Discipleship

What does it mean to be a disciple? The Greek word, mathétés, can be very simply translated as a learner or pupil. We tend to place a lot of baggage on the word that it really doesn’t carry, which is why it is interpreted in so many different ways within the church. We think of it as a follower, someone who behaves in a certain fashion, someone who models Christ. While discipleship is intended to bring about a change in behavior and Christlikeness, it is to take place from the inside out – from the mind to the heart to the hands. To be a disciple is to be a learner of God.

To understand how learning brings about behavioral changes in the life of a believer, we need to grasp something important - namely, that we are to be ‘transformed by the renewal of the mind’ (Romans 12:2). Changes in behavior are secondary to this transformation – they are the fruit that results from it. The gospel is not primarily an appeal to us to change our behavior, but an instrument that the Holy Spirit uses to change our thinking, which leads to behavior change. Look, for example, at Paul’s description of the natural person in 1 Corinthians 2:14:

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

The natural mind cannot discern spiritual truth. As Paul says in Romans 8:7 “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot.”  In its natural state, the human mind cannot submit to God; rather, it is hostile toward God. Note that Paul says it cannot submit, not that it will not submit – even if we willed to submit, we could not. If we follow this line of reasoning (and it is everywhere in the scriptures) it becomes obvious to us that in order for us to be transformed by the renewal of our mind, something miraculous has to take place. We must be given a mind that is not hostile toward God, one that can accept the things of the Spirit. This is what God does by the Holy Spirit when we are presented with the good news. By means of the Spirit, those who believe have their minds set on the things of the Spirit.

Okay, you say, that covers salvation. But now that an individual is saved, he or she needs to learn how to live as Christ, right? This is where we often fail in discipleship because we think that it comes down to ‘What Would Jesus Do’. After all, Jesus said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20 ESV) This is clearly a call for a Christian to-do list – teach them to observe all that I commanded. We begin to press our ‘disciples’ to start doing certain things and stop doing other things, presenting discipleship is a form of behavior modification. We become the agent of transformation to them, rather than continuing to teach spiritual truths with an expectation that the renewal of their minds by the Holy Spirit will lead to a transformation of their lives. We say ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the changing of your behavior’.

As a result, so much of our discipleship effort is wasted in creating Pharisees. The outside of the cup and the bowl may be clean, but the inside is filthy, all because we don’t trust the word of God to effect the transformation of the mind. But, we say, these people have been in Sunday school for years. They have listened to thousands of sermons. They are so full of the word of God that they are comatose. That’s not working, so we have taken things into our own hands because it seems obvious to us that the word of God alone is not doing the job.

Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:6-7 “Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” This is where we have missed the mark. Most of our scriptural-based teaching has not been the secret and hidden wisdom of God that Paul speaks of, but little more than vacation bible school for grown-ups. We pick out the heroes and villains of the Bible and set them up as examples of what to do or not do. In other words, our teaching has not been aimed at bringing about a transformation of thinking, but we have used the Bible as an instrument of our behavior modification program.

It is the secret and hidden wisdom of God alone that can affect the renewal of the mind that leads to transformation and non-conformity to this world. What is that? Paul told the Corinthians that he decided to know nothing among them except “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (V1:2) That is the secret and hidden wisdom of God – the gospel. It is hidden to those who do not believe, and all too often hidden to those who do by our own discipleship programs. To be a disciple is simply to be a learner of this secret and hidden wisdom, learning to observe the commandment of our Lord – “And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” (1 John 3:23 ESV) That is the gospel truth.

God Bless.