I'm inviting you to become a disciple of mine. He was not someone who would casually allow someone to think that they were his disciple unless they were prepared to do something in terms of sacrifice of their own life. But when I was talking about this, one of the ladies held up her hand and she said, you know, if we start telling people that they're going to have to do difficult things, no one will want to be saved. If you think about that for a moment, it's saying if this is what it really takes to become a follower of Christ and no one wants to do it, then let's just lower the bar. If you lower the bar, then no one really is getting saved. That's the problem. And the difficulty comes to us and say, how do we define what a disciple really is and what does it mean to recruit a disciple into the kingdom of God? Jesus' method was simple. I'm asking you to say no to yourself. So I'm going to ask you up front to say I'm prepared to give up control of my life. I'm going to ask you to do some things that you're not going to want to do. In fact, he used the language that implied not only was it things they didn't want to do, but they would be very painful and difficult things. Take up your cross. And then I want you to live a life that exemplifies me. Now, here's the catch with this. When you look across our churches, you see a lot of people who claim to be members of our church, Southern Baptist, First Southern Baptist Church, but they don't live lives that are indicative of the character and nature of Christ. Yet they want to call themselves followers of Christ. If we allow this to take place, we give them a false security about what all of this means. What does it mean to become a follower of Christ? The key ingredient in all this is that no one can enter the kingdom of God unless Jesus Christ is the Lord of their life. No one can. That is the key ingredient in which a person gets to heaven. Now, what does it mean for Christ to be in control of their life, to control their desires, to control their behavior, to control their lifestyle, to control their time, to control their money? All of this is what Jesus made as a key example. For example, when the man said, I'll follow you, but I need to go back home and tell my parents that I'm going to be coming back, that I'll be I'm going to follow you. He said, I've asked you to come and follow me. And now you have a desire to go satisfy your parents. Are you going to tell me that you're going to do what you want to do and what your parents want you to do over what I ask you to do? That really is a hard choice, but Jesus made him face it. When Jesus was witnessing to the rich man that came to him, he said, I ask you to sell everything you have and give it away and follow me. He didn't ask that of everybody. But what he asked was the most difficult thing that that man could do in his life. And that choice between what God asked him to do and what he wanted to do was tremendous. Jesus never waffled. He never said when the man turned and walked away without committing himself to him, to his kingdom, he never said, wait a minute, let's talk about this. He never said, now, what I was telling you was a principle, not a reality. What Jesus does is he looks at the most treasured things in our life. Your family, your money, your job. And even when he got to Zacchaeus, he talked about his fortune. He didn't ask him to give everything away, but he asked him to come out and say to people, if I have ever cheated any of you. You come to me and point out that I cheated to you and I'm going to give you back more money than I ever took from you. You not only ask him to give the money back, he asked him to stand publicly and say, if I've cheated you, come and tell me. How hard would that be for someone in his position, a community leader, tax collector? What Jesus was doing when he was witnessing to people was to say. Unless. I am absolutely in control of your life, no part left undone, I will start with the most important and treasured parts of your life. Unless I control that, you cannot be my disciple. So many times people come to us and they want to follow Christ. And they want to enter the kingdom of heaven, but they want to do that for the benefit of themselves. They may have trouble in their life, financial, personal, family, whatever it is. And so they come and say, you know, I want to be a Christian. What they're hoping will happen is that they'll make some promise to God and then God will fix their problem. And they won't have that problem if they don't want to follow Christ, they want the benefit of Christ. There's an enormous difference. All the people that turn around and went away after Jesus told him how hard it was going to be, wanted the benefit of Christ. But they didn't want it enough to give up the things that were precious to them. When witnessing to people, we have to be aware of Jesus' method of evangelism. He asked them to give up the most valued thing in their life. And to give that to him. To give him authority and control over the most valued things in their lives. So much of the evangelism that we do is to say, would you like to accept Jesus? You come to the front. We'll say, would you pray this prayer, Lord, would you save me? I ask you to forgive my sins and come in the kingdom of heaven. All they don't have to do anything except just say words. We must help them to know that becoming a part of the kingdom of God is a much bigger deal than that. If we deceive them, they have no way to know the truth. I've talked to many people who live terrible lives. And they're in terrible messes. And I say to them, you've got to give your life to Christ. And they may be living in morality, they may be living in drunkenness, they may be living with drugs and they're controlling their life, all that. And they look me right in the face and they say, I've already done that. I did it when I was 13 or 12. The remedy for their life, they think they've done way back there, so they see no reason to do it again. And so they're in a mess and they have already been told that they don't have to do that again. And so there's no remedy for them. There's nowhere else to turn. When I say to them, you need to surrender your life to Christ. You need to ask him to be your Lord. They say, I've already done that when I was a little kid. What can I do now? Well, you can do what you're supposed to do. Give your complete life to Christ. And in their head, they say, I've already done that. It's very hard to lead people to Christ when they've had a false salvation experience. What Jesus did was he was very direct in saying and determining in someone's life what the most precious thing they had was and say, unless I am more important to you than this, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, the reason he did this is that the Holy Spirit never comes into the life of a person until they have turned loose of their life, until they have said to God, I give my life to you completely. This is the picture of dying to yourself, saying no longer will my human nature or my human mind be in charge of my life. Instead, I say to you, here is my life. I will do whatever you tell me to do, however difficult or hard it might be. And I will do that without any stopping. When a person comes to that place, then their life is open to God and he places his Holy Spirit inside of them. No disciple making can ever occur unless the spirit of God is inside of a person. That's the key ingredient. And the spirit of God never enters someone until that person has turned loose of the control of their life and said to God, I am prepared from this moment on in my life to do what you tell me to do. Some people make professions that that's true. But sometimes they don't understand exactly what you're telling them to do. They don't know what it means to turn loose of their life. Some of them are too immature to understand that some of them think that they're prepared to do it, but because of their immaturity, they don't understand what God is going to ask of them. But he does. He understands their mind and their heart and what they're doing. And so he never really places his spirit in them until they have surrendered to the authority of Christ. And then when that happens, the Holy Spirit enters their life. No disciple making can take place until the Holy Spirit is inside of a person. And here's why. It is the spirit of God that wrote the scriptures. So when you say to someone, I want you to read the Bible and I want you to listen to what God is saying to you without the spirit, they can read the words. But the spiritual meaning of the words never grasps their mind. They read it and they read it and they read it and it doesn't make sense to them. They don't pick it up. Paul wrote and he said the fleshly man with a fleshly mind does not understand spiritual things. So whenever we don't lead someone to make this complete surrender to Christ, then we put a person in a position of trying to read the Bible who has no spiritual guide there. It's like taking an American person and saying, now, I want you to read the Bible and giving him a Chinese copy of the Bible. It makes about as much sense to them as it would if they had not the spirit in them reading the regular English Bible. They can see the words, they know the words, but it has no meaning to them. So whenever someone surrenders their life to Christ and the Holy Spirit comes in, you hear over and over again this story from them. I never read the Bible very much before. And when I read it, I couldn't make any sense of it. But now the Bible just seems to open up to me. I remember Don Elliott telling me that one time when I went to see Butch Ramsey after he'd made his commitment to Christ, he said, I'm having trouble because I can't put the Bible down to read it all night and I'm tired when I go to work the next day. It was so new and powerful and fresh, not because of them, but because the spirit of God was inside of them. I don't like to read anything that I can't make any sense out of it. And if I'm trying to read something and I read it and read it and I can't make sense of it, I don't get anything, I just lay it aside. So people without the spirit of God have the same kind of experience with the Bible. I don't get it. And we think if the spirit is in us, that when you read it, it comes alive to us. And that's true. But if another person is reading it and the spirit is not there, it is a closed book to them. Other people come to make this commitment to Christ. And they're wanting to have Christ in their life, but they don't have the understanding of the cost of what it's going to take. I'm prepared to go to heaven. And when we talk to people about they want to go to heaven, they don't want to go to hell. They, of course, are going to choose heaven. Only a smart aleck wants to say he's going to go to hell. But if a person says, I want to go to heaven and they think that all salvation is, is a destiny. Then when you stop and say to them now what you need to do is read the Bible and do these things in obedience to God, that's not really what they asked to do. They asked to be have a ticket. So when Jesus comes, they can hold their ticket up and say, I've got a ticket to get in. And when they think that's what it is, then they've missed the point entirely. Jesus never allowed people to think that way. Making a disciple means you the person has the only candidate for a disciple is a person who has the Holy Spirit in them. Now, our role in making disciples is to take that individual once they've said, OK, now I'm ready to do this. And you look at Jesus and you'll see how he did it. He said, I want you to come around and I want you to follow me. I want to give you the information you need to be able to know what I want you to do next. And whenever he went to Zacchaeus, after that meal was over, Zacchaeus knew what he was supposed to do. He went out and said, the first thing I'm going to do is make straight everything I've done wrong in the past. Anybody I've stolen from, come and let me get that square. From here on, I'm going to live doing what Jesus has told me to do in my house. What Jesus expected of people was that their life would be radically changed once the spirit came inside of them, that they would hate the sin that was in their life. You see that in Zacchaeus, you see it in many others in the scripture. They hate the sin that's in their life. And now they've been forgiven of that sin. And now they long for the message of God in their lives. They are hungry for spiritual things. As Jesus came to call each of his disciples to follow him, they were so hungry for spiritual truth that they were prepared to leave their families and their homes and everything they had. What happens when the Holy Spirit comes inside of people is they have a spiritual hunger. We can recognize that in people, and if they do not have spiritual hunger, then we need to go back another step and say, OK, we need to help you understand the importance of surrendering the control of your life to God. Because you can't help them pass this place unless the spirit's in their life. Now, two things that we need. One is every person who comes to know Christ needs a teacher. We have a tendency when people come to the front of the church and say, OK, I commit my life to Christ to say, well, we're going to shake your hand, give you our name, say that's great, baptize you, say that's great. We'll clap for you. We hope you work this out. Every person who makes a commitment to Christ needs a mentor, someone to come and stand along beside them and help them be sure that they're accountable for what they're supposed to do. Are they now reading the Bible? What are the questions they have? What are the issues that God has raised in their life? And that mentor is not only to help them to be able to help them with the questions they have, but to be a guide for them. What Jesus said to his followers was, I want you to come and do the things I'm doing. And I know that Jesus did not need. To learn all the things he was talking about with his disciples, he already knew them. He didn't need to learn the things he said on the Sermon on the Mount, he already knew them. What he knew was that the people who were listening to him needed to know those things. Sometimes as followers of Christ, we sort of look at the life of the church and say, well, do I need that Bible study? Do I need to take that class? Do I need to go this meeting? The question really sometimes is, who do I need to encourage to do these things? Jesus didn't need to learn all the things he was teaching or he knew them, but he had to live this life of devotion in front of those disciples so they would see what they were supposed to do. We need in our church people that are leaders in the church to be faithful and understanding. Sometimes you need to come on Sunday night or Wednesday night, not because you're going to learn a lot, but because you set examples for other people. We sometimes have people that make a commitment to Christ, come to one meeting, look around, don't see their Sunday school teacher, anybody from their class, they don't come back. Somebody needs to accept responsibility for every disciple that comes to our church and say, I'm going to stay with you and show you the patterns of behavior of life that you know you need to do so you can grow to be strong and to learn. So examples and mentors are keys. Jesus said not to his disciples, now, I want you to give your life to God, the kingdom of God, and trust God and then go out and live the way you should. He said, I want you to come and follow my example. That's a key ingredient in making disciples, people who are living the example of what we want those others around us to have. We can share with them our Bible reading, we can share with them our prayer life, we can share with them how we are learning and the patterns they need in their own life to get to the place where they're spiritually mature. So they need a teacher who Jesus says we should teach them all the things I've taught you. The key ingredient for making a disciple is the Holy Spirit, a mentor and the instructions that God wants them to have. What God, what Jesus was teaching was not only the things he had, but he had every one of his disciples were Jewish people who knew the Old Testament. Sometimes we kind of get past that because we're not understanding that the New Testament by itself is only half of this story. What Jesus was doing was saying to them, I want you to understand what you should know. And they knew the Old Testament, we have to help people learn the Bible. What I ask people to do is read the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and then read it again. It's only about 150 pages in most Bibles if they have common print. So that's about 300 pages. I ask them simply to read a little bit about it and think about what it means and if they have questions to come and ask me. What you're doing is trying to get them to get a picture of who Jesus is like. I want you to come and see what Jesus is like and see whether or not you are like that. In situations Jesus gets in, do you see him doing different things than you would do if he were there? If someone were making fun of you, would you forgive them or get even? If you were caught in a situation where people lied about you, would you forgive them or pay them back? When you look at the situations in Jesus' life, you are following Jesus step by step, thought by thought, so that they can understand what it means to pay a price for following Jesus. He is the mentor of their life. So we're to teach them everything that Jesus taught his disciples so they will understand what his life is like. In this process, we are not the ones who are doing this job. Once the Holy Spirit's in their life, God is talking to them on the inside. What he needs for us to do is to put words in their ears, to put words before their eyes. For once the words are in their ears, it accomplishes his purpose. Once the words are in their eyes and goes in their mind, it accomplishes purpose. Isaiah told us that the word of God never returns empty. Now, it does return empty when there is no spiritual receptor to it. It does not accomplish its mission if the mind is closed or people don't understand it. In other words, the word of God spoken to me in Chinese would go right past me. But if it's in the language I can understand, the spirit can interpret it inside of me, makes it real and powerful to me. So what we're trying to do is to make sure they hear the words of Jesus with the Holy Spirit inside telling them, now, this is the way you ought to live or remember yesterday what you did. This is contrary to the way Jesus said we should do it. Making disciples is a big burden. We have to make sure that they understand the cost of entering this discipleship road so we don't deceive them into thinking they can do less than God asks and still become a disciple. For what it means is they'll start out without the Spirit of God, which gives them wisdom, understanding and power. Then we have to have someone walk alongside of them to make sure that as their life is developing, you can help them know what's going right in their life and what's going wrong in their life. Answer questions, set examples for them, and then we have to give them opportunities to begin to learn. Whenever they're eager to learn is the time we have opportunities to teach them. We need to make sure that there's Bible studies for Sunday school, for church morning, evening, Wednesday, so people can saturate their minds in this beginning of their life with the word of God. I like to use a little brochure that we have available. Welcome to God's family, because it helps once once a person has really accepted Christ and surrendered their life to him, it talks about four basic elements that are essential to being a disciple. Once the Holy Spirit's in your life, this is the post surrender of your life to Christ. And it says there are simple things that you need to have, just like a baby does. A baby has to breathe. So a believer who's following Christ must confess his sins regularly, so you breathe out the bad air, confessing your sins, and you breathe in the good air, which is the forgiveness of God or his message to you. And this confessing and receiving forgiveness is a normal everyday part of the life of a believer. Like a baby has to have air, a believer has to have a life of prayer. And then he talked in this little pamphlet, talks about the fact that a baby has to be able to eat. You know, when a baby is born, if you talk to people that have new babies, they need to eat regularly, even all through the night. And they are hungry. They want to eat. We have to be aware that those of us who've grown old, grown older and are spiritually overweight sometimes can go on diets spiritually. But a new babe in Christ needs a constant feeding of the word of God. That's why we have to get them in every service that we can ask them to read the Bible as often as they can, because they're in that stage where the Holy Spirit has made them hungry for the words of God. Now, for those of us all who are here have been followers of Christ for a long time, the word of God is just as important to you, but it's not the same as it is to a person who's just entered the kingdom. It is a passionate thing. It's just as important for you to eat a good, balanced meal now as it was when you were a baby. But you can go a few days without eating regular meals because you're mature and grown. A new child in Christ needs constant attention and feeding. So you try to say to them, you need to read the Bible every day and hold them accountable for that. You need to be in church as often as you can and hold them accountable for that because it is the necessity of of bringing into their life the spiritual food that they need. And then the pamphlet says, of course, a baby needs exercise. Baby, first of all, is just moving its hands and feet or its arms around its hands and feet around and begins to pull up in the very beginning. The follower of Christ needs to start doing something for God. Zacchaeus, when he made this commitment to Christ, the first thing he did, he came out and he said, if I've cheated anybody, I want to make it right. In the very beginning, when a person surrenders their life to Christ, they may have some things in their life they need to go confess to other people. There may need to be some things in their life they turn loose of. There are just some things in their life that they need instruction about. They need to do something in obedience and submission to God. And it needs to be as hard as they can. Now, a baby moving its arms and legs around is a pretty big job for them. We don't ask a fellow Christian who's just started his walk to be a Sunday school teacher. We don't ask them to accept their jobs of great responsibility where they need the wisdom of God. We give them little bitty things they need to do. Big enough so that it's hard to do, but small enough so they can do it. This just takes work. You have to be with them. You can say even small things like, I have a friend I really want you to pray for. And then you hold them accountable for praying. Have you been praying for my friend? Anybody can do that. You can talk to God about a person. Little things that ask them to sacrifice and do some service to God, because here's what happens when you do something God wants you to do. The affirmation from God comes back to you. It's an encouragement to you. If you just sit there and never get the joy of doing something in obedience to God, you never get the joy of his affirmation in your life. The final thing is that every baby needs a mom and a dad and a family. I read a story one time about an orphanage in World War II in France. So many people were killed in that war and the babies were homeless. And there were only a few people to take care of them, and they would put the babies in the morning and they put a bottle in their mouth and lay it on a pillow. And the baby could suck on that bottle until they emptied it. They were having trouble because several of the babies were dying. And they did research about it and found that the people who held the baby in their arms and fed on the bottle were far more likely to survive than those who just sucked on a bottle that was sent on a pillow. The touch of a human arm and body had some kind of powerful effect that a pillow, even with the proper nourishment, did not. I don't know if that survey was accurate or not, but it certainly is in the church. What people need is they need someone to say, you matter to me and you're important to me. Because if we don't, then all this part of the body of Christ misses them. You are a part of what we're doing and you're a part of this family and you're part of the community. And so when people make a promise to God to follow him and they never join church and they never start going to church, their chances of surviving this are very, very small. As I look over the years to the people that I've baptized in churches, if they never really became a part, began to participate, were faithful in watching, faithful in attending, faithful in participating, pretty soon you don't even know where they are. Jesus wanted us to be sure that the job that we were doing was building the kingdom, not deceiving people into thinking they were in the kingdom when they weren't. What Jesus told us to do was not to go out into the world and get a lot of people as members. He didn't tell us we were to go out into the world and get a lot of people to say a prayer. What he wanted to have happen was that he wanted people whose lives were under their own human nature control to begin to live in submission and surrender and obedience to Christ. We're not in the business of making people feel good or entertaining them or doing the things that they want us to do. We're in the business of teaching people that life comes when you surrender yourself to the will and authority of Christ. It will be contrary to what you'd like to do. It will be hard and sacrificial, but in that you will find life in all of its fullness. What happens to us whenever we find people who are maybe not interested in doing this, we want to lower the bar. But when Jesus found people who wanted in, he made sure the bar was always at the top. There is no shortcut into the kingdom of God. Jesus had 5,000 people around him one time, 4,000 another time, but he never worried about those. He had 12. He worried about them. And he made sure that they understood what the price was to be a follower of his and to enter the kingdom of heaven. But even Jesus in three years talking to all of them, he had one that never made it. But at the end, the guy who didn't make it knew that it was his fault. That's what we want. We may not be able to lead everybody in the kingdom of God, but we want when their life is over for them to say, I know what happened and I know what I should have done and I know what I could have done, but I just didn't want to. We don't want them to end up saying, I did everything that church told me to do. Why are you saying I can't get in the kingdom of heaven? I did what they told me to, I prayed the prayer they told me to, I was baptized like they told me to. And that's all they ask. And I did it. Why are you saying no to me? The job that Jesus gave us was not to fill our church, but to make sure that we helped people to become like Christ. And it's not easy. And we really can't do it without the wisdom of God. And we'll never be able to do it without the power of the spirit of God. But he told us, this is your job, making disciples, not building a church, not having a lot of people, but making disciples. If we don't do that, we failed. Father, hold before us this high example of what it means to be agents of seeing the lives of people changed and transformed. We live in a world filled with people whose human nature controls their thinking, their goals, their desires. They're driven by their human nature, even in churches. And they don't know it. Help us not to be satisfied with anything less than producing people who every day say, Lord, tell me what to do and I will do it. And I will not do anything until you tell me. That we might see the world transformed. In the name of Christ, we ask this, amen.