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.