Developing a Passion for Evangelism and Discipleship

So, I am not called simply to tell people that God is compassionate and loving. I'm called to say, show him in action the kind of God who, when he recognizes sinners instead of sending them all to hell, comes and hangs on a cross to say, if you believe in me, I'll forgive you.

What does it mean to become a disciple of Jesus? Bible teacher Ray Vanderlaan is here to help us discover our calling as Christ followers. Welcome to Focus on the Family. With Jim Daly, I'm John Fuller. John, I'm sure anyone who's familiar with Ray Vanderlaan, affectionately called RVL around Focus on the Family, so we'll probably use RVL throughout the program today, but man, we certainly appreciate his gift of teaching. You know, you can tell a teacher when you meet a teacher. We probably had some along the way, even elementary school, high school, the people that love to teach, and they hone the craft, and they learn how to communicate in story, and they draw you in. That is a good teacher, and certainly RVL is a wonderful teacher.

He is an ancient Jewish cultural expert. I know he's not going to admit to that, but he is, and I love the way he teaches the biblical context for us as Christians to better understand what is being said in scripture, and the eastern style context, the Jewish thinking behind those scriptures. So I'm excited for everybody to hear this program today, and also for the resource that we have worked with RVL on, this great study series. We'll talk more about that throughout the program. Yeah, RVL Discipleship the Study is a terrific online resource that we want our listeners and viewers to know about. It is rich in what you're talking about, Jim, Ray's insights, and he's poured so much into this resource.

Ray's the founder of That the World May Know Ministries, and of course we had a video series, and still do, with Ray by that same title. Is it 30 years? 35 years?

Yeah, well no, he crossed 30 this year. 30 years, that's amazing. There's a lot of content there. There is, and all of that seems to be an outgrowth of his 40 years as a religion instructor at Holland Christian Schools in Holland, Michigan, and so it's our privilege to have Ray here.

You can learn more about RVL Discipleship the Study. The details are in the show notes. Well, Ray, it took us a minute, but welcome back to Focus on the Family. It's an honor to be here again. I so appreciate it. Let me tell you, if Jean has not been able to tell you, she is in love with the series.

She is enjoying it so much, and I'm watching along, and I'm enjoying it, but she is a driver. She's telling all her friends about it, and you have touched our souls yet again after That the World May Know. Let me ask you the foundational vision that led you to create RVL Discipleship. What is your target?

What are you trying to do with this content? Well, originally I was involved with Focus on the Family with the trips that I lead to the Bible lands and created a program that walks through the history of God and his people in the setting where he placed them. Worked hard on that over the years. We recorded that with Focus on the Family. That was a huge benefit and blessing to me in my life.

This is different in this sense. While I was doing all of that, I was a high school Bible teacher committed to helping young men and women understand what discipleship was and is in the context that God placed Jesus when he made disciples. So some years ago, people began to say, you know, you've recorded in Israel, you've recorded in Turkey, you've recorded in Greece and Egypt. What about your classroom? And I always hesitated because classroom to me is sacred. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous Jewish philosopher, talks about how in Judaism, study is worship. Because the moment you learn something, you're drawn to praise the creator of whatever it is you're discovering. So classroom was sacred. I was hesitant to have these cameras in there and have people filming because I didn't want to detract from that sacred moment of students experiencing God's truth, sometimes for the first time, sometimes review. But we decided to do it. And so what we have in the discipleship series is a summary of my life's ministry from the time I started teaching in 1976 till this year, we finished the year in 2024, and it's a look at what was discipleship in God's plan to bring wholeness to a broken sinful world.

Yeah. You know, and Ray, again, I mean, your teaching and what you've done to study the deeper meaning of metaphor and analogy and stories in the scripture, that's what is so attractive. Because generally, we don't get enough of that in Western churches.

And, you know, I'm not, it's just not part of our discipline to really go that deep. Let me give or ask for an example with the yoke where the Lord says, my yoke is easy. You had a story in the series about a woman in apartheid, South Africa. So many years ago, when apartheid was still in place, their vicious, harsh separation, segregation by race and tell the story of that woman. And I think as we prepare for that story, it's tough, it's not an easy one. And there are many others, but this one, it just makes you go, wow, is that carrying a yoke?

That's a great question. Let me give a little bit of background to that. The yoke Jesus invites people to take, I think can refer to the ordinary problems of daily life, everything from our health to our job to our relationships. So to say to someone, you're carrying a heavy burden, go to Jesus, because he will lighten your burden, I think is very biblical. But I think Jesus' audience saw a deeper application of that as well, too. Because the yoke is to say, I'm going to accept living out my life, believing and practicing the Word of God as Jesus interpreted.

That is not and going to be an easy task, not only for a sinful human being, but even for a human being empowered by the Spirit of God. It's a daily struggle to be like Jesus in everything I do. Now Jesus said, if you take my yoke, it's easy, my burden is light.

What's interesting, there are rabbinic teachings from the time period that are similar. And by easy and light, they didn't mean it's like carrying a feather or a marshmallow. What they meant is, if you got a hobby, and you spend a lot of time, a lot of effort, practicing that hobby, maybe even a lot of money, and I say to you, why do you put in all that effort, all that hard work?

And you say, because it's so exhilarating, so fulfilling, so fun and exciting, that it's worth it. That's how they would have understood. I think my burden is light.

They would have said, the result of carrying this burden is so exhilarating, so purposeful and meaningful in my life, that it makes that hard work and that burden worth it all. Now in that light, I tell a story in this series about South Africa, which is meaningful to me personally. I come from the Dutch Reform tradition, which was part of the apartheid struggle in South Africa. That was a colony of the Dutch Reform.

So I've always been fascinated at how the theology I grew up with had such impact and such struggle in the South African setting. But when that began to collapse, apartheid, that view that there were certain people that were superior and in authority, the white race over the black community, the fear was, what are we going to do with the abuse that has happened over the years, where those in power abused those who were subjugated? They came up in the Dutch Reform tradition with the idea of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

It went like this. If someone had committed crimes against someone else, rather than have a blood feud, they have to come in and sit in a chair in front of those who were abused. They have to give testimony to what they had done that was so obscenely wrong. If the abused victims would forgive them, they were free to go.

It doesn't say they hadn't done anything bad, but at this point it says, we forgive you, so we're going to move on, and to prevent this revenge, revenge, revenge. So the story goes like this, and I've looked at the details, there are some subtle differences in some of the versions, but I've looked at it enough to say, I think almost certainly it's a valid, true story. The victim was an elderly South African woman, she sat in the victim's chair. The accused was a Burleigh police sergeant. The audience listened in horror as the sergeant shared how he and his men had come to this woman's home, dragged her husband out, took him in the yard, put a tire around him and lit it on fire, as she and her son and daughter watched.

They threw the remains of her husband in the back of their vehicle and drove away, these officers did, only to come back later and do the same to her son. They listened, watched the woman's face as she heard the awful, awful terror that had happened to her family. When the time came for her to speak, she said, I want you to know three things. One, I heard every word you said. Two, I forgive you. And three, I have two requests. One, please tell me where you brought the remains of my husband and my son, because I would want to put up a marker to remember them. And two, I have a lot of mother love I've never been able to share.

I want you to become like my son and come to my home once a week so I can love you as my son. Wow. He fainted. Could not imagine anyone with the grace to be so forgiving at something so obscenely wrong. But she was exactly like Jesus. Somehow in that moment, God empowered this woman to be forgiving of her enemy like our Messiah as they nailed him to the cross. So she took his yoke and to say to that woman, the yoke is easy, I'm sorry.

That's an unbelievable yoke to carry. But somehow in the moment, the Spirit of God, as it would happen to Stephen in the New Testament, as Jesus showed on the cross, that woman was empowered to say, I'm going to take the yoke and I'm going to live out scripture the way Jesus did. That is such the ultimate example of God. Yeah. Amen.

What an amazing woman. Amen. Ah, that just, I mean, it does gets tears in my eyes. It's hard to even move to another example.

You know what I mean? But in lesson, I think it's in season four, the last 10 of the 40 episodes, you speak to the audience, I think from Matthew 14, where Jesus tells the disciples to go out in a boat. What are your observations about that moment? The fact that he tells them to go and then he's going to obviously come out and greet them walking on the water.

I use that story. It's in Mark 6 and Matthew 14. I use that story to draw together several principles of what it meant in Jesus' day to be a disciple. One of them is in Jesus' practice, the disciples didn't ask him whether they could be his disciples and then were accepted.

He's asked a couple of times in scripture, but he always turns them down. The demon-possessed man that was delivered said, may I follow you? And Jesus said, no, go home and tell them what just happened.

Tell them about the mercy of God. So Jesus didn't take those, at least in scripture, who said, I want to follow you. Instead, very differently, Jesus went out and found people, people who were already decided what they were going to do with their lives and disciple was not in the picture, like Peter and John were fishermen. Pretty common people. Pretty common ordinary people.

And I make that point. The second thing that I stress to my classes at this point is when Jesus selected people like that, not only were they ordinary people, but it meant they always knew he believed in them. He believed that by his example, by his interpretation of scripture, by his spirit, he could empower them. He would empower them to be like him, which is huge to my way of thinking. It's that affirmation of someone who believes in someone else and you feel the power of that. Well, imagine if that someone is Messiah, Rabbi Jesus. Now, we conclude that discussion with the story that you referred to. It goes like this. Jesus went off to pray and of course the audience found him.

They weren't going to give him that time. They wanted to hear more teaching to see more miracles maybe. So they have the feeding of the 5,000. When that's finished, Jesus turns to the disciples. They're somewhere to the west of Capernaum, along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus says to the disciples, get in the boat and go to Bethsaida, which is about three and a half miles due east. Now, I don't know what they thought, but if you look at scripture, every time Jesus got that group in a boat, they had a problem. And this time Jesus doesn't go with them.

He goes up on the mountainside there and he prays all night till just before dawn. Meanwhile, they're in trouble. There's an east wind.

It was against them. It says there's a rowing east of Bethsaida. There's an east wind, which usually means very choppy water or even storm. And so they're out in the middle of the lake.

It's pushed them way away from the shore into the middle of the lake. They don't know it, but Jesus is watching. And he just lets them row all night.

Wow. Knowing the struggle, knowing the fear, knowing the terror of, are we going to make it? Where's Jesus? Why isn't he helping us? Then, just before dawn, he came out to them walking on the water. They thought it was a ghost initially. They didn't expect him to come that way, I guess. He was going to come walking right on by, Mark says.

But they called out, help us, help us. Jesus stopped, stood there. The wind and the waves continued. Peter, seeing him, said, if that's you, Jesus, I want to walk over to you. And Jesus said, come on. So Peter got out of the boat, walked over to Jesus, actually walked on water. Peter, one of us, walked on water. But then when he got to Jesus, he saw the waves, he heard the wind, and he began to doubt. And he sank like a rock. Jesus grabbed his hand, pulled him back to the surface, and said to him, you of little faith, why did you doubt? Now, I draw several lessons out of that.

I'm kidding. First of all, when you go through life, there are going to be times that the direction God sends us means a storm. But don't ever forget who's watching. Jesus sees you in the storm. He knows the anxiety and the pain you face, the struggle you have. He's never going to let you be, get beyond what you can handle. He's watching.

Don't forget. Then he comes walking on the water. So my question to the students then that I spend a lot of time on, what's wrong with the other 11? Why aren't there 11 disciples walking on water?

Why only one? I'm sick of being in the 11. I want to have the guts to say, if you follow a rabbi who gets into storms and walks on water, you can't stay in the boat. That is an invitation to you to have the courage to get out of the boat and face the impossible. If you choose to follow him, you're going to have to get out of the boat.

You can't sit and watch like the other 11. He picked you as his disciple, called you to be his disciple because he knows by his spirit, the direction of his teaching and then the book that God gave us, the scripture, he will show you how to be like him in the situations like the woman in South Africa. Yeah. You know, you know, Ray, I'm thinking of Luke six, which is such a difficult area of scripture. It's where we all get treat others the way you want to be treated.

It's the two paragraphs leading into it. We don't read that closely in my opinion, but it's, if somebody hits you in the cheek, give them the other cheek. If somebody wants your coat, give me a shirt.

Somebody wants your money, give it to him because that will show that you are trusting in your father in heaven basically and that you have his character. This is probably this woman's story to me would be one of the closest examples I've ever heard where she lived up to Luke six totally. Now the question is, why for us as Christians is living up to Luke six so difficult. We think in our flesh, you know what you hit me in the cheek, I'm going to hit you right back in the cheek.

We love, you know, we always, sometimes, you know, behind closed doors are going yeah, tooth for a tooth, eye for an eye. And that's not where the Lord wants us to be. But Ray, in so many ways, that's such a hard battle in this world we live in to be of the spirit and not of our flesh. And somehow God's mission for his people from the beginning was to have them live in such a way, be a light to the Gentiles, be a kingdom of priests, make my name known, to live in such a way that in my life and yours, people catch a glimpse of the incredible mercy and love and compassion of the heavenly father. So I am not called simply to tell people that God is compassionate and loving. I'm called to say, show him an action, the kind of God who when he recognizes sinners, instead of sending them all to hell, comes and hangs on a cross to say, if you believe in me, I'll forgive you. I can't imagine the Lord's emotion seeing one of his created beings living up to that godly, heavenly standard.

And if we go back, whoo, it must just lift his heart and go, she's of me. You know, when Jesus sent out his disciples and they came back and said, Jesus, it's working. It says Jesus was filled with great joy. It's a one place in scripture where it really talks about the tremendous joy Jesus felt. And it was when his disciples were enough like him that God's spirit began to work through them in ways that it had been done by him. You know, Ray, what's so fascinating with this, the way you're describing the Lord is such like a parent. And of course he created this creation so we could feel those elements of him in our own experience here. So being like the really good dad, the loving dad, the loving mother. I mean, that's from his character. And if we can go back to the boat story, then Peter has the courage to say, OK, Jesus, I may drown.

I may sink like a rock, but I'm going to try and be like you in this situation. And he gets out and he does. Not because Peter had big flat feet or something.

Peter walks on water because Jesus empowered him to do it. But then he begins to look around and say, I can't do this. Look at the wind.

Look at those waves. And down he goes. And Jesus says, why do you doubt? And I think for a lot of time, a lot of years of my life, I thought Peter doubted Jesus.

I don't think so. Jesus is still standing there. Jesus hasn't. Peter doubted he could be like Jesus. And I wonder sometimes if part of the reason why I as a Christian, we as a Christian community aren't more like Jesus is because it just doesn't seem to be possible that we could do that in those difficult circumstances of the storms of life.

Yeah. And I stress that with kids, you have to walk, you may walk out of this class and say, you won't be a disciple of Jesus. You cannot walk out of this class and say, I can't be a disciple because Jesus called you.

He empowers you the way he empowered Peter. That's even hard to believe, right? Isn't that cool? It's so cool.

But you know, the last thing that we do as a class, many of my seniors would tell you has as much impact on them and their lives as anything in the whole course. Because if you remember that Jesus fed the 5,000, then he sent them to Bethsaida, which was three and a half miles to the east. They rode all night trying to go east, ended up in the middle of a lake. Jesus walked on water. Peter got out of the whole story.

And then the story ends almost like the writer is trying to be a little bit humorous. And they landed at Gennesaret. Now what people don't recognize, because we don't usually read the Bible with a map next to us, Gennesaret is two miles to the west. They rode all night thinking they were headed in the direction that God wanted them to go. This is where he sent them. And they end up two and a half, two miles in the opposite direction.

And how often does that happen in life? We're so concerned that we need to know where our Gennesurates are. We may never know until we get there. Just row toward Bethsaida. When God calls you to go in a certain direction, go with everything you've got.

He's watching. He'll walk out on water if he needs to. And you may end up at Bethsaida. I went to college to be an attorney.

Isn't that crazy? I used some circumstances, fell in love with understanding the Bible in context, ended up a high school Bible teacher, which was the last thing on my list of things that I wanted to do. That's my Gennesaret. But meanwhile, when you think God is pointing you to Bethsaida, row as hard as you can. Because when he wants you to be somewhere else, you'll get there. And Ray, this is highlighting a very important point, because we have our expectations.

That's what you're describing. I want to do this vocationally. I'd like to live in this city. I'd like to marry this guy.

I'd like to marry this woman. And those things don't come about. You can either trust as a Christian.

Okay, Lord, I'm going to head to a different direction by your hand. And I'm not going to be resentful for these things I didn't get to do. And again, that's a discipline and seeing your circumstances differently. Yeah. Amen.

Yeah. I see these high school seniors and I say to them, it's not easy to know where Bethsaida is. But once you get a sense of where God is leading, go for it.

Hard as you can. It may not be where he wants you to end up, but he'll get you. It may even take a storm. Right. To get you where you're supposed to go. It also, though, raises the question, why they kept rowing all night. Well, because God told us to do it. To go to Bethsaida. And so they were trying to be faithful, and yet they ended up in exactly the opposite direction. And to get there, the life lesson that God gave them, to get where he wanted them eventually, had to be profound. How many times did they tell their story to their children and grandchildren to say, let me tell you about the night.

And it's like, oh, here comes again. Those are some whopper stories. Those are campfires I'd like to hang around. Ray, this is a great taste of what you have done. And I'm so privileged to call you a friend. And I'm so grateful for your discipline to learn what you have learned over your entire lifetime and then apply it so deeply, so genuinely, and so capably. It is an honor to partner with you. And I, you know, I think again, as we ready the church to make it more like him, more like Christ, I don't know of any other teaching in at least my orbit that can get us there than what Ray Vanderlaan has done with the That the World May Know series, with this study, Discipleship series. There is so much great content here. I wish every pastor would digest this and be able to talk about these themes, because I think it makes the faith come alive, which is what you've done for Jean and me. And I'm so grateful. And with that, man, thank you for what you've done in this series, the 40.

And I'm looking forward to getting more into it and seeing all 40 of them and then applying them, which is the thing. That's where the rubber meets the road. Exactly. That yoke is light and easy in the sense that the results are exhilarating. Yeah. But it's not light and easy when doing what it takes to be a disciple of Jesus.

Yeah. And I'll add my thanks, Ray. You really helped transform my thinking about the scripture in so many ways. And we want you as a listener to have that same kind of transformation in your life. So learn more and participate in this four season series called RVL Discipleship, the study.

We have all the details right there in the show notes. Or give us a call if you're having any questions. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family 800-232-6459. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. We can't wait to see you there.