So You Want to Be a Disciple - Part 2

Audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. Jesus never said that following him would be easy.

In fact, he promised just the opposite. But the benefits of being a disciple are beyond compare. Today on Turning Point, Dr David Jeremiah takes a closer look at both the requirements and the rewards of discipleship.

As he continues the series, In Search of the Saviour. To introduce the conclusion of his message, so if you want to be a disciple, here's David. Well, you know discipleship is a word that is cast about a lot among Christians.

And yet it seems to have different meanings depending upon who you talk to. A disciple is not necessarily a synonym for a Christian. I know a lot of Christians who don't qualify as disciples. They're Christians. They're in the faith. They know Jesus.

Their sins have been forgiven, but they're not walking closely with the Lord and following him in their walk every day. And so discipleship is something we need to really define and understand. And we're doing that in these two lessons from the book of Mark. I hope you have a copy of the scripture close by and you're ready to follow along with us as we finish up our discussion from Mark chapter 8 verses 31 through chapter 9 verse 1. Well, let's get started with today's study from the book of Mark as we continue In Search of the Savior. Jesus moves from what it means to be a Messiah to what it means to be a follower of the Messiah, verses 34 through 38.

Notice the scripture is broken down this way. Verses 31 to 33 answer the question, what does it mean to be the Messiah? And verses 34 to 38 answer the question, what does it mean to be a follower of the Messiah?

So he lays down these three conditions. He says, you want to be a follower of this Messiah? The first requirement is the requirement of self-denial. He said to them, whoever desires to come after me, let him deny himself. What does it mean to deny yourself? In this world where everybody is in self-promotion, what does it mean to deny oneself? It means to surrender ourselves to Christ and to determine to obey his will no matter what the cost. Jesus says, if you want to be one of my disciples, it can't be about you.

From now on, it's about me. Here's the second requirement, the requirement of suffering. Whoever desires to come after me, let him take up his cross. That's really an interesting thing because in our culture today, what we know about the cross is that it's a piece of jewelry we hang around our neck. But I need to tell you, that wasn't the cross in Jesus' day.

The cross in Jesus' day was the Roman cross. It was the most humiliating experience that an individual could ever go through in the days of Jesus. The cross was dehumanizing. It was deadly.

It was defeating. And if you talked about the cross in his day, you knew it was the form of execution for the poorest of the poor and the most wicked of the wicked. It was saved for special occasions to make a statement.

And it was the most cruel of all of the punishments known to man. Jesus said, you've got to take up your cross and follow me. So often today, we think, we understand what the cross is. For instance, take up your cross.

What does that mean? Well, I've got all these aches and pains. I'm taking up my cross. Take up your cross. Oh, I've been bearing some heavy burdens throughout this life. Take up your cross.

I've been married to this woman for 50 years. That's what some people think it is. They think it's some little issue. Take up your cross is not hanging in there. Taking up your cross is not enduring verbal or physical abuse. Taking up your cross is not putting up with a nutty boss, an unfair teacher, or a bossy mother-in-law. Taking up your cross is not suffering with an incurable disease or a debilitating handicap.

It's none of those things. We use the words kind of in a colloquial way. We use it kind of as a slang. Oh, she's just bearing her cross, they say. But in the Bible, to take up your cross means to suffer particularly because of your relationship with Jesus Christ. To bear your cross is to suffer abuse because you are a Christian. We know very little about that in our culture.

We're learning more about it as the years go by. But go to some of the places where they really have to stand up and be counted for their faith. That's what it means to take up your cross. It means not to try to get out of identifying with the person who's accusing you, but willingly say, yes, he's my Savior. He's my Lord.

I'm one of his. And then when you get the abuse that comes from that, that particularly connected abuse to your connection with Jesus, that's what it means to take up the cross. Because you see, Jesus doesn't offer his disciples of self-fulfillment or intoxicating spiritual experiences or intellectual stimulation, although that may come in the process. He offers us a cross. He doesn't invite us to try the cross on for size to see if we like it.

He doesn't ask volunteers to carry one for extra credit. His demand separates us from deciders or disciples. Disciples have to do more than survey the wondrous cross. They have to do more than glory in the cross of Christ. And they have to do more than love the old rugged cross. They have to become like Jesus in obedience and live fearlessly, not worried about what men may say because of who they are.

Notice the third requirement, the requirement for self-denial, the requirement for suffering, and the requirement of submission. Whoever desires to come after me, let him follow me. In other words, if you're going to be my disciples, you've got to do what I do, and you've got to go where I go and listen to what I say and follow my example. I want you to get in line behind me. Discipleship is not about being in front of somebody. It's about being behind someone.

Follow me. And Jesus tells his disciples to follow the way he has chosen, not the way they want to go. Jesus doesn't want a convoy of followers who just marvel at the good things he does but then don't follow as an example. The procession that Jesus is talking about in these words is a rare sight, disciples following after their master, each of them determining in their own heart how they can best serve the one, and each of them carrying a cross in the procession. So, again, can you imagine these disciples, what they thought they were getting? They thought they were getting this king, and he was going to come and set up his kingdom in Jerusalem, and he was going to rule and reign, and they were going to be with him, and it was going to be all glory. And glory turned to glory. Prominence turned to pain. Success turned to suffering.

Maybe one of them turned to the other and said, what have we gotten ourselves into? And do you know that sometimes I think Christians feel that way? Have you ever heard a preacher preach, if you accept Jesus Christ, all your problems will be solved? And most of us know that when that happens and we accept Jesus Christ, we get a bunch of problems we didn't even have before.

Amen? The Christian life was never meant to be a life of ease and success and wealth and prosperity and all your problems being solved. If you study the New Testament, that doesn't fit anywhere in the definition of a disciple.

I can't find it. But let me tell you, there are rewards for disciples, and that's what Jesus is going to talk about in verse 35. First of all, he tells us there's the reward of a passionate life. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. Now, that's a really interesting statement. When you first read these words, it looks like Jesus is talking about physical death.

In other words, the idea goes something like this. If you give up your physical life, you'll get back a spiritual life. And in giving your physical life up, you'll be blessed because you'll get a spiritual life that will be eternal. And that's all good, and it's all true, but I don't think that's what Jesus is talking about. If we accept this as the ultimate interpretation of Jesus' words, there's nothing that moves us to any kind of action or response. Let's face it, most of us will not be asked to give our physical lives for Christ and the gospel. So we just read right past this and say, well, that's for people in other countries where they're under pressure. That doesn't belong to us.

But it does belong to us. What Jesus meant is something quite different than giving up our physical lives for him. What he meant is that we have a choice to make in how we live our lives now in this present world.

What if he's talking about dying to our own ambitions and our purposes and our plans so that we can live our lives totally for him? G.K. Chesterton writes, he that will lose his life, the same shall save it, is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors and mountaineers.

It might be printed in an alpine guide or a drill book. The paradox is the whole picture of courage, even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. And then he uses these illustrations. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by his enemies, if he's to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward and he will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then there will be a suicide and he will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to what it means. He must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. I don't know if you're catching this, but he is saying that when you follow Jesus without any reservation, you enter into a life that is filled with risk and adventure and surrender and not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow and getting up the next day and saying, Lord, I didn't sign up for this, but here we go. And the passion grows in your heart until you love what you do so much you can't imagine not ever doing it.

And every day is not, oh, I have to go to work today, but every day is not like work because it's who you are and what you do. You're a disciple of the Savior and you're so full of passion. And the Bible says you do this for his sake and for the sake of the gospel. You do it for the sake of Jesus because you love him, but that's abstract. You do it for the sake of the gospel, which is sharing the message of Jesus Christ as widely as you can. That's not abstract.

That's concrete. So a person who's a disciple isn't a poor guy who sits over here waiting for the next shoe to drop and go through some suffering. He's a guy who lives on the hairy edge of life every moment of his day, and he knows that he's walking with an eternal Son of God, and death isn't frightening to him.

He's not wanting to die, but he's not afraid to die, and life is so filled with joy and excitement and adventure and sometimes sorrow and suffering, but all of it in the context of a call from the Son of God. How many of you know it's a lot easier to work for one boss than for many? Looking up every day and realizing, Lord God, you're the one.

You're the only one I report to. Life of a disciple is a passionate life. It's also a productive life. Notice, he says, For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? Did you know that discipleship is a matter of profit and loss?

It's a question of whether we will waste our lives in our present or invest our lives. Remember, Jesus was instructing his disciples. These were men who already knew him. He was not telling them how to be saved and go to heaven primarily. He was telling them how to save their lives and make the most of their opportunities on this earth. And they did, didn't they? After the day of Pentecost, these very men caught fire with this issue, and they went everywhere preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Bible says they turned their world upside down. Do you think that those disciples ever got up in the morning and said, Oh, another day of serving Jesus?

No, sir. They were like many of us who get involved in this whole process. They couldn't go to sleep at night because they were thinking of the next opportunity.

They would get up early because they were so excited about what was going to happen that day, and many times they didn't know what was going to happen that day. But when you walk with Jesus, you walk in a different way. You walk in a world that is filled with opportunities to invest your life. When he says you can lose your soul, he is saying basically you can waste your life.

You can miss your opportunity. God gives you one opportunity, and one of these days you're going to stand before him, and Jesus is saying if you stand before him, and he's talking, I believe, to Christian people here, and you've got all of this stuff that you've accumulated and all these achievements that you've made, and you've won all these awards, and you stand before him someday and say, Lord, look what I've got. But you haven't invested any of your life in the kingdom. You've lost.

You haven't won. And if you walk through life and you don't have a lot of these major things that everybody tells you you have to have in order to really be successful, but you serve the Lord God with all of your heart, and you're totally into what he's asking you to do, and sometimes it's harder than you could imagine. One day you're going to stand before him and hear him say, Well done, my good servant. Enter into the presence of your Lord.

You get to make the choice. You can either waste your life on all the stuff that's going to burn up when this earth goes up in smoke, or you can invest your life in eternal things. And finally, there's the reward of a purposeful life. For whoever is ashamed of me and my words and this adulterous and sinful generation of him, the Son of Man also will be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with his holy angels. Is there any reward for the person who is a true disciple?

Absolutely. He becomes more like Jesus in the here and now. But in the end, the Bible says he shares the glory of Christ. He stands with Christ in that moment of glory as one of his chosen disciples, and the reward is way beyond any of the investment he could ever have made. I must tell you, when I read a passage like this, I want to see if I can call somebody else to come and preach it, because I feel so unworthy to do it. Who of us, if we're honest, would say, I measure up to all those things. I'm a walking, living, breathing disciple.

Of course we don't. I can't say that. But I can tell you, when I read these things and when I study them, I know this is the direction my life needs to be going. Is your life going in that direction? Have you chosen not just to... You know, one of the things we learn as we get older is how quickly life passes by. The clock just seems to go into overdrive and just goes like that. And you look back and that's what happens in life. Life speeds up as you start to get older, and the opportunities that you don't take advantage of in your life don't wait for you.

Some of them you can go back and recover, but many, they come in a moment of time and then they're gone. And you let your life get cluttered up with all the stuff that doesn't matter. That's what I think Jesus is wanting to say to us all today. Not that we have to be perfectionists in terms of all these things. None of us will be.

I don't know anybody truly that is, just maybe a couple of people I've met along the way. But in the process of life, the question we have to ask is this, are we headed there? Is that our goal? Is that our purpose? Do we want to be able to learn how to deny the things that we want so that we can invest our lives in something more important? Are we allowing our lives to be chewed up piece by piece every day while things that will make a difference for eternity are left undone?

We're just so busy with everything. And what does it mean? What does it count? That's what I think he's talking about. That's what challenged me this week. I'm sure you guys all know I love what I do. I don't have to force myself to get up and get to work in the morning.

It doesn't seem like work to me. But there's so much that crowds into your life, even as a pastor, stuff that's so incidental. I mean, I used to be so tied up in how the Chargers do. Now, you say, well, are you bad mouthing sports?

No, you know, I love sports. I'm just saying you've got to keep it in perspective. You've got to keep it in the right order. It cannot become everything because when it becomes everything, what should be everything gets pushed to the side and the things of God, which mean everything.

The souls of lost men and women, the people that come to Christ, the neighbors who need our help, the calling of God upon our lives get pushed into the second place, and that's not a good exchange. I'm glad for passages like this. They're good checkpoints for us along the way, aren't they? Make a stopping. What am I doing with my life? What is there in my life that's really of no value but is just taking up time?

Only one life you have, and it'll be gone. I read a story about a pastor in Texas who on occasion would go to the mission field, and one year he went to Malaysia to visit some friends down there, and he went to a church in Malaysia, which is one of the countries in the world where hostility toward Christianity is its highest. It really costs to be a Christian in Malaysia. And during the service, a young lady was baptized, and she gave testimony of her faith in Christ, and as he was watching the baptism, he noticed that there was some old beat-up luggage leaning against the wall on the inside of the church auditorium, and so he said to the pastor afterward, what is that? He said, well, he said this young lady was told by her father, if you go to that church today and you get baptized, you can't come home, so she brought her luggage with her.

I guess it's a good place for me to say there's a lot of baggage that we carry around that we don't need. We need to be ready to follow the Lord in the simplicity of the Christian life no matter what it costs. Are we willing to do that? You say, well, pastor, you don't have to pay a price in our culture today.

That's true, but I want to tell you something. We're going there. We're going there. We feel it, don't we?

We see it. We see the encroachment into our Christian experience, and we know that we're headed toward a day when if you're not willing to stand up and say, yes, I follow him, you can't be a disciple. As I talk today, I know that some of you are Christians, and once a long time ago, that was the fire in your belly. That's what you wanted to do. You wanted to serve the Lord, but life just sort of got complicated, and you got confused, and all of a sudden you look up and the years have gone, and Jesus has been put on hold, and today as you listen to this message, you realize you've still got some time left, and you want to put him back where he belongs in the center of your life. It's the only way you'll ever find true fulfillment and joy.

The only way you'll ever be passionate and productive and purposeful in this life is to get with it. Here's what I'm asking you to do. Get all in. Are you all in? How much are you holding back?

How much do you have that you haven't put on the table? Oh, Lord, I want to serve you, but you can't have my children, and you... No. To be a disciple is to be all in. All in. Everything. And when you get all in, then the passion and the joy begins to flow in your heart. Amen.

Amen. You know, I recently was teaching here at the Shadow Mountain Church on the life of Elisha toward the very end of his life. He met with the king of Israel, Joash, and he had a prophecy for him. He said, Strike the ground with your arrows. And Joash pulled out three arrows from his quiver and struck the ground with him, and Elisha was furious. He said, Joash, why would you strike the ground only three times? Because in striking the ground, you're fulfilling the prophecy of the defeat of your enemy. If you had struck the ground many times, the enemy would be totally defeated.

You read the rest of the story, and Joash and the Israelites beat the Syrians three times, but were still plagued by them because Joash refused to go all out. Is it not interesting that that often plagues us, too? To be a disciple means you do everything. You leave nothing on the table. You sell yourself out to God. Have you ever thought of that?

Have you ever wondered what that would feel like? To be totally committed to the Lord Jesus Christ, to literally be his disciple? Well, tomorrow we're going to talk about the transfiguration of Jesus, one of the signal events of his life, and I want you to be sure and join me as we look at the ninth chapter of Mark.

We'll see you tomorrow. The message you just heard originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church, where Dr. David Jeremiah serves as senior pastor. Let us know how Turning Point keeps you spiritually strong. Write to us at Turning Point, post office box 3838, San Diego, California 92163. Or visit our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Ask for your copy of O.S. Hawkins' new book, The Bible Code, finding Jesus in every book in the Bible.

It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app for your favorite smart device, or search in your app store for the keywords Turning Point Ministries for instant access to our programs and resources. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hoogfleet. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series in search of the Savior. That's here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah. Thanks for taking time to listen to this audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. To find out more about us, go to vision.org.au