Building Kingdom Disciples | Special Guest Dr. Tony Evans

Hey there. Thanks for listening to the Greg Laurie Podcast, a ministry supported by Harvest Partners. I'm Greg Laurie encouraging you.

If you want to find out more about Harvest Ministries and learn more about how to become a Harvest Partner, just go to harvest.org. I'm happy to be here with my son, Anthony Jr., and to be here at Harvest. It's good to be with Greg. He called me and asked if I believed in free speech.

I said, yes. He said, come give one. So I'm delighted to be able to be here. I have followed the ministry of your pastor for many years. His love for people, his love for the Lord, and his love for the unreached through his harvest events. And he's had a number of them in Dallas where I minister, and we have appreciated his work here locally and his work nationally. So thank you for allowing me to be part of this wonderful, wonderful congregation as you continue to serve the Lord Christ in these challenging days. For many years, I served as chaplain of the Dallas Cowboys when they were winning.

My son played, my younger son, Jonathan, played for Baylor University and then had a short stint in the NFL and has taken over my role as a chaplain of the Cowboys. And as you know, when a team, when a game is being played, three teams will hit the field. There will be the home team.

There will be a visiting team. Which means there will be a three hour conflict. There will be a three hour conflict between these two teams because they are going to clash. Because they're going in two different directions.

One has a goal this way, another has a goal that way. Three hours, they're going to clash and no amount of argument will make them get along because by the nature of the gridiron, conflict is inevitable. In the middle of this conflict, in the middle of this gridiron battle, a third team is introduced. This is the team of officials. There are seven officials at an NFL game whose job it is to manage the mess.

To be in the middle of the conflict without becoming a part of the conflict. These seven representatives do not belong to the home team, nor do they belong to the visiting team. They belong to a whole other kingdom. You see, the NFL offices are located at 345 Park Avenue in New York. And what they do is they dispense to all 32 teams, to all of the games, their kingdom representatives. These representatives are situated on the field, but they get their instructions from 345 Park Avenue.

So they get instructions from up there for the decisions they make down here in the middle of the battle that is being played out on the gridiron. Each official has been handed a book. This book is the governing guidelines by which all decisions are to be made on the field of play. Their personal opinions must be subject to that book. Their perspectives must adjust to that book. Regardless of how they feel about this team or that team, they have got to make all of their decisions predicated on what is written in the book from the kingdom up there in the chaos down here. Now, they understand that their presence on the field is not part of a popularity contest. They understand sometimes they're going to be booed because one of the teams, and if it's against the hometown team, the crowd is going to boo them. They understand if it's for the home team, with the home crowd, they're going to be cheered.

But that is a non-relevant issue for them because they're not there for a popularity contest. They're there to represent the kingdom in New York and the chaos on the field of play as distinct representatives of the NFL. They are always distinguishable. You never have to guess about the referee because they have black and white jerseys on. They don't don the jerseys of this team. They don't don the jerseys of that team because they are independent of both teams. Because they represent neither team, they represent another order. They represent another kingdom. We have a problem today in our culture, and that is we have God's representative joining cultural teams.

Some have joined the Democratic team, others have joined the Republican team, some have joined the black team, others have joined the white team, some have joined the rich team, others have joined the poor team, and they have joined teams and have lost the distinction that they were created and rebirthed to provide in the chaos of the culture. What we are missing today is what I call in the book and what I want to challenge you today. We're missing kingdom disciples. We're missing men and women who do not fully understand what it means to be a full-time follower of Christ and not a part-time Christian.

Men and women who have refused or failed to distinguish themselves in the chaos of the conflicts on the field of play that dominate the gridiron of a culture in which we find ourselves. Jesus called a meeting. It was the only meeting he called between the time of his resurrection and the time of his ascension.

He had a number of meetings, but only one was called prior to his ascending after he rose. You know it as the Great Commission, and I know that is a passion of your pastor and of this ministry. There are five commissions in the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. All of them have a commissioning by the risen Christ. But Matthew 28 calls it, we call it the Great Commission, because it uses a term that none of the other commissions use.

The Greek word is mathetes or disciple, and that's why it's called the Great Commission. Three groups are invited to this meeting. We find out in verse 16 that the eleven disciples proceeded to Galilee to the mountain which Jesus had designated.

So it was a planned meeting, designated. So we have eleven disciples, that is minus Judas, who attend the meeting. The second group that attends the meeting, we're told in 1 Corinthians 15, was five hundred brethren.

So that is either five hundred and eleven or four hundred and eighty-nine, depending upon whether the eleven are part of the five hundred. So there is a large group that attends the meeting. There is a third group invited to the meeting, because verse 20 says, And lo, I will be with you until the end of the age, while the age has not yet ended, so you and I are invited to the meeting.

So why don't we mosey on up the hill and see what this meeting is all about, since we've been invited to the meeting to find out what the risen Lord expects of us in His physical absence, in the midst of our physical presence and His work through us. They start off with a worship service, because it says when they saw Him, they worshiped Him. And so they started out like you have started out today, in worship.

Worship is the recognition of God for who He is, what He has done, and what we are trusting Him to do. So they were worshiping, but we are also told that some were doubtful. So while everybody's in church, so to speak, some were in church with question marks.

They weren't fully convinced. And perhaps you are one of those here today who you're in worship, but you're not yet fully convinced. You've got questions about how real is this Jesus thing, how powerful is this biblical proclamation, how strong is this community of believers, especially in light of all that we're seeing with the chaos in the culture.

So they were there, but they were there with questions that had not yet been answered. After the singing and the praying of the worship service, it's time for the pulpiteering. And on this occasion, Jesus mans the podium. After they worship, He comes and He says in verse 18 of Matthew 28, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. The risen Christ steps before His three audiences and says, I'm in charge now. All authority belongs to me in heaven up there and on earth down here. I'm in charge in eternity and I'm in charge in time. I'm in charge in heaven and I'm in charge in history. I'm in charge in the sweet by and by and I'm in charge in the nasty here and now.

He says, I'm in charge now. The word He uses for authority is an interesting one. The dominant word in the New Testament for authority is dunamis, where we get our English word dynamite from.

That's not the word He uses here. He uses the Greek word ekkousia. Ekkousia is a little different than dunamis. Dunamis, that expression of explosive power.

But ekkousia has a different nuance to it. In a football game, you have players who are young, strong and fast. They have dunamis. They have power. But you have referees who are slow and fat and old.

They do not have dunamis. They can be defeated by the dunamis of the players because the refs do not have that innate ability to compete with them. But what the refs do have is ekkousia. The players can knock you down.

The refs can put you out. Because what they carry is kingdom authority. Ekkousia has to do with the rightful use of power, not the dunamis, the execution of power.

The players have the uniforms, but the refs have the yellow flag and the whistle. They have ekkousia, and if you put your hands on them, you will be judged by the kingdom up there because you mess with legitimate authority. Jesus says, I'm in charge now. Anything that contradicts me is illegitimate because I carry legitimate authority. Satan has dunamis.

I have ekkousia. I have legitimate authorized authority. And then he issues his instruction. He says, I want you to make disciples. I want you to make disciples. I don't want you to make church members. I want you to make disciples. In the Greek text, it is an imperative, not an indicative.

It is a command, not a request. The whole point of the church is the making of disciples, not merely the introduction of converts. Discipleship starts with conversion.

Faith alone in Christ alone for the free gift of eternal life. But once a person places faith in Christ, they have entered into the school of discipleship. That's why your announcement earlier about small groups to grow you in your faith is so critical because God's goal is not church attendance. God's command is disciple making. What is a mafetes, a disciple? A disciple is a man or woman, a Christian, who is progressively learning to live all of life under the rule of Jesus Christ. They are progressively developing into a visual, verbal follower of Christ.

They are people who have transformed lives that transfer the values of the kingdom of God in every area of life. It is to the degree that God owns more of you next year than he owned of you this year that you are becoming a disciple. The idea of discipleship is the replication of the conduct and character, attitudes and actions of Christ. Or as Jesus says in John 10, it is enough for a disciple to become like his master.

It is the reflection of Christ being lived out in your life, my life, and collectively our lives in the chaos of the culture. When I preach a sermon, much as your pastor does on Sunday, it is recorded on a master CD. This master CD is then sent over to our national ministry, the Urban Alternative, and people who still want or use a CD will request a copy.

We have duplicators. These duplicators run off 16 messages a minute for people who want the message in CD form. The CD that was sent out or is sent out is a replica of the master. The CD is not the master, it's a copy. But the copy is so much like the master, you could confuse it for the master because it's a replication of the master.

There's only one master, but the copy is designed to reflect the master. Jesus wants to run off on you and run off on me so that we become visible, verbal copies of the master, so that his life is run off on us in a way where when people see us, they see a little bit of what Jesus would look like if he was here in physical form. That is the goal of discipleship. I'm here with my son Anthony Evans Jr. He's a professional gospel artist. He leads worship all over the nation and around the world, and God has given him a great, great ministry of music. When he first started out, he asked me, he said, Dad, would you pick me up from the airport?

He was just starting his music ministry. He said, Dad, will you pick me up from the airport? I said, sure. And this was before 9-11, and so you could go up to the gate, and I waited for him to get off his plane. He's about like the third person to get off the plane, and we're walking to baggage claim. Halfway to baggage claim, I stop. I look at him. I stare at him. And I say, no you didn't.

He began to laugh because he knew exactly what I meant. You see, in order to be the third person off the plane, you in first class. If you the third person off the plane, you in first class. He did not have a first class ticket.

He did not have first class money. What he had was my name. So I knew what he had done. He had gone up to the counter and said, my name is Tony Evans.

That was true. And I would like to know if you have any platinum upgrades, because I'm a platinum flyer with America. She said, oh, Dr. Evans, we're glad to have you flying with us again. So you know what he did? He piggybacked off of my authority.

He piggybacked off of my name. Jesus says, make disciples so that they can piggyback off of me, so that they can use my authority as they execute their lives in time and space, in the chaos of the culture. So how do we do that? How do we make disciples? That's what the church is designed to do. My contention is today that we have plenty of Christians. We do not have near enough disciples.

We have Christians who have joined the teams and donned the uniforms of the culture and have lost their distinctiveness of the faith. That's why you can have racial division on Sunday morning. That's why you can have political division in the family of God, because they've lost their kingdom perspective. And the Word of God no longer has final say-so in the decision-making of life. That's why you can have as many divorces in the church as you do in the culture, because men have not decided to be kingdom men. Women have not decided to be kingdom women.

Parents have not decided to be kingdom parents. So because they have not yet been kingdomized as disciples of Jesus Christ, they have been culturized by the environment in which they live and the false teams for which they play. He gives three participles. In Greek, when you have an imperative connected with participles, the participles define the implementation of the imperative. So the imperative is to make disciples. The participles are go, baptize, and teach.

Those are the three points to Jesus' sermon. He says, I want you to go. Now, you can study go in Hebrew, Greek, Ugaritic, Aramaic, and Syriac. And go means go. It means don't stay. That is Jesus' evangelistic term. It's used in Matthew 10 where he tells his disciples to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and to tell them Messiah is here. It was the message that is carried so well from harvest of evangelism, of calling people to the free gift of salvation.

To go. It means don't stay. It means that you're not just here for your growth, you're here for your influence. You're here to be equipped to be representatives of the king and his kingdom in the culture to declare Messiah has arrived. He has died and he has risen. That evangelism, winning people to Christ, is part of our mission of making disciples because you must make a convert first.

So the question is not only what you get when you come here, but the difference you make when you leave here, when the benediction is over. Our gathering today is like a huddle in a football game. A hundred thousand people don't gather at Los Angeles Stadium to watch the Rams play, to see eleven grown men bend over in a huddle. They don't come for a huddle. Now they don't mind a huddle as long as you only spend a few minutes in it, a few seconds in it. But you know what they came to see? What difference the huddle makes.

Having huddled, can you now score? What are you going to do about eleven other men on the other side of the ball daring you to go public with your private conversation? They want to see your impact. Help me, how can we have all these churches on all these corners with all these members and all these preachers and all these buildings and all these programs and still have all this mess as a dead monkey on the line somewhere? Folk who go to church but who do not go, their testimony for Christ is unclear. Their witness as a believer in Christ is mute.

It's on silent. So the first thing has to do with evangelism. It has to do with the public declaration of your faith. If you were accused at work of being a follower of Christ, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Or would you be found innocent of all charges? Because you have become a secret agent Christian, a spiritual CIA representative, a covert operative, not a public representative of the faith.

Everybody else is coming out the closet you might as well come out to. The second part of simple is baptize them. The Greek word is baptizo. Baptizo in New Testament days was used of a die maker. A die maker would, a mother who wanted to sew a pink dress for her daughter would get the cloth and take it to the die maker. The die maker would take the cloth and dip it into pink dye, hang it up, wash, work off all the extraneous dye, let it dry. Now the gray cloth was pink. It had been recolored.

So the mother could now go home and make her daughter a pink dress. For that to happen, an immersion occurred. The cloth was immersed, dipped into this cloth, into this dye, so that it had been recolored, reclassified, re-identified. Jesus chooses this word to explain the new identity, classification, that belongs to his disciples.

People need to be reclassified. Paul goes into this in Romans 6. Those of you who've been identified with Christ, he says, you were baptized with him. You were raised, brought up out of the dye with the newness of life. When a football team plays underneath the helmet and the uniform, they're black players, they're white players, they're Spanish players, they're players from the hood, they're players from the suburbs, they're rule players, they're players from single-parent families, players from nuclear solid families. There are all kinds of histories under that uniform, but they're all under that uniform.

Regardless of what their history and background happens to be, they've been dipped into a cowboy environment, which means they all are looking, even though they are distinct in their humanity, they are reflecting the unity of that one uniform because they belong to this one team. God does not negate our humanity, but he does overrule it when it comes in conflict with him. What he is saying is that believers are to be so identified as Christians that everything else is underneath that uniform, that they have been classified, they have been recolored. That makes it technically incorrect to say, I'm a black Christian or you're a white Christian or somebody else is an Asian Christian because then I make black and white an adjective, I make Christian a noun and the job of the adjective is to modify the noun. So if I have Christian in the noun position, my color in the adjectival position, I got to keep adjusting the noun of my Christianity to the adjective of my color. I must take my Christianity and always keep it in the adjectival position so that my color and culture is always in the noun position so that if anything changes, it's the noun of my humanity and not the adjective of my faith. It means my humanity must adjust to my new uniform, that I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.

I don't lose my uniqueness. But he says, I am crucified with Christ, the life which I now live. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

That is my point of identification. I am first and foremost a Christ follower. I am first and foremost a kingdom disciple and everything else must surround that. Everything else must adjust to that.

Everything else must be influenced by that. That becomes my identity. And so he says that it ought to be clear that you are a Christ follower and it ought to be clear publicly, not privately alone, not in church alone.

The third part is simple. It's teach. So what do you teach them? Pneumatology, ecclesiology, eschatology, angelology, anthropology? What do you...armartiology?

Uh-uh. He says you teach them to observe. You teach them how to apply spiritual truth to life's decision-making. That's what you teach. You don't just teach biblical knowledge for knowledge's sake. He says you teach them to observe whatever I have commanded, which means you need to know what he's commanded, but he says, the goal here is the observation, not merely the education.

You teach them to serve, you teach them to live it out, you teach them to reflect it, you teach them to manifest it, you teach them to apply it. If you were needing a life-saving surgery, this surgery would determine whether you lived or died. The doctor comes in and he sits by your bed and he says to you, this is what we're going to do tomorrow. He goes through all the idiosyncratic elements of the surgical nuances. He will perform, he will cut here, he will do this there. He goes through.

It is obvious that this doctor has been to school, that he has learned his craft excellently. He then says to you, do you have any questions? I don't know about you, but if I was in that situation, I'd have two questions. Question number one, how many times have you done this before? Now, if he tells me, well, you my first, but I made A in class. His grade, knowledge, and information would not impress me. Now, I have a second question.

My first question is how many times have you done this before? My second question is how are them people doing? Because if none of them made it, I don't care about your grades. In other words, I don't want to know your information, I want to know your skill. Going to Bible study is critical. Being part of your small group is critical, but it only is meaningful if it's applied.

Because if it is not a skill set, then it's information that is of no use. Teaching them to observe whatever I have commanded you. It is the whole corpus of biblical revelation, and it is whatever I have commanded you, not whatever I have suggested to you. There are two answers to every question. God's answer and everybody else's, and everybody else is wrong. God has spoken and He has not stuttered.

He has spoken clearly, and He wants us to adjust. He concludes with the statement, And lo, I will be with you always, verse 20, even to the end of the age. And lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age. Now, in Greek, we call this the ego ami construction. The ego ami construction means that the word I is written twice. So if we were to read it in Greek, literally it would read, And I, even I, will be with you always.

And I, even I, will be with you always. Why would he write his name twice? Now, in your versions, they don't put the word I twice. They intensify the one I, so lo I. So that's really I under emphasis, because he writes I twice.

I, even I, will be with you always, even until the end of the age. In the previous verse, he said, Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So he brings in the Trinity, the triune God. The Trinity means there's one God composed of three co-equal persons who are one in essence while distinct in personality. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, but the three together make up the one Godhead. It's like a pretzel with three holes. The first hole is not the second hole, the second hole is not the third hole, but they're all tied together by the same dough.

It's called divine nature. But now he extracts himself from the other two. He says, I, even I, not the Father, not the Spirit, I, even I. Why does he move away and bring himself out of the three that he just talked about by emphasizing himself with the ego ami construct?

I, even I, will be with you till the end of the age. Because he had began his sermon with, All authority has been given to me. All authority. I'm in charge now.

You have to understand that. Jesus is in charge now. Up there and down here, he will call the shots. What he is wanting to do is transfer authority.

All authority. But here it is. I know we quote this verse when people are sick. Well, he said, I'm gonna be with you. I know we quote this verse when people are in trouble. God said, it's gonna be with you. I know this verse gets used for everything, and there are plenty of verses you can use for all those situations, but not this one.

Because this is very specific. I will be with you if you are a disciple, not I will be with you generically because you are a Christian. His concern in the Great Commission is on discipleship, not merely on conversion. He is saying, my authority will only be transferred to you when you are making disciples. I'm not gonna transfer my authority to people who don't know how to use it, to people who challenge it, to people who question it, or to people who subjugate it to the culture, to the politics, to the racial divide, to the culture divide, to the class divide.

Let me say it another way. Jesus does not relate to all Christians equally. Now all Christians have Jesus if you've come to Christ, but he doesn't relate to all Christians equally. He doesn't share his authority equally just because you're on your way to heaven. He wants to know, are you good, any good for him on earth? And he's not gonna transfer his right of rulership with people who not gonna take it and call the right plays, or call the right penalties, or use the book to make their decisions.

He's only gonna share his authority. That's why John chapter 2 verses 23 to 25 says, Many believed in him. The Greek phrase there is pistuois. Pistuois in the book of John always means conversion. It says, many believed in him, many got converted, but then it says, but he would not commit himself to them because he knew what was in them. So even though they were converted, they did not have his full commitment, and they did not have his full commitment because they had not yet made full commitment. So Jesus Christ does not relate to every Christian equally. He relates to disciples and disciple makers at a whole different level than just generic Christianity and generic church membership. What we are needing today in the collapse of our culture are radical Christians. Christians full of love, but Christians full of truth who never use sympathy to cancel out the truth, but who never declare the truth without a sympathetic heart.

We are in desperate need of Christians today who are full-time disciples, not part-time saints. A man one day who had just gotten married was on his way to his honeymoon. They left the wedding ceremony and was going on to spend their first evening together as a married couple.

It was in a rural area where the wedding took place, and they had to go down a country road to make their way to the major area to their hotel. It was a foggy night out, and so you couldn't really see too far in front of you, and they were behind an 18-wheeler. The 18-wheeler was going pretty slow, and he wanted to pass the 18-wheeler, and so he pulled out to pass the 18-wheeler, but because of the fog, didn't see the oncoming van. There was a head-on collision. The collision was so cataclysmic, it flipped his car up and over and into a ditch where both he and his new bride were knocked unconscious. He came to first. He looked over on the passenger side and saw his new bride gushing blood.

He knew that if she did not get help soon, she would bleed out and die. But he's on this country road in this ditch in a crisis, and that's when he saw it. Just above him, on the hill, was a sign that said Office of Dr. Bill Jones.

How fortunate could it be that the accident happened in front of a doctor's office. As best as he could, he staggered around the passenger side and picked up his beloved and staggered up the hill. Knocked on the door, frantically, an old gentleman came to the door. He said, she's dying, she's dying, she's dying, save her. The old man said, I'm so sorry, I stopped practicing years ago.

The young man said, Mister, you have two choices. Save her or take down your sign. But don't have a sign up giving me the impression that if I came to you, you could make a difference. But when I come to you, you don't practice anymore. A lot of Christians today are carrying around a sign. I'm a Christian, I'm a follower of Christ, I'm a disciple, I'm a faithful church member, I'm this, I'm that.

But when the culture is collapsing, when the world is falling apart, we only discover they don't practice anymore. The challenge today is clear. Either take down your sign or start practicing your Christian faith so that everybody knows you belong to the king and you represent his kingdom as a kingdom disciple. Wow, what an amazing message from Dr. Tony Evans. I don't know about you, but that last closing illustration, it really drove it home.

Talking about that, doctor, my goodness, there was a quote that he said, basically, either you have two choices, right? Take this sign down or start living up to what you say you are. Start practicing what you preach. Start becoming that Christian that you say that you are and become a kingdom disciple. That impacted me.

I'll be honest, that even convicted me a little bit. And I can't help but think maybe there's some of you out there that have been living kind of a compromised life. You say you're one thing, but you're not really living up to it. This is something I talked about in my sermon in James 2 the week before, talking about faith without works is dead. If you say you're a believer, if you say that you follow Jesus and he's your Lord and Savior, but your life is not measuring up to what you say you are, you have to ask yourself, what kind of faith do you have? That was my message.

Dr. Tony kind of furthered that saying, hey, if you've got this sign up, you've got an option. Take down that sign. Stop telling people you're a believer or start living up to it. My recommendation to you would be start living up to it because not only is it a blessing to you, it's a blessing to the people around you.

The relationships that you have, the people that you're friends with, your loved ones, your marriage, your children. It helps you in so many ways when you fully commit your life to Jesus Christ. And so if you're watching right now and you've maybe been living a compromised life, you haven't really made that real commitment to walk with God.

Yeah, you believe in your heart, but you haven't started walking with him. Listen, I just want to invite you to pray a really simple prayer, to ask Jesus Christ to come into your life. You can do it wherever you're at. You could be sitting at home watching on your couch, watching TV right now. It could be in front of your computer screen. Man, you could be on a walk right now, listening to a podcast, listening to this via audio, wherever you might be, your car, work, wherever. You could pray this prayer and mean it in your heart.

Here's what's amazing. It's between you and God, not the people around you. It's between you and your father in heaven.

So just pray this prayer. Dear God, I know I'm a sinner. I know I've messed up and that I've made mistakes, but I turn from that life now. I turn from my sin and I turn to you. I commit myself to you from this moment forward. Help me to walk with you and talk with you.

In Jesus' name I pray, amen. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to this podcast. To learn more about Harvest Ministries, follow this show and consider supporting it. Just go to harvest.org. And to find out how to know God personally, go to harvest.org and click on Know God.