What is Discipleship?

“Jesus saves.” Jesus saves. Praise the Lord.

Well, it’s good to see you in the Lord’s house today with that great message to believe and live by. We’re glad you’re here. If you’re visiting by way of the Facebook live video—are we live? He’s giving us the thumbs up.

We are. We’re never sure on that with our spotty internet, but today we are live and in person all over the world.

Well, welcome. We’re here today to worship God in spirit and truth and to worship God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. So, let’s give glory to God today.

Praise God bless.

Praise Him all creatures here below. Praise Him above heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Amen. Amen. Let’s go to the Lord in prayer.

Heavenly Father, we are so glad that we have the promise. The promise that is true, the promise that we believe, the promise that we stand on, the promise that we are encouraged by, the promise that is our blessed hope that we have sung today, that Your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, will save.

Lord, if there’s anybody here today that needs to hear that and understand it and receive it for the first time, we pray that they will. Lord, as the message is sung, as it is preached, let Your Holy Spirit move amongst us as we know He is. Lord, let Him move amongst us in power.

We pray all of this in Jesus’ name. And all of God’s people say, “Amen.” And amen.

If you are able, would you stand with us again as we sing Jesus savings

of Jesus saves Jesus saves

every seus

to far and susp.

Jesus in the wind mightj.

highest hills and deepest victory.

Jesus My

king

grows.

The longer I serve Him, the sweeter heels

each day like heaven overflows

the sweeter.

of God.

and praise

my way I serve Him the sweet grow.

The longer I serve Him, the sweeter heels

Each day our heaven overflows

come down

Let’s pray.

Father, we come to You now thanking You for this day that You have brought us here in Your house as Your people. And God, this morning, I pray that as we offer our checkbooks to You, may that be just a mere symbol of the offering of our lives to You.

Father, we like to give our all of ourselves to You, all that we are. Spend us how You wish. And Father, may Your people be edified by our offerings. May the outside world be blessed by the ministries of our offerings.

Father, we thank You for Jesus who bridges the gap toward the veil so that we could know You in fullness.

Father, we love You. I pray that as we continue in worship, Your name is glorified and Your people are nourished. I pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen.

All right, boys and girls. It’s time for our children this moment. So, let’s have all the boys and girls.

Hey, Tucker. You won. You won, buddy. You’re first.

All the boys and girls come gather around.

Good morning, John Ross. Good morning, Eddie. Good morning. There we go. You can sit right there. We’ll be good.

Good morning, everybody.

All right, boys and girls. Here’s the question for today. Let me—I’ll start with an explanation before the question.

You see these big old claw hopper shoes I’ve got on. I have worn the same size shoe for about 30 years.

That’s a long time.

Now, I have not worn the same size shirt. The shirt size I wear now is bigger than back then. But boys and girls, do y’all wear the same size shoes that you did last year?

Let me look at the parents. They’re saying, “No, we’re having to buy new shoes twice a year.”

Your feet are growing, and your legs are growing, and your arms are growing. You’re growing into a big kid. You’re growing up.

And boys, four years old. See there? I remember when you were born. Four years old. And after that, you’ll be five years old. And you keep on having to have bigger shoes and bigger clothes because you’re growing.

But boys and girls, we’re supposed to grow not just in our bodies, but we grow in our minds the more that we learn and the more that we know. And we also grow in our heart, how we follow Jesus.

And we really need to keep on growing. We need to keep on growing in two out of those three categories our whole lives. Amen.

Amen.

So, we need to keep on growing our minds where we know more and more. And so, boys and girls, I want to encourage you to always ask questions. If you have questions, ask them.

And we’re also growing in our spirit, how we’re following Jesus. So, boys and girls, let’s keep growing. Amen.

Amen. There you go.

You said you will receive whatever you need.

You said I’ll

glory will fill the earth.

Lift up your eyes. The harvest is here.

The kingdom is near the nations.

That’s the cry of my heart.

And we’ll see Your love.

glorom

is I stand now to

the cry of my heart.

Ask the nations to Lord

of my heart and the island will sing

the nations to That’s the cry of my heart.

And the will

Let Your glory.

Jesus said, “Pray ye therefore that”—He said, “The fields are white unto harvest.” Pray ye therefore that the Lord of the harvest would what? Send out harvesters into the harvest field.

All right. For the first time in several, several, several weeks—couple of months, actually—we’re not turning to which book?

We finished up Haggai. I’m so proud of you. How many folks can say they went their whole life going to church and never went all the way through Haggai? But you have. Amen.

Instead, if you’ll be finding in your copy of God’s Word, the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew, the last chapter, Matthew 28.

Let me grab mine.

Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 28, beginning in verse number 18. When you get there, if you’re able, if you would stand with me as we honor God in the reading of His Word.

Matthew 28:18.

Now hear the word of the Lord.

Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.

“And remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.”

May God add His blessing to the reading, the preaching, and your hearing to understand His holy Word. May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ forever be praised. And all of God’s people say, “Amen.”

Amen. You may be seated.

Great passage of Scripture this morning that we know as the Great Commission. And these are some of the last words that Jesus spoke in His physical earthly body to the disciples before He’s going to gloriously ascend back into heaven, where He sitteth at the right hand of God the Father on high and from whence He shall come again. Amen. To judge the living and the dead.

But before He has done that, Jesus has spent 40 days with the disciples in His resurrected body. Jesus alive on the earth with the nail-pierced hands, with the hole in His side, with the crown of thorn scar on His forehead. He was there on the earth to prove that He was truly alive.

And now, as He’s about to ascend into heaven, He gives the disciples, including the disciples today, this Great Commission to go make disciples of all nations.

And so then, if He’s given us that Great Commission, we need to understand what Jesus did not commission us to do.

Folks, I hope you realize this: that Jesus did not commission the church to be a social service club.

Now, we need to do social services. We need to feed the hungry. We need to clothe the naked. We need to minister to people who are in need. Absolutely.

But that isn’t the primary thing that we are commissioned to do.

Jesus did not commission a fraternal organization.

Now, we ought to have our best and closest social bonds within our church family as we worship together and as we grow together and as we “do life together” is the catchphrase.

But even though those are important things, that’s not the primary thing that Jesus commissioned the church to do.

Jesus did not commission a political party.

Christians in the church ought to be good citizens. We ought to vote. We ought to be involved in the political process. We ought to educate ourselves about what things are going on. We ought to speak out. In America, we have the right to speak out. Amen. And we have the right to be wrong. Amen.

But that’s not the main thing that Jesus has commissioned the church to do.

In the Great Commission, Jesus commissioned a disciple-making, missionary-sending institution that we call the church.

That is the primary thing that the church is called to do. And if we do all of the other things very well, if we excel, if we get a hundred out of a hundred on all of those other things in every other category and what we are supposed to do as a church, but if we are not a disciple-making, missionary-sending institution, we are not doing what Jesus commissioned the church to do.

He gave us the assignment.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

That’s the mission.

So if that’s what Jesus told us to do, to make disciples, then maybe we need to make sure we know what a disciple is. Amen. And maybe we need to make sure that we are a disciple ourselves. Amen.

Because coming to church and being a disciple are not necessarily the same thing, folks.

You can sit in a football stadium without being a football player. And there may have been thousands and thousands of them yesterday in the stands who wish they could have been out there on the field, but they weren’t.

You can sit in a classroom where education is going on and never learn anything.

You can stand in a garage without being a mechanic. Amen.

And you can sit in a church building week after week without ever seriously becoming a follower of Jesus.

So what is discipleship?

The passage tells us, number one, the Great Commission tells us that discipleship requires a subject.

Jesus.

Verse 18, Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and earth.”

Quick pop quiz, just making sure you got good theology or not. Who gave Jesus the authority?

The Father. God the Father gave the Son the authority.

Christian discipleship begins with a subject, and the subject is Jesus.

The truth is, folks, everybody is discipled by something. So we’ve got to distinguish Christian discipleship from all of the other forms of discipleship.

The word disciple simply carries the idea of being a learner or a follower, a student. And you’ve met people, you know people, you are people who are disciples of all kinds of things. And you can be a disciple of more than one thing. Amen. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Some folks are disciples of NASCAR. They can tell you the names of all the pit crews, and they can tell you the numbers and the laps and the horsepowers and Talladega 15 years ago. They know all about it. Nobody assigned them homework about it. They just learned it because they love it.

Some people are disciples of college football. Like we said earlier, they can tell you the recruiting class. They can tell you how much NIL money is going around. They know who the third-string quarterback is on the practice team. They know what some 17-year-old kid in Georgia can run the 40-yard dash in.

We are disciples of things that we follow.

Disciples of hunting and fishing, disciples of actors and singers, and disciples of all the influencers on TikTok and Instagram.

We are disciples of something that we follow, that we learn, that we study, that we obey. Why? Because everybody disciples themselves in something.

Everybody is somebody’s disciple.

Whose disciple are you?

The question is not whether you’re learning. The question is who’s teaching you?

Let me say that again.

The question is not, are you learning? The question is, who is teaching you?

For the Christian, the subject of our discipleship is Jesus Christ. We want to know Him. We want to understand Him. We want to think like Jesus. We want to obey Him. We want our lives to look increasingly like His life.

How many of you remember the old bracelet in the ’90s and early 2000s? WWJD. What would Jesus do?

And then our source material. How do we know what Jesus would do? Our source material is the Word of God. We know what Jesus would do by looking at what Jesus did.

The subject is Jesus. The textbook is the Bible.

And notice why Jesus has the right to do this. He said it. He said, “All authority.”

This is a crucial point right here, folks. Why? Why does Jesus have the right to disciple us?

He said, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.”

Not some authority.

All authority.

Folks, Jesus isn’t asking for a little corner of your life.

Jesus is not a lucky rabbit’s foot or magic charm.

Jesus is not asking for a little piece of your life. He’s asking for your life. He is Lord.

So discipleship begins when I recognize that Jesus Christ has the authority to teach me how to live.

Let me put it another way.

Discipleship begins when I acknowledge, when I bow the knee and say, Jesus has the right to tell me what to do.

You either heard that and didn’t like it or didn’t hear it.

Discipleship begins when we acknowledge, when we bow the knee and say Jesus has the right to tell me what to do because all authority has been given to Him.

Amen.

Got to move quickly.

Discipleship requires a subject.

Discipleship, number two, requires study. He says in verse 20, “teaching them to observe.” Teaching them.

There’s no way around this, folks. If you’re going to be a disciple of Jesus, you’re going to have to study. You’re going to have to learn. You’re going to have to read. You’re going to have to listen and think and ponder. And you’re going to have to ask questions.

And by the way, I hope you noticed what I told the boys and girls: to always ask their questions. Let’s encourage a discipleship process where people are never afraid to ask their questions.

Amen.

You got to—thank you—you got to open your Bible because, at its very core, to be discipled is to be taught.

We live in a time when everybody wants everything instantly. Instantly. We want the 30-second video. We want the three-minute explanation, not anything longer than that. We want somebody to summarize the book for us so we don’t have to read it ourselves.

But discipleship doesn’t work that way, folks.

There are no shortcuts to spiritual maturity.

Nobody accidentally goes to bed one night and wakes up the next morning and says, “Well, look at that. Somehow I know the book of Romans.”

It takes time.

It takes repetition. It takes study. It takes sitting under good Bible teaching. It takes opening the Bible yourself.

There is work involved in discipleship.

And church, that means that Sunday school matters. That means that Bible study matters. That means that Wednesday night matters. That means your personal Bible reading matters because discipleship, the thing we are commissioned for, requires study.

And let me say something else here.

Jesus did not say—look again at the verse—He did not say, “Teaching them to know everything I commanded you.”

No. He said, “Teaching them to observe,” teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.

The goal isn’t just information. The goal is obedience to Jesus.

Biblical knowledge that never affects the way you live is not discipleship.

I’ve known these people. I have been related to some of these people who had lots of Bible knowledge, but it never affected, never changed their lives.

Real discipleship doesn’t merely ask, “What does Jesus say?”

A real disciple asks, “What am I going to do about what Jesus says?”

Amen.

Discipleship requires a subject. Discipleship requires study.

Discipleship requires a system.

Look carefully at the phrase: “Teaching them to observe.” What’s that next word?

Let’s try it again.

“Teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.”

Now, that’s a big assignment. How do you teach somebody everything?

You need a system.

Now, folks, some of you are going to—this is some inside baseball—you’re going to be maybe really bored by a few details. A few of you are going to say, “I understand that for the first time.”

So listen, educators, those who have been trained in pedagogy, you understand that education has a scope and a sequence.

The scope is everything that needs to be taught. The sequence is the order in which it needs to be taught.

Let me do that again.

Education has scope and sequence.

Scope is everything that needs to be taught. Sequence is the order in which it needs to be taught.

There are some things you need to teach before you teach something else. Do you get it?

And folks, that’s the reason that we use a systematic Sunday school curriculum, because there’s a plan behind it.

A plan behind it.

Over time, you’re moving through—over a period of three years—you’re moving through the Bible. You’re learning the great essential stories. You’re learning essential Christian doctrine. You’re learning essential Christian living. You’re learning how all of the Bible works together and fits together.

Because if you don’t have a system, you know what we’ll do?

“A system? We don’t need a system. Just open up your Bible and read from it.”

If you don’t have a system, here’s what we’ll do. Because we’re humans, we’ll just teach our favorite Bible stories over and over again.

We’ll do Noah and the flood. We’ll do David and Goliath. We’ll do Daniel in the lion’s den. We’ll do Christmas. We’ll do Easter. And then back to Noah and the flood. Back again. Back again.

And those are great Bible stories. Amen.

But Jesus said teaching them—what was the word?

Everything.

And that’s why I want to encourage you: do your best not to miss Sunday school.

I know, I know there are times you’re going to miss. You’re sick or you’re traveling or something happens. That’s just life. I get it. I’m not condemning anybody, okay? Because I have to miss two or three times a year.

But here’s the thing. You know, in your Sunday school class, there’s that big old stack of what we call quarterlies, Sunday school books. When you miss, you need to at least pick up that student book and read the lesson that you missed.

That’s why we buy those books, by the way. That’s why we spend all that—it’s a lot of money that’s spent on those books. Not just so you can hold something while the teacher reads to you.

There’s a plan in it.

There’s a system in it.

So, here’s an example.

I understand the three-year cycle that Sunday school rotates in. So suppose the same Sunday every three years you’re gone. Just happens to be that way.

Same Sunday every three years you’re gone. And somehow every time you’re gone, that’s the week that the Sunday school covers the doctrine of the atonement.

You miss it the first time. Three years rolls along. Same Sunday, you’re gone. You miss it again. Three years roll by. You guessed it. You miss it again.

Now you’ve been in Sunday school nine years, and somehow you’ve missed the doctrine of the atonement every single time.

You’ve never been taught the doctrine of the atonement, even though you’ve been in Sunday school, but you missed that particular Sunday every three years.

And now you’re sitting there thinking, “The doctrine of the what?”

And wait a minute, I see some of you scratching your heads.

Maybe you missed that Sunday.

And that’s the point.

That’s the point.

That’s why we have Sunday school books where you can read the lesson even if you’re not here, so that there’s a systematic discipleship process.

Folks, you can’t live the Christian life just on random Christian facts.

You can’t live the Christian life on three favorite Bible stories.

A disciple needs the whole counsel of the whole Word of God. Amen.

That’s why we teach children. That’s why we teach teenagers. That’s why adults still need Sunday school.

And by the way, you don’t ever graduate from discipleship.

Look, I’ve been studying the Bible. I’ve been a serious student of the Bible—a serious student, like really, really studying the Bible—for almost 30 years, and I still find things in the Bible that I’ve never noticed before.

You never graduate from discipleship until we see Jesus face to face.

We are still being discipled.

Amen.

Amen.

Now, here’s the shocker for you. You thought we were done.

Number four.

I do this every once in a while so you won’t think there just has to be three.

Number four: discipleship requires sacrifice.

Jesus said, “Go ye therefore and make disciples of the tri-county area.”

And stop there.

No. He said all nations.

And sometimes we read that too quickly. And sometimes we don’t understand the context in which it’s said.

You know, today in our modern era, going to another nation requires sacrifice. You got plane tickets and passports and packing bags and leaving home and another culture and food you’re not used to. It takes money. It takes time. It takes effort.

But imagine hearing those words in the first century A.D. when there were no airplanes, no interstate highways, no GPS, no Hotels.com, no cell phones or FaceTime.

Travel could take months to get to these other countries.

And yet they went.

St. Thomas. Thomas that we call what?

Thomas?

Doubting Thomas.

Y’all remember Doubting Thomas.

Well, after doubting, Thomas saw the risen, resurrected, living Jesus. He believed, and he packed up and started walking from Jerusalem, from Israel, all the way to—he made it all the way to India.

Walked through the desert on a horse with no name.

No, probably not.

And made it all the way to India and preached the gospel and started a church, and that church is still going on today in that province in India.

That’s the amazing thing.

Jesus said go, and His disciples went.

They went across borders and across languages and across cultures, across seas.

Why?

Because discipleship requires sacrifice.

That’s not just true for missionaries.

Your own discipleship will cost you something.

It costs you time to study your Bible. It costs effort to come to Sunday school. It’s hard sometimes to get all the children up, get them bathed, get them dressed, get them in the car, get them fed before that, and get them to church on time for a Sunday.

It’s a sacrifice.

It costs money to buy the Sunday school material, and it’s going up every year. It costs money to send missionaries to Ethiopia and to Ecuador and everything in between.

It costs something, folks.

It costs something to invest spiritually in the life of another human being.

We’ve somehow developed this idea—and look, I get it. We want things to be convenient.

“Oh, that’s just too much trouble.”

Come on.

We’ve gotten the idea that discipleship should be convenient, but Jesus never said that.

Listen, somebody needs to reassess the fact they’re a follower of Jesus.

You’re saying, “I’m a follower of Jesus,” far too easily and readily.

Jesus said, “If anyone wants to follow Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.”

Discipleship requires an investment of time, of effort, of money, of energy, and sacrifice for your own discipleship and for discipleship to happen all over the world.

Number four.

Number five: discipleship requires salvation.

Then Jesus says, “Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Notice the order here.

Notice the order.

Make disciples, then baptize them, then teach them.

Make disciples, then baptize them, then teach them.

Baptism is the public identification of someone who has placed his or her faith in Jesus Christ.

We don’t baptize somebody hoping the baptism will save them. We baptize people because they have already trusted Jesus to save them. Amen.

The water doesn’t wash away sin.

Jesus does.

Now, there can be a sense where discipleship happens before salvation. We sometimes call this pre-conversion discipleship.

Someone starts coming to church. They start asking questions. They start reading their Bible. A friend talks to them about Jesus. They hear the gospel and they understand it for the first time. They begin to understand who Jesus is.

And then the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to convict them of sin and draw them to Jesus.

That’s pre-conversion discipleship.

But ultimately Christian discipleship leads to the gospel and leads to salvation, which is followed by baptism, which is followed by more discipleship.

Amen.

Because you can’t just follow Jesus as a good teacher, folks. You need Him as Savior and Lord.

Maybe there’s somebody here today and you’ve been around the church for years. You know the songs and you know the vocabulary and you know the ins and outs of how the church works, but you’ve never—you have never personally repented of your sins and trusted in Jesus as your Savior.

Don’t confuse being around disciples with being a disciple.

Jesus did not say make church attenders.

He said, “Make disciples.”

And discipleship begins with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Amen.

That’d be a good place to stop, but there’s one more.

Number six: discipleship must be sustained.

Then Jesus closes with this promise. He says, “And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

I love that.

I love that because this mission of the Great Commission was never supposed to stop with the 11 men standing there listening to Jesus.

They made disciples.

Who made disciples.

Who made disciples.

Who made disciples.

Who made disciples who then, nearly 2,000 years later, somebody made a disciple of you.

Think about that unbroken chain that is 2,000 years old.

Somebody told you about Jesus because somebody told them about Jesus. And somebody told that person about Jesus. And somebody told them, all the way back to that mountain standing there with Jesus and the 11.

You can trace it backwards across centuries, across generations, across cultures, across languages, because there were some people along the way who took seriously the command of Jesus to go make disciples.

And now the chain has reached us.

We are the last link in that 2,000-year-old chain, and it is up to us to forge the next link in the chain that will follow us.

The question is, does it stop here?

Discipleship is supposed to replicate.

We make disciples who make disciples.

Parents disciple children. Older Christians disciple younger Christians. Teachers disciple students. Men disciple men. Women disciple women. Pastors are supposed to do what? Equip the church to make disciples.

And then the church sends missionaries. And those missionaries make disciples in foreign lands. And those people who are saved in foreign lands, they establish a church.

And then they make disciples. And then they send missionaries.

And it goes on and on and on.

In the 3rd century A.D.—y’all know this is near and dear to my heart—in the 3rd century A.D., the gospel made it to the British Isles.

And the gospel was persecuted there, began to flourish and grow even in persecution until the nation became a Christian nation.

And then in the 1600s, 1612, the gospel was brought from England to the New World in the United States at Jamestown.

And the gospel grew in America and flourished in America. And now we’re at the point today where we are now what?

Full circle, carrying the gospel back to the United Kingdom.

It’s how it’s supposed to work, folks.

Disciples who make disciples who make disciples.

And then Jesus closes with the promise.

He says, “I am with you always to the end of the age.”

Folks, we don’t make disciples alone. Jesus is with His church. His Spirit empowers His people. His Word accomplishes His purpose.

And until Jesus comes again, until Jesus comes again, we’re called to make disciples.

So let me bring all this down to one question.

Are you a disciple, or are you just a spectator?

Examine your own discipleship.

Who is the subject of your life? Are you really following Jesus? Are you committed to study His Word? Are you participating in a system of discipleship that is teaching you all things?

What are you willing to sacrifice in order to grow?

What are you willing to sacrifice in order that others might know?

Because there’s something, folks, there’s something I’ve learned about almost everything in life.

What you put into it determines what you get out of it.

That’s everything.

If you just casually dabble in discipleship, don’t be surprised if you have a shallow faith.

If you rarely open your Bible, don’t be surprised you don’t know what it says.

But church, that’s our business.

That’s why we’re here.

We’re not here just to conduct weekly services and maintain facilities and preserve sacred traditions. We’re not here just to keep an organization running.

At least I’m not.

That’s not what I’m here for.

We exist to make disciples of Jesus Christ in all nations and to do it until He returns.

And maybe today your first step of discipleship is the most important step because you need to be saved. You’ve learned about Jesus. You’ve heard the gospel. You’ve been around the church, but you’ve never trusted Christ yourself.

He calls you today to repent and believe.

Maybe you’re already saved, but you’ve been more of a spectator than a disciple. You’ve been watching Christianity. You’ve been watching discipleship instead of being a disciple.

Somebody today, folks, somebody today out in this world, somebody today in the people you’ll meet next week, somebody in that group needs to know what you know because the Great Commission wasn’t given just to 11 on a mountain 2,000 years ago.

It’s given to you.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

That’s what discipleship is, and that’s what Jesus has commissioned His church to do.

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, I pray this morning thanking You that somebody who heard and believed the gospel told somebody else who, through generations and generations in an unbroken chain, in a little block building behind a little white clapboard church in a Vacation Bible School in 1986, then proclaimed the gospel to me and I believed it.

And in proclaiming it to people today that I pray will be proclaiming it to others tomorrow.

We pray this all in Jesus’ name. And all of God’s people say amen and amen.