Discipleship
Read: Matthew 14:15-33
Accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour is the best decision a man or woman can make; it is a turning point in our life. It is the start of a most exciting journey, one that will lead us hand in hand with Jesus into new learning situations.
In a butcher’s shop, a woman asked for a pound of sausages. ‘They’re kilos now,’ said the butcher.’ ‘Oh, all right then,’ she said, ‘give me a pound of kilos.’
We’re learning new things every day, every week. The Bible passage talks about Disciples. A disciple is one who learns. And those men in Matthew chapter 14 had plenty to learn. After all, feeding 5,000 people starting with next to nothing, and walking on water, weren’t part of their everyday experience until then. As we read through the Gospels, we realise how much the chosen twelve were absorbing from their time close to Jesus, day after day. And that’s how it needs to be for us who call ourselves ‘friends of Jesus.’ Every day, every week, it must be a 21st century ‘pilgrim’s progress,’ fired by our passionate desire always to be close to our Lord and Saviour.
How can this happen?
1) We will spend time reading the Bible and praying, we will expect to receive and absorb God’s message for the day, His ‘rhema’ word. In Matthew 11:29 Jesus says, ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me.’ One verse earlier, we read: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’ Just as we need physical rest each night, we need spiritual rest in order to receive strength to carry out God’s tasks for the day.
2) A disciple will also learn how important it is to keep short accounts with God - daily repentance. And that can be painful, as we allow God’s searchlight to probe the parts of our nature that we try to hide from others and even from ourselves. I recently heard an elderly preacher, who has an international ministry, say ‘God has told me that I need to be the person that my listeners think I am.’ My bank account is called ‘123 Lite’ - and it’s so tempting to live ‘Christianity Lite’. Read Psalm 51 : it’s a great place to start a prayer of repentance, and it can help us to be totally honest with our Lord about the bits of our nature that we prefer to keep hidden. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians gives plenty of detail for a closer walk with God.
3) A disciple is one who rejoices. Billy Sunday, an American evangelist in the early 20th century, said: ‘If you have no joy in your religion, there’s a leak in your Christianity somewhere.’ There’s a story about a king of a particular country who travelled a lot. But one day a man living near to the palace remarked to a friend, ‘Well, it looks as if the king is at home tonight.’ ‘How do you know?’ The man pointed up to the royal house: ‘Because when the king is at home, the castle is all lit up.’ Read Philippians 4:4-7.
The old chorus puts it well:
Running over, running over, my cup’s full and running over.
Since the Lord saved me, I’m as happy as can be. My cup’s full and running over.
4) And a disciple is one who relates, both in the sense of getting alongside others and in the sense of telling people about how special Jesus is in our life. Read Matthew 28:19-20, Mark16:15, Colossians 1:28. We learn to become disciple-makers. The second verse of the ‘Running over’ chorus is:
Telling others, telling others, my life’s work is telling others.
Since the Lord saved me, I’m as happy as can be. My life’s work is telling others.
Let me end this ‘Time with the Bible’ with a challenging quote from David Watson, a gifted English evangelist of the last century:
Christians in the West have largely neglected what it means to be a disciple of Christ. The vast majority of western Christians are church-members, pew-fillers, hymn-singers, sermon-tasters, Bible-readers, even born-again believers or Spirit-filled-charismatics - but not true disciples of Jesus. If we were willing to learn the meaning of real discipleship and actually to become disciples, the church in the West would be transformed, and the resultant impact on society would be staggering.
