Delivered to Be a Disciple
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Delivered to Be a Disciple - Rudolph McKissick Jr.
Purpose
INTRODUCTION
It makes no sense to live and catch hell and die and go to hell. That’s just too much hell for one person.
I still remember the first time I heard that phrase. I was at my big brother’s, Dr. Freddy Haynes’, church in revival, and he was extending the invitation to salvation after one of my sermons. In his appeal, he made the statement that has stuck with me now for over a decade. I find myself using it often. More often than not it results in a laugh or a chuckle from the audience, but the statement, while cute, has so much truth in it.
The fact of the matter is God did not send His Son, Jesus Christ, just for you to get to heaven. While that is the ultimate goal, to be with God eternally, the more immediate goal is for you to live for God on the way to God. We call it discipleship. I can recall as a kid growing up that the bulletin would always read, Invitation to Christian Discipleship.
I hardly ever saw where it said Invitation to Salvation.
It was understood that if you were giving your life to the Lord, His Lordship meant your discipleship. Even when Jesus gave His final marching orders to those original followers He had enlisted, Jesus did not say, Go save the world.
Jesus said to them in each of the synoptic versions, Go and make disciples.
Jesus was in the disciple-making business.
The Lord laid it on my heart to write this book because the mandate given by the Lord seems to be the mandate lost by the church. We don’t seem much interested in making disciples any longer. Rarely do we hear lessons on discipleship. In this Neo-Pentecostal era, theology is more about earning and gaining materially. Selfishness is the central theme of most teaching and theology in this day and time. Most preaching sounds more like self-help coaching than it does discipleship making.
I mean, think about it. You hear more sermons about overcoming and taking and getting than you do about submitting and becoming. Jesus never called us to be rich. He called us to be disciples and to be disciple makers. As we live here on the earth, we have an assignment to be a disciple. We are to show forth through our lifestyle and decisions the Lordship and control of Christ over our lives. My actions, my lifestyle, and my choices should reveal that I am not in this by myself and for myself. They should reveal that there is somebody I am submitted to, namely, Jesus Christ. Make no mistake about it. You and I are saved to be disciples. We are saved to be models of the kingdom’s principles and agenda. That is the primary assignment placed upon the believer. Be a disciple.
As you read the scriptures of the New Testament, this becomes a glaring reality over and over. The first place we see it is in what has been termed by us as The Sermon on the Mount.
I don’t know about you, but I have seen so many pictures depicting this scene that are so off when it comes to accuracy to the context of that conversation. Matthew’s version and the particularity of the text bring home very succinctly the point of the primacy of discipleship.
Verse one tells us that Jesus saw a crowd, and then that He withdrew from the crowd, and out of the crowd (my interpretation), His disciples came to where He had withdrawn. Those very words let us know a few things. They let us know that disciples are from the crowd but don’t stay in the crowd. You cannot run with the crowd and be a disciple. Disciples are those who were once a part of the crowd of the curious but know that they are called out to be distinct and different. Not everybody in the crowd is a disciple.
This brought to my mind a haunting and sad reality. We do everything we can as the church to draw a crowd. We make sure our music draws a crowd. We preach to draw a crowd. We want crowds. I must admit that I am guilty of this very thing myself. When I walk into my own sanctuary or the sanctuary of a church where I have been invited to preach, the first thing I notice is how small or large the crowd is. We are very crowd conscious.
Jesus, however, was not driven by crowds. He was neither moved nor motivated by them. Matthew’s gospel says that he moved away from the crowd. When you read the Gospels, you discover that to be a theme over and over again in the life of Jesus. He was always found withdrawing from crowds. I am afraid that the church has become more crowd driven than disciple driven. The fact that Jesus held his lessons until the disciples had come away from the crowd suggests to me that the lessons he was about to teach were for those committed to following Him and not those who were simply curious about Him.
In Matthew 5, Jesus begins to outline the lifestyle principles of being a disciple. From this teaching we can learn that discipleship is designed to affect every area of your life. It affects you in the home, in the marketplace, in your relationships, and in the church. It influences your prayer life. What we call The Lord’s Prayer
is really the disciples’ prayer given to them as a model and blueprint to use for their prayer life. Note again: Jesus did not teach the crowd how to pray. He taught disciples how to pray.
The goal of this book is to impress upon you that the first