From the Pulpit...

Matthew 28:18-20 tells us that we are to make disciples, baptize them, and teach them to obey everything the Lord has commanded. That is our central mission as a church.

But what exactly is our end product? What is a disciple? What does one look like? Act like? Think like? How are we supposed to make disciples if we are a bit fuzzy on what we are making? In today's evangelical landscape, this sometimes gets lost in the rush to "get people to believe" or "make a profession of faith." Discipleship is reduced to "belief" and "belief" is reduced to head-knowledge, and true Christianity is emptied of reality.

We talk a lot about believers but not so much about disciples and this is not good. Discipleship roughly equals belief + transformation, and both are produced by God. Transformation refers to the "new person" thing that happens to someone when they trust in Christ. Their life changes--from characterized by sin to characterized by righteousness. The belief part of it refers to accepting that you are a sinner, that Christ is the Son of God who died for your sins and rose again, and that believing in Him you will have eternal life. But if you have fact-belief only without transformation, that falls short of true Christianity (even the demons believe, says James 2:19). That half-baked type of "Christianity" is called easy-believism or free grace theology.

On the other hand, if you claim to have a kind of transformation apart from belief in Christ then all you have is moral reformation, which rearranges a person's problems but does not ultimately solve the sin issue.

In this message, we embark on a study of what the Scripture says about disciples. These are the end products that we seek. We ought not to think that we perfectly become such a thing immediately after coming to Jesus. But we also ought not to think that our lives look entirely different than this end product. Even a new believer bears an unmistakable resemblance to what we will see in the many verses we will visit.