Disciple

Today on Summit Life with Pastor and Theologian J.D.

Greer. What I want to show you is that our use of the term Christian today obscures the fact that a lot of people who call themselves Christians are not actually disciples. You see, disciple, the term is much clearer, terrifyingly clear, in fact, about what you actually become when you choose to believe in Jesus. Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Have you noticed how the term Christian has become almost meaningless in recent years, especially in America? It seems like if you believe in some version of God and you don't really identify with any other big name religion, then you probably consider yourself a Christian. But is that really what it looks like to be a follower of Christ?

Certainly there's way more to it than a self label, right? Well, today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer encourages Christians to reevaluate what we really mean by the term Christian and what it looks like to carry that name personally.

It's part of our teaching series called In Earth As It Is In Heaven and Pastor J.D. titled today's message, Disciple. You got your Bible this weekend?

I hope that you do. If you do so, take it out and open it to Matthew chapter four. As you are turning there, I want to begin today with just a very simple question. The question is this. What comes to your mind when I say the word Christian?

All right. What comes to mind? That's what I mean, we would consider ourselves here, right? We're a bunch of Christians.

People would describe a church. But what comes to your mind when I say the word Christian? I mean, let's play a little word association game.

I'll kind of prime the pump a little bit with you. What's the first thing that pops into your mind when I say Bernie Sanders supporter? What's the image that pops in your, don't answer anything out loud, but what's the first image that pops in your mind? What's the first image that comes in your mind when I say Trump supporter? How about when I say vegan? What's the first image that pops in your mind?

How about Crossfitter? What comes into your mind when I say the word Christian? Bible teacher in Atlanta named Andy Stanley says, if you ask 10 different people, you're probably going to get at least nine different answers, at least here in America. If you stop people on the street and you ask them, are you a Christian? You're going to get some people who say, well, yes.

Some are going to say, what do you mean? Some will say, yes, but, and some will say no, but. Some will say, well, yes, but I'm not like. Some of you would say that at some point you became a Christian, right? If that's how some of you would answer it. It was a point in your life where you prayed a prayer, walked an aisle, got baptized, maybe went to a confirmation class.

Maybe that was your tradition. Others of you would say that you've always been a Christian. Since you were born, you've been a Christian. There are some of you and in fact, maybe some of you listening to me right now that would say, no, I'm definitely not a Christian. And if you were asked to define what comes into your mind when you say Christian, it would be something like a definition that I heard one guy use recently. Christians are judgmental, homophobic, more or less, who think that they are the only ones going to heaven and secretly relish the fact that everybody else is going to hell. Now, please don't say amen to that. But there are some of you that when I ask you what comes in your mind when I say Christian, that is what you think of.

Here is a strange and interesting fact. The very first followers of Jesus did not call themselves Christian. That was not a name they chose for themselves. The term was actually, Christian was actually a derogatory term that was used by people outside of the Jewish community. That's what Acts 11 tells us. Acts 11, 26, in Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians.

It was passive. It was a derogatory term that meant like little Christ. You just want to be little Jesus's walking around. It was a derogatory term. You say, well, if they didn't call themselves Christians, what did they call themselves? Well, you see the answer right there in verse 26, the disciples. They referred to themselves as disciples of Jesus. Consider this. The word Christian is only used three times in the entire Bible.

The word disciple, by contrast, is used 281 times in the New Testament alone. You say, well, so what? Here's what.

Andy Stanley says this, and I agree with him. I want to suggest to you that in changing the primary word that we use to describe ourselves, we lost the clarity that the word disciple conveyed about what a follower of Jesus actually is. Now, in case you're wondering where all this is headed and you're starting to feel yourself tense up a little bit because you're like, OK, he's going to at the end of this message say after 15 years of the Summit Church that we're no longer going to call ourselves Christians. And from now on, I want you to go to work and tell people you're not a Christian, that you're a disciple.

And you're like, I just feel like that's weird and I'm not going to do that. So that's not where this is all headed. But what I want to show you is that our use of the term Christian today obscures the fact that a lot of people who call themselves Christians are not actually disciples. You see, disciple, the term is much clearer, terrifyingly clear, in fact, about what you actually become when you choose to believe in Jesus. So I want to go back and try to get into what a disciple actually was. And in Matthew Chapter 4, we have the calling of the first disciples.

And in that, you'll get a glimpse of what a disciple was and how Christians saw themselves. Okay, Matthew Chapter 4, let's begin in verse 18, while walking by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus saw two brothers, Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen. Verse 19, and he said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Verse 20, immediately, immediate obedience, they left their nets and they followed him. And going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee Dudai and John, his brother, in the boat with Zebedee, their father. Mending their nets and he called them.

Immediately, they left their boat and their father and they followed him. Let me ask a question. I'll be a little transparent with you right at the beginning. When I heard that story as a kid, it never really made sense to me. You know, I learned the story on flannel graph like I learned most of the Bible stories and then the B grade Christian movies that, you know, we used to watch back then. It was basically this image where you've got a bunch of people who are out doing their jobs and suddenly a guy that they've never met shows up in a white bathrobe with a blue Miss America size and his blonde long, you know, Ric Flair blonde hair flapping in the breeze and he flashes him a blue steel look and he says, follow me. And this tractor beam, I guess, comes out of his, you know, eyes and they're like, yes, master, we will follow you. And it just didn't really make much sense. Like why, you know, it was a Jedi mind trick. How did he just convince these guys to come and follow him?

And I just assumed that, you know, he just was his special powers or something. But when you understand the history behind what's happening here, it actually makes a lot more sense. This is one of those moments where being a history nerd actually helps you and doesn't like annoy everybody. I'm going to take just a couple of minutes and try to fill in some of the things happening historically around this that will make that passage of scripture make a lot more sense. All right, here we go. You ready?

You ready for our nerd moment? All Hebrew boys in those days went to what they called Torah school. Torah was just learning the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. You started at age five. It started with a ceremony where they would bring all the five year old boys in and they would take a drop of honey and they would put it on their tongue.

Now, for most of these boys, they were poor. And so it was the first time they'd ever tasted sweetness. And so this sensation of sweetness just flooded into them for the first time. And at the same time, they're reading to them the first chapters of Genesis.

The image is this word is going to be sweet to you. And so for the next five years, they've memorized large sections of the Torah. Well, by age 10, they had kind of a weeding out. And so they only took like the very best students, say the upper 20 percent or so. And then the rest of them who didn't make the cut went back home to their fathers and they would begin to pursue being apprentices in the family business. The boys who remained in a Torah school would study on till about age 17, where they would learn the rest of what we now call the Old Testament, Joshua through Malachi, the only Italian prophet. And so they would learn that for the next seven years.

Well, when they got to 17, there was kind of another cut. And if you wanted to go on with your religious studies after that, then you had to find yourself a rabbi, a rabbi that you admired and applied to become that rabbi's Talmid. Rabbi just means teacher. Talmid means disciple.

It's the Hebrew word for disciple. When you found your rabbi, you would go and sit at their feet. That was your request to learn from that rabbi. And the rabbis would examine you with a series of questions and put you through a series of tests to see if you were worthy to be their disciples. You see, the rabbis were able to be really selective because in those days, becoming a religious ruler was the best of all possible jobs. And so almost every Hebrew boy dreamed of becoming a religious expert one day.

They didn't dream about becoming basketball players or rock stars because they didn't have that back then. They dreamed of becoming religious experts. Therefore, the rabbis could choose only the smartest, most talented boys to be their Talmideen.

That's the plural for disciples, their Talmideen. Another reason the rabbis were so picky is that when they chose a disciple, they were choosing somebody that they believed had the capacity to become just like them, not just to know what they knew and to hear their teaching, but to do what they did. And for several years, these Talmideen would follow around their rabbis, imitating them in every way. They would learn their mannerisms. They would learn how they answered certain questions.

They would learn how to respond in situations. Supposedly, the highest compliment you could play Talmideen in those days was to say to them, the dust of your rabbi is all over you. That wasn't like saying, hey, man, you need a shower. That was saying that whatever your rabbi stepped in sprayed up on you.

That's how closely you followed him. Everything that your rabbi does, you do. You got covered with it.

Now, one more thing here. In Jesus's day, there was a really rare form of rabbi who possessed a characteristic that the Jewish people called, this has got to be my favorite Hebrew word of all time, called shmihah. That's right, shmihah. Shmihah just translates as authority.

But I think it sounds so much cooler in Hebrew, doesn't it? Shmihah. You want to say it?

It's kind of fun. Say it. Shmihah. All right. Shmihah. Shmihah.

All right. Shmihah means authority. Authority. They were very rare, these kinds of rabbis. We only know of a dozen or so that were recognized as shmihah rabbis in the first century. And they all had names that if you know anything about Jewish history, you recognize names like Hillel or Gamaliel. These guys were, first of all, masters of the Torah. They were mystical and they had this like spiritual authority where they could give interpretations of text. They were thought to be so close to God that they could give new, unheard of insights into scripture. You know, for Jewish people, they weren't into like new stuff. Everything that they needed to know, they'd always known, they assumed.

So new stuff is frowned upon. But these rabbis were shmihah. Man, they had the ability to say, you didn't understand this, but I'm going to explain it to you.

A couple other things here. To be regarded as a rabbi with shmihah, there had to be evidence that you had done miracles, credible evidence. Finally, if you were regarded as one with shmihah, it had to be officially conferred upon you by two other rabbis with shmihah.

All that to say, this was a really exclusive club that was pretty hard to get into. Now, back to Matthew chapter four. Here comes Jesus, who knows the Torah so well that we find him at age 12 in the temple, correcting the religious rulers.

All right. He frequently says things when he's teaching like, you have heard it said, but I say to you, there's his new interpretation authority. Throughout the New Testament, we see that his hearers are constantly amazed at his authority. Just a couple of chapters after Matthew four, he says this, Matthew chapter seven, they were amazed because he taught them as one with, in Hebrew, they would have said one with shmihah. They taught him as one with shmihah, not like the other scribes who just repeated what everybody else said. You see throughout Jesus' career, Luke 20, they're saying things like, where did you get your shmihah? Where did you get your shmihah? Who converted upon you?

We need to know. He does miracles. Matthew four, 23, the verse right after the ones that we read, said that right after this passage, he goes throughout the region, healing every disease and sickness among the people.

Oh, and this is probably the best part. Right before this account in Matthew four, Jesus goes out into the wilderness where John the Baptist, John the Baptist, the camel skin wearing locust and honey eating prophet preaching in the wilderness, who was a teacher dripping with shmihah sauce if there ever was one. He tells everybody that's listening, hey, there's somebody in this crowd points to Jesus.

He is so much greater than I am that I'm not even worthy to untie his shoelaces. And then at the same moment, God the Father speaks from heaven and says, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. Now at that point, a little shmihah light on your dashboard is going off. Shmihah, shmihah, shmihah, shmihah. Jesus has got shmihah.

It's very, very obvious to everybody. Thanks for listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. If you'd like to know more about this ministry, visit us online at jdgreer.com. You know what? We appreciate you. We love being a source of encouragement for you each day because we know that there's no greater joy than having a relationship with Jesus. Did you know that these Summit Life broadcasts are only one of the ways that you can keep up with Pastor J.D. 's ministry? There are emails, blog posts, our entire sermon library, and so much more available on our website.

But if you're like me, I spend a good amount of time on my phone. Well, did you know that you can follow Pastor J.D. on social media? Just search for Pastor J.D. Greer on Facebook, at Pastor J.D. Greer on Instagram and at J.D. Greer on X, formerly known as Twitter. Follow along on all of your favorite social media platforms and stay up to date with this ministry while also filling up your timeline with encouragement from God's word. Now, put your phone away for just a few more minutes and let's get back to today's teaching from Pastor J.D.

Greer right here on Summit Life. Now get this, Matthew chapter four, Jesus, this new rabbi, just oozing with Shemihah, chooses Simon Peter and Andrew, who are fishermen. The fact that they were fishermen, what does that show you? They hadn't made the cut. They were part of the B team.

Ladies and gentlemen, before we go on any farther, could you just make sure you stop and get your mind around this? When Jesus assembled his force by his choice to transform the world, he chose the B team. He skipped over all the A players and went straight for the B ones. So the point is, of course they wanted to follow him. Of course they wanted to follow this rabbi with all this Shemihah, chosen them. Guys without much potential or personal power, he chose them to follow him, become like him, to know God like he knew God, to do what he did and be filled with his power. A few things we notice about being a disciple right there from Matthew chapter four, if you're taking notes. Number one, he doesn't choose the best, he chooses the willing.

He doesn't choose the best, he chooses the willing. Another Bible teacher named John MacArthur explains it this way. In choosing his disciples, Jesus skipped all the whys of the day. The great scholars were in Egypt, the great library was in Alexandria, the great philosophers were in Athens, the powerful were in Rome. He passed over Herodotus the historian, and Socrates the great thinker, and Julius Caesar the great ruler. He chose men to be his disciples so ordinary it was comical. Not a single rabbi, no teachers, no religious experts, not even a synagogue ruler.

Half of them were fishermen, one was essentially an IRS agent, and one of them was a former terrorist. He chose the B team because his work in the world would not come from their abilities for him. It would come from what he would do through them. And see people with a lot of talent and ability would only get in the way because they would never really learn to lean into his power. You see Jesus taught that his power in the weakest vessel was infinitely greater than the greatest talent apart from him. I love how Jesus reinforces, brought this home to his disciples just a few chapters after Matthew four, Matthew 11.

Matthew 11 says that Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says, of all those ever born to women, which means everybody, the one that is greatest, the one who is greatest in the world. I've told you this before, according to Jesus, who was the greatest preacher ever to live. John the Baptist, very good guess. John the Baptist was Jesus' favorite all time preacher of all of history. And he said to his disciples, John the Baptist is the greatest preacher hands down ever to live. But I'm gonna tell you the truth, the one who is least in my kingdom is greater than John the Baptist.

I mean, just imagine the impact of that, right? I mean, least in the kingdom of heaven means you know the least about the Bible. It means you have the least talent. It means you are the least eloquent. It means you have the least amount of spiritual gifts. One of you has the least talent, you're the least capable, you're the least eloquent, you know the least about the Bible. Well, right now you're thinking, I think he might be talking about me. And God in heaven is like, yep, it's you. You're at the bottom of the pile. All right, even if that's accurate, you, whoever you are, have more potential for power in ministry than John the Baptist.

Why? Because you got something John didn't have and that is the Holy Spirit inside of you. And Jesus said from that point on, it was no longer gonna be about your abilities for Jesus. It was about your ability to be available to him because he didn't choose you because you could be a great dad. He didn't choose you because you could be a great witness. He didn't choose you because you could be a great preacher. He chose you because he knew that you could be a willing vessel that he could work through. And the Holy Spirit in the mouth of one believer is more powerful than an army of the most eloquent orators in the world.

You understand that? I saw a really good example of this when I was in college. Surely I got after the college I went to. We started a real small little Bible study that was just designed to introduce some of our friends that we were meeting to Jesus. And it kind of puttered along for a few months and there was like 12 of us or something. Well, we decided that we were going to have one night where we invited all of our friends that we could get to come to one kind of place where we would kind of explain the gospel and tell them about Jesus. And so we planned for this thing. We planned for about a month and we passed out flyers. And the day before we were going to do the thing, it was going to be on a Tuesday night, our little core team was meeting at lunch in the dining hall.

And it was one member of our team. Her name was Amy, if I remember correctly. She was one of the shyest girls that I'd ever met.

I think she prayed a lot, you know, which I don't know, whatever. But she she was pretty awesome, but she didn't talk a lot. So she was over here to my left and I'm, you know, I'm talking to somebody over here to my right. And all of a sudden I hear this commotion beside me and I look up and she's standing on top of the dining room table, just looking out over the entire dining hall. And then she stamps her foot and I think she has lost her mind.

I'm looking to see if somebody like poor Jack Daniels into her apple juice or whatever, like what is happening to this girl? So she said she gets the entire place quiet and in a very small kind of as loud as she could project her kind of mousy voice. She says, she says, hey, I know most of you don't know me and you probably think I'm crazy, but I consider all of you my friends. And tomorrow night, some friends of mine and I, we're going to explain what the greatest thing is in our life, how Jesus Christ has changed our lives and we believe he can change yours.

And I really think all of you should come. And then she sat back down and I looked at her. I said, what? It just happened, Amy. I'm not really sure.

Like, and she said, she said, I don't know. I just really feel like the Holy Spirit told me to do that. And listen, I'm not saying when you listen to the Holy Spirit, you hear voices all the time or that you're going to start doing wacky things continually.

But I will tell you, the next night we had 700 people show up. And in large part, it's because of people like her that were listening to the Holy Spirit and doing what he told them to do, because the Holy Spirit in the mouth of one available believer is more powerful than the most eloquent army of believers in the world. You understand that when you face the things that God has told you to face, he didn't choose you because you were awesome. He wanted to make you awesome because he chose you. Your awesomeness was not going to come from your abilities. Your awesomeness was going to come from his power in you. So the question is not how able are you?

The question is how available are you? Have you surrendered yourself to him to say, God, I'm going to stop making excuses and I'm going to quit looking into my family, into my marriage, into my ministry, into my workplace and asking, what can JD do? I'm going to start asking, what can Jesus do? Number one, he chose, didn't choose the best, he chose the will and number two, God chose us, not we him. We see from there that he chose us, not we him.

Like I explained, the normal way all this went down is that if you were in the best of your class, then you applied to a rabbi. And if he liked what he saw, he'd choose you back. Now, what we know is that that became a great source of confidence to these talmadine, because, you know, when, when everything else was going against them, they kind of were like, yeah, but my rabbi, who I respect, he chose me.

He must have seen something in me. Well, Jesus starts the process even farther back. He chose them when they weren't even looking for him. He came seeking them when they didn't really have any idea that they could be his disciple.

Do you understand what kind of confidence that was supposed to give to them? One of the things you notice if you read the New Testament is how many times and how often Jesus and the apostles bring up this concept that he chose us as a means of instilling confidence. You'll see this in the book of Ephesians, how Paul is going to develop this theme that you didn't choose God.

He chose you. And Paul is not just, he's not trying to unravel the mysteries of predestination to you. What he's trying to say to the Ephesians and to you is in the midst of a world where you feel overwhelmed by opposition, you can be confident that if God chose you, God's going to see it through.

And it doesn't matter what the size of the obstacles are in front of you. It matters the size of the God behind you. And that God is greater than those greater is he that is in you. So stop worrying about the obstacles and start focusing on God.

That's the whole point of choosing. Now watch, here's what Jesus, I'll give you his words. Here's what he says to his disciples later.

You didn't choose me, I chose you. And I point to you that you might go and bear fruit. Bear fruit means you're going to win other people to Jesus and your fruit will last.

It's not just going to be a temporary thing. It's going to be permanent fruit, real fruit, eternal fruit. So that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. When Jesus says you didn't choose me, but I chose you.

His main point is not, hey guys, I'm a Calvinist. His main point in saying that is I chose you and what I have planned for you and purpose for you, I'm going to pursue in you and I'm not going to let it drop. And so when you lack confidence in yourself, you should put confidence in my purposes in you because even if you falter, they will never fail. When Jesus chose you, he had a plan. When you fall apart, the plan still remains. Anyone else thankful for that truth today? You're listening to Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Don't forget, Christmas time is coming soon. As if that's possible to forget, right? Well, right now we have a very special featured resource to share with our Summit Life listening family that reminds us. It's a set of 20 exquisitely designed Christmas cards to share with your friends and loved ones. These cards aren't just designed to spread Christmas cheer. Each one has a message about the real meaning of Christmas written on it. Things like Prince of Peace and Wonderful Counselor.

They make the perfect way to let the people in your life know that you are thinking about them this Christmas. We'd love to send you your set of Christmas cards today as our way to say thank you for your gift of $35 or more to this ministry. To give, call us at 866-335-5220.

That's 866-335-5220. Or you can give online anytime at jdgreer.com. While you're on the website, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Get ministry updates, information about new resources, and Pastor J.D. 's latest blog post delivered straight to your inbox. It's a great way to stay connected with Summit Life, and it's completely free to subscribe.

Sign up when you go to jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. So glad to have you with us today. Have a great weekend of worship with your church family, and we'll see you again next time right here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.