We're all to go and bring people to the knowledge of the Savior and begin the process of nurturing and developing. We're all to pick up those that the Lord brings across our path who need to be discipled.
And there might be all different kinds of relationships involved in it. I've always said that discipling is nothing more than building a true friendship with a spiritual center. Phil Johnson, when you're facing an important career decision, or wondering how to apply biblical principles to your life, or considering how God would have you discipline your child, where do you turn for help? Whom do you rely on for practical wisdom in how to apply Scripture to your everyday life?
And is anyone depending on you for answers? Do you have opportunities to give biblical encouragement to other people? The Lord expects His people to pass along biblical truth to one another, in the family, certainly, and even through other relationships. Simply put, it's called discipleship. Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur looks at the importance of discipleship, in your life and in your church, as John continues his study, The Anatomy of a Church. My life is the church, in many ways.
I don't have a nine to five job. It never ends. You never stop doing what you do when you minister in the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as a believer, you don't either. Life for me is the church of Jesus Christ. Every waking moment of my life, thoughts in my mind have to do with His kingdom and His work and His people and His word.
It's a total saturation. I've been called to unique calling, and I understand that and with gratitude express my appreciation to God. And while there is tremendous joy and great exhilaration and wonderful privilege involved, there's also a serious and weighty responsibility. And I'm often reminded of several heart-searching passages in Scripture, like James 3.1 that says, Stop being so many teachers, for theirs is a greater condemnation. And James is saying to us, Don't be in a hurry to be in a place of spiritual responsibility unless you're ready to deal with the consequence of failure. And I'm reminded also of Hebrews 13, 17 where it says that we watch for men's souls as those who must give an account to the Lord. And there is an accountability factor in ministry. There's an accountability factor in pastoring and shepherding. There's an accountability factor in leading the church of Jesus Christ that's very serious.
And while life on the one hand is filled with joy and happiness and blessedness, there is always that lingering reality of the immense seriousness with which one deals with the church. In 1 Corinthians chapter 4, there is a text that perhaps can give us a perspective with which to begin. Open your Bible, if you will, to that. In 1 Corinthians chapter 4, the Apostle Paul is expressing to the Corinthian believers his own view of his place in the ministry. And he says in verse 1, Let a man sow a count of us. In other words, let it be that men say this about us, or let this be their evaluation of us, that we were servants of Christ. And he uses the word huper etes which means under row or the lowest of slaves. Let it be said of us when all is said and done and we are evaluated that we were low level slaves of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
The mysteries of God are those great truths imparted to Paul in the New Testament. And a steward is one who manages what he does not own for someone else. And so he says, Let it be said of me that I was a low level slave of Christ on the lowest rung of slavery and that I was a steward who owned nothing but managed things well, namely the mysteries of God. Moreover, verse 2 says, it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful, faithful, trustworthy. Paul says, This is what I want out of my life, to be a faithful slave, to handle what God gives me and have Him say He's trustworthy.
He's faithful to the cause and the call. And he says in verse 3, With me it's really a very small thing that I should be judged by you or of men's judgment. Yea, I judge not mine own self.
He says, And by the way, in the process of doing this, I'm not looking for some human evaluation. It matters very little to me what public opinion is about me. It matters very little to me what your opinion is.
It really matters very little to me what my opinion is. The truth is you don't know my heart and I really don't know my heart either because in my sinfulness I'm blind to some of my own weaknesses. So ultimately, not you and not me can stand in the place of true judgment. Verse 4 says, Even when I know nothing against myself, in other words, I can't find some overt, flagrant, exterior sin that I can nail down. Even when I can't find that, I'm not thereby justified. That doesn't make me right. But he that judges me is the Lord.
Serious, isn't it? He says, I'm in the ministry. And let it be said that I was a slave of Christ and a steward of the mysteries of God. And that I am not concerned with the judgment of men, nor am I concerned with my own self-evaluation.
Because men don't know all the facts and they may be biased and I am biased and don't know all the facts. The one that judges me is the Lord. And everyone who serves Christ will be judged by him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive the things done in the body whether they be good or useless. All of us. So in verse 5 he says, Judge nothing before the time.
And when is the time? It's the time when the Lord comes. And when he comes, he will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and make manifest the counsels of the hearts. In other words, the real issue is what's inside you. It may not be how clever you were or how glib or how good a preacher or how dynamic a leader, but what God's going to evaluate is your heart.
And men can't see your heart and you're not even always able to see the truth. It's only then that every man will have praise of God. So I confess to you that the church carries with it a great amount of seriousness for me. I am under double condemnation for failure and so are all those who minister and teach the Word. I must give an account to God for how I have shepherded the sheep and fed the flock and ultimately will be judged by the Lord himself. And I want not to live under some illusion that I can be satisfied by the very gracious and kind evaluation of men, nor by the tendency to evaluate myself in a positive way. So I'm sharing with you my heart because these are burdens which I bear and which all who serve Christ bear.
And I just need all of you to bear it with me, to share the load. And so we've been talking about the things that God would have us be as a church. And so important that we understand that this is not an optional thing. And as we have been looking at the church and what the church should be, we've been using the analogy which is a Pauline analogy of a body. And we've been trying to see the church as a body, though using a Pauline analogy, we've been looking at it in a non-Pauline way, kind of a topical look. And we said that a body could basically be divided into four elements, the skeleton, the internal systems, the muscles, and the flesh.
And so with the church. First of all, there has to be a skeleton, that is that which gives it form and foundation. Those are the bottom line, non-negotiable, basic foundational truths upon which it must be formed and framed. And then we said, flowing through the church there must be certain internal systems, we call them spiritual attitudes. And then last time we began to talk about the muscles, and the muscles represent function. Now that we understand our form and have our foundation, and flowing through are the right spiritual attitudes, what are we supposed to do?
And muscle is how we begin to function. The function of the church, how it moves, and ministers, and operates. First of all, one of the functions, a critical one, is preaching and teaching. Preaching and teaching. In 2 Timothy 4-2, Paul instructed Timothy, preach the Word.
And he also said in that same verse, There must be instant in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with all longsuffering and teaching. So preaching, teaching, basic function for the church. We also talked about evangelism and missions. That we are mandated to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. That we are called as those who know the terror of the Lord to persuade men.
In other words, because we can see the impending doom on the ungodly, we are mandated to go out and warn them. And so we're called to missions and evangelism as function. Thirdly, we talked about worship, both individually and corporately. We are to be a worshiping group. We are to worship in the heart, as Philippians 3-3, which is the best definition of a Christian I know in the Bible.
We are the circumcision who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. We are to be the true worshipers, John 4, who worship in spirit and truth. So individually we are called to be worshipers, and also collectively we are the temple of the Spirit of God, and God dwells within the praises of his redeemed people. And so we worship not only individually, but collectively.
And Hebrews 10 tells us to draw near unto God with pure heart. And then fourthly, we said that our function also demands prayer. We are to be functioning in prayer. That is a priority, beloved. And in the early church, the apostles said, look, we will give ourselves continually to prayer. That's first in the ministry of the Word. The priority is prayer.
Why? Because we must ever and always be fused with God. I mean, the plug is pulled if we're not. And the flesh can do no good thing. That's why, first of all, says Paul to Timothy in setting the church in order, 1 Timothy 2. First of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, giving of thanks. All men everywhere lift up holy hands in prayer. First of all, we're called to pray. Now, I want to talk about some other functions today, and I'm going to go through them rather rapidly. We could spend a lot more time, but I've taught them over and over.
I'm just going to touch them. The next one is discipling. This is a function of the church. In Matthew 28, 19 and 20, our Lord said, going into all the world, make disciples. Make disciples.
The word mathetuo is the word disciple or learner. Make learners. Make disciples. Baptizing them. That's how you get them started. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you. That's how you keep them going. Discipling, then, is bringing people to Christ and leading them in Christ to maturity.
That's the discipling process. I love what it says in the book of Matthew when it says that Jesus discipled Joseph of Arimathea. The text actually says, And Joseph of Arimathea, who was discipled by Jesus. What a wonderful thought.
We're all in that process. In Acts 1, 1, Luke writes, The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, referring to the Gospel of Luke. The former writing, he says, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and teach.
Isn't that a wonderful thing? He says, My other letter was all about Jesus began. And this one, the book of Acts, is all about the carrying on of that work. Jesus discipled 12, and now in the book of Acts we find what the 12 did with their generation. And the book of Acts is a flowing through from what Jesus began. And here you and I are 2,000 years later, and we're still working on what Jesus began. Somebody gave the baton to the apostles.
They gave it to somebody else, and somebody else, and somebody else, and somebody gave it to us. And we're in the same succession of having heard these things to be committed, 2 Timothy 2, 2, to passing them on to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. You see, every Christian's in a relay race. He takes the baton, he hands the baton. And none of us is in a solo effort.
I mean, we're all in flow. And somebody invested in us, and we need to invest it in somebody else. Which is to say to a believer, you ought to be being discipled and be discipling. You say, I don't know much. Find somebody who knows less than you do and tell them what you know. Find somebody who knows more than you do and listen to them. Plug in someplace.
Plug in, be taught, and teach. I mean, I pour my heart into some people in the discipling process, and I'm pulling it from somewhere else. All of us got to be in the flow somewhere. We're not isolated people out there. We're in the flow.
We're a chain all linked and hooked together. Back to 1 Corinthians 4, where I was a moment ago. I think you have a wonderful indirect insight into the discipling process here. Paul is writing a letter that's basically a rebuke to the Corinthian church, which he himself brought into existence by the grace of God and the power of the Spirit. And they have departed in many ways from the primitive things that should have been basic to their faith, and they've launched off into all kinds of sinful things. So Paul writes to correct them, and he begins in verse 14 with a good insight into helping us understand the relationship of a discipler to his disciple. In verse 14 he says, I write not these things to shame you, but as my beloved sons I warn you, for though you have ten thousand pied-a-gagas, which means moral guardians or people giving you spiritual advice in Christ, yet you have not many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. Now he throws this in because by now they're saying to themselves, after four and a half chapters of rebuke, who does this guy think he is? What gives him the right to talk to us like this? He stops and says, here's why. First of all, I'm your spiritual father. That is, I brought you into existence.
And that's the first thing about discipling. People say, well, your church is into discipleship. What's your view of evangelism? You can't do discipleship unless you do evangelism. Who are you going to disciple? You have to beget before you can build up, right?
You have to have a baby before one can grow. Of course we're committed to that. And the best place for discipleship to begin is to lead someone to Jesus Christ. And there will be a link there that doesn't exist when you weren't that key person. Oh, it can be pretty strong with others, but there's something marvelous about that link of regeneration. When God uses you to bring someone to Christ, there is an indebtedness and a sense of responsibility and a sense of love to you from them that ties you together and enables you to say things to them that you might feel a little hesitant to say to somebody else. But when they know that you are God's agent to bring them to Christ, there's something wonderful there that links you together. And so discipleship begins with evangelism.
Now, all of us have picked up somebody else's child kicking and screaming somewhere that nobody is willing to disciple. And we've taken them on. And that's wonderful. That's wonderful. And we need to keep doing it.
Keep doing it. But the link between two people, one of whom led the other to Christ, is marvelous. It all begins in evangelism.
And then discipling moves. Look at verse 14. He says, My beloved sons, the attitude in which discipleship occurs is an attitude of love.
And love, as I've said, is not an emotion. It's a commitment of self-sacrificing, humble service to one in need. And so you have an environment of love which says, I'll give my life for you. I'll give my time for you. I'll give my prayers for you. I'll give my insights for you.
I give you myself. That's an element. You can't... You see, if you don't care about a person and if you're not willing to sacrifice, you never really have the discipling process working in its richest potential. And then thirdly, in verse 14, he says, I warn you. And that's the word nuthateo, which means to admonish or to warn people with a view to judgment if they don't change their behavior. It's corrective. And that's the third thing about discipling. It first of all begins with salvation.
It exists in an era of... an aura, really, of love. And it is marked by warning. It's just like a child. You have to warn your children what to stay away from. You can't just give positive instruction to your kids. You have to give negative instruction, too.
That's why Paul said to the Ephesian elders in that same passage in Acts 20 at Miletus, I have not ceased for the space of three years, night and day, with tears, to warn you. To warn you, to warn you, to warn you. I was asked a week ago, how important to you is a ministry of warning?
It's essential. And in discipling, we've got to say to folks, you can't keep doing that. You've got to stop that.
You've got to put the fences up and the barriers up. And that's part of discipling. And then the key, I guess, to all of it is in verse 60. Wherefore, I beseech you, be ye followers of me. You need to say to that disciple, look, you've got to be like me. You say, whoa. That's where I bail out, folks. You've got to be like me.
That's right. In other words, you've got to be further along the path than they are in your spiritual development. You've got to be able to give some leadership. The Lord isn't asking for perfection. It's direction He's after. It isn't that you have reached perfection. It's just that you're in the right direction.
And that other one will follow along. And your imperfection may only reinforce how important it is to follow. If you were perfect, I don't know about you, but I'd bail out. I wouldn't try to follow a perfect person.
That'd be very difficult. It's the imperfection of the person that I follow that helps me understand the path. And so there needs to be example.
That's the whole point. Paul said, be followers of me as I am of whom? Christ. So you need to be able to say to someone, I want you to follow me the way I'm following Christ. And you don't say it proudly. You say it what? Humbly.
Understanding your own weakness. And there's another element in discipleship. In verse 17, he says you're going to send Timothy. And what will Timothy do? He'll bring you into remembrance of my ways, which are in Christ, as I teach everywhere. And Timothy was going to come and teach, and that's another ingredient.
There's got to be an imparting of divine truth because people function off of truth. So discipling means bringing someone to Christ, building a relationship of sacrificial love with that person, admonishing that person to change their behavior if it's going to come to the point of chastening or forfeiture of blessing, setting a model or a pattern that they can follow and inputting them with the truth of God. And that's what Paul says I'm trying to do with you people, and that's why I talk the way I talk. In fact, he says if you don't shape up when I come to you, I'm going to bring a rod with me in verse 21 and let you have it. Now, he says if you shape up, I'll come in a spirit of love and meekness. So he really was raising spiritual children, wasn't he?
Beloved, this is what we're committed to. This has always been the heart of our church. Jesus said, and when a man is fully discipled, he'll be like his teacher. Isn't that good?
When a man is fully discipled, it says in the Gospel of Luke, he'll be like his teacher. We're trying to reproduce ourselves, reproduce ourselves. See, one of the characteristics of life is that it reproduces. Life that doesn't reproduce isn't life, it's death. Life reproduces. And you're pouring yourself into somebody else, maybe a partner in marriage, maybe children, maybe a dear friend, maybe the person you led to Jesus Christ, maybe a bunch of little kids you have in a group, maybe an FOF class of brand-new baby Christians, maybe a friend at work, who knows?
But you're pouring your life in, see? And building to that kind of thing is accountability, right? Because if you've got somebody looking at you and saying, show me how, show me how, teach me how, teach me how, you've got to get your act together. And the accountability is so good. And the ultimate end, of course, is in 1 John 2, 6, if we say we belong to Christ, if we say we're in Him, we ought to walk the way He walked, right? So our model is Christ, and we're trying to nurture people along in the walk with Christ. And our church is committed to this. We've always been committed to this.
We've always desired to do this. And this is a function that we must be about, every one of us. Now, it isn't optional.
It isn't optional. We're all to go and bring people to the knowledge of the Savior and begin the process of nurturing and developing. We're all to pick up those that the Lord brings across our path who need to be discipled. And there might be all different kinds of relationships involved in it. I've always said that discipling is nothing more than building a true friendship with a spiritual sinner.
That's what it is. So that you're not friends because you both like baseball, or you're not friends because you both happen to like the same music, or you both work the same place, or you have certain likes and dislikes, or you have the same hobby, or you both knew somebody from Indiana. You're not friends because of some kind of superficial thing. You're friends and it's very deep and it's very profound because at the core of that friendship is an openness about spiritual issues. And that's what carries discipleship along. You see, what you're basically doing is teaching people a godly lifestyle. You're teaching them biblical responses. And I've always said spiritual maturity is when your involuntary responses are godly, when your involuntary reactions are virtuous, then you know the Spirit of God has control. And we're trying to bring people to the point where they don't have to think to act right, they react right.
That's the process. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. He's showing you what discipleship should look like in the church and in your life. His lesson today is part of his current study, The Anatomy of a Church. John, in today's lesson, you define discipleship as bringing people to Christ and leading them to spiritual maturity.
So for the listener who's wondering, what does that look like practically, how do you answer that? You know, I think it's a simple definition of that given by the Apostle Paul who said this, be followers of me as I am of Christ. So you look at Christ and you look at his life, the virtue of his life, the holiness of his life, his complete devotion to God, to honoring God, his complete application in every situation of the truth of God. And following Christ is that. It is following him in his love for God, his love for the truth, the Scripture, his love for the world, his love for the church.
And Paul says, those are my loves. Obviously Paul wasn't Christ and he couldn't come close to the perfection of Christ, but Christ was his pattern. And discipleship for Paul was to be as much like Christ as he could be. And that's what the New Testament describes as discipleship, being conformed to the image of Christ. That's the church, the elders of the church, the pastors, teachers, are conforming us to the image of Christ by means of the Word of God. So what it means is Christlikeness and a pattern to follow.
There are some fundamentals of that process. And we have a wonderful book called The Fundamentals of the Faith. By the way, this has been translated into multiple languages all over the world, The Fundamentals of the Faith. There are lessons on how to know the Bible, how to know God, his character, his attributes, the person of Christ, the person of the Holy Spirit, many other things. Thirteen lessons, and even a booklet can be used in classrooms. There's also a version for the teacher, a great resource if you're discipling young believers. I think everyone should go through Fundamentals of the Faith. The title again, Fundamentals of the Faith.
That's it. The Foundation can order the regular edition or teacher's guide when you contact us today. Thanks, John. And, friend, whether you're a young Christian yourself or looking for tools to disciple a new believer, Fundamentals of the Faith is an ideal resource. You can order a copy of the book and order a copy of the teacher's edition when you contact us today. Call 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org. Fundamentals of the Faith is available for $10. The teacher's guide costs $20. And for each book, shipping is free. Again, to order, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org.
That's our website, gty.org. And when you visit there, take advantage of the multiple ways to listen to John's verse-by-verse teaching. You can download more than 3,600 sermons free of charge in both audio and transcript format. If you're not sure where to start, log on to GraceStream. That's a continual broadcast of John's teaching beginning in Matthew chapter 1 and taking you through Revelation chapter 22. Then it starts all over again. So whether you have a few minutes or a few hours, log on to GraceStream and start learning.
It's available for free at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Watch Grace to You Television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378 and be here tomorrow to consider this question. How do you protect your family in a culture that seems to promote anything but biblical values? Learn some helpful strategies when John returns with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
