Discipleship
The
Requirements of Discipleship
While every disciple is a believer, every believer is not
necessarily a disciple.
Many may
think that the term disciple refers only to the early followers of Christ. From
our previous studies, we know that they were a praying, worshipping, loving,
giving, and evangelizing group of men and women who refused to keep the truth of
the gospel to themselves. Yet, God still desires disciples today—ordinary people
like you and me who God can use to do extraordinary
things.
The
Christian experience of the believers in the first century church may seem
radical to many in the church today, but to those early believers, it was
nothing less than normal Christianity. And these men and women—empowered and
propelled by the Holy Spirit—turned their world upside down for the sake of
Christ. In short, they were true disciples of Jesus
Christ.
Are We True
Disciples?
If you are
a true disciple, your Christian walk will be challenging and exciting, and you
will have a sense of purpose and direction. But if your Christian experience can
be described as dull, unfulfilling, and even boring at times, you need to
seriously examine the statements Jesus made concerning what it means to be a
disciple. After all, how can we expect to fulfill the Great Commission to go
into all the world and make disciples if we don't even really know what one is?
It literally takes one to make one.
Disciple (Biblical
definition):
A learner; a
pupil; one who comes to be taught. The relationship between the disciple and his
teacher is not merely that of a student listening to a lecturer, or simply a
passively interested listener. A disciple listens with attention and intention.
He drinks in every word of his teacher, marking every inflection of voice with
an intense desire to apply what has been learned.
The
Requirements of Discipleship
Read Luke 14:25-35
In Luke
14, Jesus lays out the tests and requirements of discipleship. In verse 25,
Jesus sees a large crowd gathering. He knew that these people believed and
accepted His message in principle. Prior to this point, Jesus had shown how the
message of the gospel was for everyone. He had exposed the Pharisees as the
religious hypocrites that they were. As a result, He had become enormously
popular. Now He wanted to weed out those who were following Him for the wrong
reasons.
Some
wanted to be dazzled by Jesus’ miracles, while others came looking for a free
meal. A few even hoped that He would overthrow
Jesus Seeks Quality
over Quantity
Jesus
makes it clear that when it comes to personal discipleship, He is more
interested in quality than quantity. The words He spoke that day are perhaps the
most solemn and searching words that ever fell from His
lips.
Why would
Jesus say such things to all those people who followed Him? It seems that He is
intentionally trying to get rid of them. In a sense, He is trying to get rid of
at least some of them. A similar story is found in Judges 7:1-22. There God
wanted to give His servant, Gideon, a victory in his battle against the Midianites. But the Lord said that He wanted to get the
glory for it. So, through a series of tests, God whittled down Gideon’s original
army of 32,000 to 300. God knew that He could do more with 300 alert, committed
men than He could with 32,000 half-hearted ones.
Three
times in the course of this message in Luke, Jesus uses the phrase, “cannot be
my disciple.” In other words, Jesus is laying out some absolute prerequisites
for discipleship.
Prerequisite
#1: Love God More
Than Anyone Else
Jesus
begins with some very strong words: “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and
children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My
disciple” (v. 26).
Jesus was
not advocating that in order to be disciples, we must exhibit hate toward
family, friends, and ourselves. In this verse, Jesus was using the Oriental
method of sharp contrasts to make a point. Here He uses the word hate as the
opposite of love. He did not choose something easily hated, like sin; instead,
He chooses the most noble love we could have in this world—the love of family.
He uses this analogy to show that our love for God must take pre-eminence over
all others.
Your love
for God should be so strong that your love for others is like hatred by
comparison.
We see how
personal relationships can conflict with the call of discipleship in Luke
chapter nine. There, Jesus asks someone to follow Him, but the man responds with
this excuse:
“Lord, let me first
go and bury my father.” (Luke 9:59)
Right
there a conflict arises. If He is truly Lord, then He is first, not us. This man
was essentially saying, “Lord, let me wait until my parents grow old and die. I
don’t want to create any conflict. I’ll follow You at a
more convenient time.”
Jesus
answers:
“Let the dead bury
their own dead, but you go and preach the
In this
life, you either will have harmony with people and friction with God, or harmony
with God and friction with people. You cannot have it both ways. Speaking on the
theme of discipleship and its effect on the home, Jesus
says,
“Do not think that I
came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I
have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matthew
You must
decide which way it will go. If you choose harmony with God, the conflict you
experience with others may ultimately lead to the awareness of their own need to
find harmony with God.
A Test of Devotion
. . .
Jesus
wants to test our hearts. He wants to be sure that we love Him more than anyone
or anything else.
Abraham of
the Old Testament seemed to struggle with this. God gave him a son, Isaac, in
his old age. The boy was precious to Abraham’s life, the joy of his heart. This
young man was a physical representation of everything sacred to Abraham’s heart:
the covenants God had made and the physical link to the coming Messiah. As he
watched him grow from a little baby to a strong, young man, perhaps this child
began to fill the spot that Abraham had previously reserved for his friend, God.
Perhaps, at this point in his life, had he been asked whom he loved more—Isaac
or God—it would have been difficult to answer.
A. W.
Tozer writes, “It was then that God stepped in to save
both father and son from the consequences of an uncleansed love.” So God said, “Take your son, your only
son—yes, Isaac, whom you love so much—and go to the
When
Abraham so wonderfully passed this test, God blessed him and spared his son. In
essence, God was saying, It's all right, Abraham. I
never intended that you actually kill Isaac. I only wanted to remove him from
the temple of your heart that I might remain unchallenged
there.
A Personal
Thought
Will you
dedicate your Isaac to the Lord today? It could be a family member or friend you
love more than God. It may be a relationship you are in at the moment. It may be
some sort of pursuit you are afraid to give up.
Will you
step out from the fickle multitudes and fair-weather followers today and be a
true disciple of Jesus, loving Him more than anyone or anything
else?
After this
test in Abraham’s life, there was nothing in his life that was not committed to
the Lord. He still had great wealth, flocks, and possessions. He still had his
son Isaac. He had everything, but he possessed nothing! His grip was very light
on these things, and tighter on the eternal. Again, to quote Tozer: “Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and
nothing is really safe which is not so committed.”
God is
still looking for men and women who will shake their world, men and women who
will be His disciples. I urge you to make that step. If you do, our world will
never be the same again.
English
evangelist John Wesley once said, “Give me a hundred men who love God with all
of their hearts and fear nothing but sin, and I will move the
world.”