Paul’s Path to Discipling Others

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A lot of you have probably heard the term worldview before. For some of you, it may be a new term. And if it is, it’s a fairly simple concept.

It’s just the lens that you view the world through. It’s the framework that you see everything around you in. And so when we talk about somebody having a biblical worldview, we mean that somebody sees the world the way the Bible portrays it.

It’s as simple as that. and that that’s our goal as followers of Jesus Christ is to see the world the way he tells us it is to operate within the world the way he tells us to operate even though we know we’re going to fall short of that we all do that that’s still the goal we we shoot for there are various ministries that do research on on people people’s worldview one of them is Lifeway that makes some of our Sunday school literature. Another one is Ligonier Ministries, if y’all are familiar with R.

C. Sproul. Another one is Arizona Christian University.

And they’ll come out periodically with research on worldview. Again, this idea of somebody looking at the world the way the Bible portrays it. And they’ll ask questions that indicate where somebody’s worldview is.

For one thing, do you believe there’s such a thing as absolute objective truth, yes or no? Well, the Bible indicates that there is. Otherwise, what are we doing here if we just get to make it all up as we go along?

Questions like, do you believe that God created the world? Do you believe that God exists and is a creator? If you say no, that’s not a biblical worldview.

And they’ll ask various questions, usually going in depth into what somebody believes. The most recent numbers I saw said that 6% of people in America have a biblical worldview. according to these studies.

Now that’s pretty concerning, but when you throw in that those same surveys say that more than 60% of Americans claim to be Christians, there’s a disconnect somewhere. And we could say, well, there’s a lot of people who say they’re Christians and they’re not involved, they don’t go to church, they don’t really do anything with it. There are places in this country, including Oklahoma, where over 40% go to church or say they go to church on a semi-regular basis.

And yet we’re at a place where 6% of the people have a biblical worldview. I don’t know if those numbers translate to here or not. I suspect ours are probably a little higher.

By the way, they surveyed pastors and said that just about 51, 53%, I can’t remember the exact number, somewhere way too low, of pastors had a biblical worldview. Now, Southern Baptists were the highest at 71%. We could pat ourselves on the back about that, but that’s still way too low.

Thinking, where are these other 29 guys at? What are they preaching? But something’s wrong.

And we could look at that and we could shake our fist at the world outside and say, shame on them, they just don’t get it. But when that many people profess to follow Jesus Christ and that many people are somewhat involved in a church, and only 6% of the people in the nation have a biblical worldview, that suggests to me that something has gone wrong in our discipleship. Something has gone wrong in our training of the next generation of believers.

And when I say next generation, that includes our young people, but it really includes anybody that’s new in Christ. You can be in your 60s or 70s and be a new believer. You can be in your 60s and 70s and be an immature believer. But something has gone wrong in our discipleship.

If the goal of discipleship, first of all, if the goal of the church is to make and strengthen disciples, and we’ve been talking about that with the Great Commission on Wednesdays, if that’s our goal, and a disciple is somebody who follows Jesus, it suggests to me that somewhere we’ve made a disconnect, somewhere we’ve disconnected in our efforts to try to teach people to think and act like Jesus. It’s, discipleship is not about teaching people the rules, and hey, you just agree to this set of beliefs, and you can do whatever else as long as you agree to the right things. That’s not what it is.

It’s about teaching people to think and act like Jesus, to the extent that we can, as fallen human beings. And I think part of that may be because some of us just don’t know how. Maybe because we were never discipled, and we just kind of had to figure it out on our own.

I think I was discipled completely by accident from a human standpoint. Now, I’m thankful that I have godly parents who raised me in church and taught me right and wrong. As far as the church doing anything to disciple me, it was almost entirely by accident.

Because I sensed God calling me to ministry, and I would not leave the pastoral staff alone until they let me as a teenager follow them around and learn what they did. And they discipled me well, but it was by accident. I think many times we don’t know how to disciple people, because we’ve not been discipled, because we’ve not been taught how to do that.

And as we’re studying through the book of 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses that. It was really timely to our discussions about making disciples when I realized that’s what he’s doing here. If you’re a guest with us today, if this is your first time, we’re glad you’re here.

We are studying through the book of 1 Corinthians. So I’m not addressing this because it’s a particular problem in our church that I think people need to be called out on, although we probably all do need some encouragement on it. We’re just simply going through the book piece by piece, and this is where we are.

And wouldn’t you know it, God works it out to where we see things that are answers to what we’re dealing with as a church, as a Christian community in this society. And so we’re in 1 Corinthians chapter 4 this morning. We’re going to be at the end of 1 Corinthians chapter 4.

And Paul lays out some of the path that he has taken to disciple people. And we would do well to learn from it as we try to disciple others. I think we get, as we’ve studied the Great Commission, by the way, if you turn there with me to 1 Corinthians 4, if I didn’t already ask you to do that, as we’ve been talking about the Great Commission, I think we’ve got the idea that we understand we’re supposed to make disciples.

But we may be sitting there saying, how? Where do I get started? Or that sounds hard.

So we’re going to let Paul walk us through it this morning. 1 Corinthians 4, once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find 1 Corinthians, it’ll be on the screen for you.

But we’re going to read verses 14 through 21 this morning. Here’s what Paul says to the church at Corinth. He says, I do not write these things to shame you, but to admonish you as my beloved children.

If you remember back to what we talked about last week, he was talking about their pride, their self-absorption, the fact that they bragged about how mature they were spiritually when the marks of true maturity were absent from them. And he says, look at us as apostles. And you would think from the world’s perspective, you could teach us something.

But the opposite was the case. He was showing how foolish that pride was. And then he says here in verse 14, I do not write these things to shame you, but to admonish you as my beloved children.

I’m not here to put you down about these things. I want to help you do better. Verse 15 says, for if you were to have countless tutors in Christ, yet you would not have many fathers.

For in Christ Jesus, I became your father through the gospel. Therefore, I exhort you, Be imitators of me. For this reason I have sent to you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, and he will remind you of my ways which are in Christ, just as I teach everywhere in every church.

Now some have become arrogant as though I were not coming to you, but I will come to you soon if the Lord wills, and I shall find out not the words of those who are arrogant, but their power. For the kingdom of God does not consist in words, but in power. What do you desire?

Shall I come to you with a rod or with love and a spirit of gentleness? And you may be seated. Just for the sake of transparency, I struggled with this passage this week.

I struggled harder to try to make heads or tails of what he was talking about and how it applies to us. I probably struggled harder than I have anywhere else in 1 Corinthians, or honestly with a lot of passages. Because I keep reading this and I think I see what he’s talking about.

I understand the context. What does this have to do with us? Because this is not a situation that we’re dealing with.

How do I make it apply here? And I’m looking at it from the standpoint of what he’s telling the Corinthians to do and saying, how do we take his advice to them? And how do we do something with it?

And finally, Friday, I’m praying and I’m about to beat my head against the wall. I’d get cranky, by the way, if I’m not done with my sermon by about Tuesday or Wednesday. And here we are Friday afternoon.

I still have very little on paper. And I’m struggling with this. And finally, it occurred to me, look at it from the standpoint of Paul as the example.

Not his advice to the Corinthians, although we could easily apply that in situations where we’re dealing with the same things. But we could look at it from the standpoint of Paul as the example to the Corinthians as he’s trying to disciple them and learn from what he did and learn from his approach, maybe more than the advice that he gave. And that’s where I’m coming from in this morning, seeing what Paul did in order to disciple these people.

He also, we need to be clear on what he’s doing here. Because Paul has been accused of being arrogant for what he’s written here. Paul’s been accused of being harsh or self-centered.

And that’s really not the case. Some people get hung up on the concept where he says, be imitators of me. And that might strike you a little wrong if somebody, if some preacher, some Bible teacher said, why don’t you just try harder to be like me?

Right? If I stood up here and said, y’all be more like me, that would probably leave a bad taste in your mouth. And rightly so, I know it would, I know it would bother me if I was sitting there listening to it.

Because Paul is not the ultimate example. But as we’ve read all through 1 Corinthians, Paul has already made the case, he’s been very vocal about the fact that he’s not trying to build a following. He’s not trying to make other people follow him.

He’s not trying to make people be like him. He’s trying to be obedient to Jesus. He’s trying to point others to Jesus.

And so when he comes and says, imitate me, he’s not saying, I’m so great. Why can’t you just be more like me? He’s telling them, do these things that I’ve shown you.

He’s saying, I’ve tried my best to live out an example here for you. And these are the things you need to do. And that hits a little differently.

We can pick out of context, be imitators of me and it sounds arrogant. But when we read it together with everything he’s told him up to this point about not trying to follow Paul, but be like Jesus, here we realize he’s just saying, I’ve given you an example of how this works, of how a fallen, sinful person can still try to live up to the example of Jesus. Then there’s the bit at the end about the rod.

And it sounds like he’s threatening to whoop them, right? Sounds like when I ask my children, do I need to pull the car over? We know that that’s not going to be a happy experience.

And none of them are in here today. Okay, I think they’re all in nursery today. The secret is I don’t want to pull the car over.

I will if necessary. But I’d much rather, my parenting approach is I would much rather come to you and talk to you in a gentle, reasonable way and try to engage the heart. But if that’s not going to work, we can go up on the consequences from there.

And that’s Paul’s approach. He’s not threatening them. He’s not saying I’m going to come with a rod and whoop you.

Also, shepherds, by the way, had rods. I’ve never seen a shepherd go out there and just whack the sheep like he’s playing golf with the rod. It’s more of a gentle prodding with the rod.

In the same way when I’m trying to shoo the chickens around. I would never walk up and just kick a chicken, right? They don’t like that.

But I might shoo them with my foot. And so I might say, do I need to come with my shoe? Do I need to come with my foot?

Well, we could read that as he’s going to kick the chickens. It’s a gentle prodding. And I think that’s what Paul’s talking about.

Do you want me to come when I come and deal with your hearts because you’re sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit? Because you’re trying to do the right thing? Because you’re trying to deal with these issues that I’ve talked about?

Or do we need to get a little sterner? But he’s not skipping right immediately to act right or I’m going to whoop you when I pull Corinth over. So let’s look at some of the steps that he took in trying to disciple these people at Corinth.

These are not, this is not everything that’s involved in discipleship. This is just what we can pull out of this passage in his relationship to them, some of the things that he had done. And if we’re going to disciple people, we have to first recognize that it’s our responsibility.

You have to recognize that it’s your responsibility. In verses 14 and 15, he says, I don’t write these things to shame you, but to admonish you. Paul is stepping out and taking the responsibility for admonishing them, trying to correct them as beloved children.

For if you were to have countless tutors in Christ, yet you would not have many fathers. Paul sees himself as the spiritual father of the people at Corinth. And that too, people have been bothered by that.

That doesn’t mean he’s claiming special authority over the people at Corinth. It means he has a special interest in their spiritual growth. He felt a special sense of responsibility toward them.

The same way we do with our children. As a father, I feel an incredible sense of responsibility for the growth, for the emotional, for the intellectual, for the spiritual growth of those children. Now, I’m not being made to do that by law.

Lots of people don’t get involved in their children’s education. They don’t get involved in their spiritual development. They turn them over to the world and they’re never arrested for it.

So I’m not doing this because it’s the law. I’m doing this because as a father, I feel that sense of responsibility. I feel that tug to make sure I know that they, any one of them could, they have their own free will, they could make their own decisions, they could go a different way, but I want to give them every opportunity that I can possibly give them to know and live the truth.

And he felt this same sense of responsibility. Now in his case, it’s because the people at Corinth were people that he led to Jesus Christ. It’s because he was the one that first shared the gospel with them and saw them respond in faith. And so if we lead people to Jesus Christ, we need to understand we have a responsibility to disciple them.

We have a responsibility to follow up. I’ve seen churches go really hard on evangelism, and that’s a good thing. But you go out and knock hundreds of doors, and sometimes you’re going to have people pray a prayer just to get you off the porch.

Sometimes it’s going to be sincere, and they’re going to come to faith in Jesus Christ, but oftentimes those people aren’t followed up with. And even those that made a sincere profession of faith, even those who sincerely trusted Jesus Christ, nothing ever changes because nobody comes alongside them and teaches them how to grow in the faith, teaches them what it means then to go the next step and follow Him. And we have to recognize that it’s our responsibility.

So if you have the privilege, and we’ve been talking about how to share our faith, if you have the privilege of leading somebody to Jesus Christ, Take the responsibility. Don’t just abandon the baby on the doorstep. Take the responsibility of the next step of care for them.

And if that doesn’t work out, that you’re able to disciple that person in an ongoing way, find somebody else who can. But we have to take some responsibility. At the same time, this doesn’t exclude people that we didn’t lead to Christ. If a new Christian wanders into our church and we weren’t the ones that led them to Christ, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility for them.

Because Paul took a very similar interest in people from other churches that he was not the one who started the church. He was not the one who led those people to Christ. Part of the intensity of his concern for the Corinthians was because he had been there from day one. He had seen the babies born, spiritually speaking.

But Paul exhibited a very similar concern for people in other churches. And it may be that our churches fail to disciple people we all look around and say, well, somebody else will do it. If you’ve noticed that somebody needs to be discipled and you’re able to do it, you may be the one that God’s called.

So we have to look around and take responsibility for discipling others, even if they’re not new Christians in the sense that it’s been a month or two since they came to Christ. Somebody can have made a profession of faith 20 years ago and haven’t grown past that. They’re still a baby Christian, and we have the opportunity to disciple them if we’ll just take responsibility for it. Then we see the second thing here in verse 15.

Bring them to Jesus Christ. That’s what he did. He says, for in Christ Jesus, I became your spiritual father through the gospel. Again, he’s not describing authority over them.

He’s describing his concern for them. And it grew out of the fact that he did lead them to Christ. And conversion all throughout the New Testament is described as a new birth. It’s the birth of a new person, a new person in Christ. And when we are babies, we can’t do anything for ourselves.

I have forgotten this with each child. You know, we get one a little bit raised, a little bit self-sufficient, and think, oh, let’s have another one. And then they come and I think, I forgot how helpless these things are, right?

They can’t do anything for themselves. They need care. They need feeding.

They need tending. We as believers are the same way. The things that the Bible teaches us to believe are not things that the natural world believes.

They’re not truths that we stumble into naturally. They’re things that we have to be taught as a believer. I didn’t come to faith in Jesus Christ and suddenly know all the things that I know now 30 plus years later.

And I don’t know all the things now that I’ll, God willing, know 30 years from now. It’s a process of learning. But at some point, somebody brought us to Jesus Christ. It might have been a situation like where I knelt my head and prayed to ask Jesus to forgive me and save me at the kitchen table with my mother.

For some people, it might be that they were sitting in a church service or a revival meeting. Somebody might have been watching a presentation of the gospel on television. Somebody might have been at a Billy Graham crusade.

Somebody might have gotten a gospel track. There was nobody there with them, but they picked up a gospel track that was left on the street. Somebody might have just opened a Gideon Bible.

But whether somebody was physically there or not, somebody brought all of us to Jesus Christ. Somebody planted the seed. Somebody is responsible for being used by God to bring you into a relationship with Jesus Christ. And if we’re going to disciple somebody, it’s about bringing them to Jesus Christ. It’s about bringing them to faith in Jesus Christ if they don’t believe yet. If they’re a new Christian, it’s about bringing them closer to Jesus Christ. We’re not discipling them to make them more like us.

We’re not discipling people so they look and dress and act and sound and smell like us. Discipling them is about helping them become more like Jesus Christ. And he said, I became your father through the gospel. He was there at the beginning of that new life in Christ. Part of discipleship too is that we need to provide them a proper example.

This is where he says in verse 16, Therefore I exhort you, be imitators of me. He’s not saying be like Paul. He’s saying do the things that Paul does when I’m trying to be like Jesus Christ. It’s not an ego trip.

He’s not saying how wonderful he is. He’s calling them to follow this example that he set as he follows Jesus Christ. And he’s talking about doing this in the way that a child typically imitates an earthly father. I frequently hear this child is just like their daddy.

And I always have to stop and ask, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Depends, you know, because I don’t always hear the context. They all are like me in some way.

For better or for worse, they are all like me in some way. They all share some similarities. There are things that, there are things in the last week I’ve heard a child say that sound just like something I would say but didn’t.

Whether it’s Charlie yelling at other cars, I’ll admit I do that, and he does it when he’s with his mama. Or whether it’s Jojo, as some of y’all heard, talking about she didn’t want to go to the voodoo doctor. Still don’t know where that came from, but sounds like something I might say.

Or Benjamin talking about politics and saying things that I think that I haven’t expressed, and I realize these kids are all me to an extent. And they pick up mannerisms, and they pick up behaviors, and they pick up beliefs. And these are what kids do.

They follow our examples. They’re learning. By golly, they are always learning.

They’re always watching and learning, even when you think they’re not. And for us as Christians, it should be the same thing. We should be looking to those that are more mature in the faith and seeking to follow their example.

But on the flip side of that, as a more mature believer, and if you’ve been a believer longer than five minutes, you’re more mature in Christ than somebody. As a more mature believer, you have to recognize that there’s always somebody watching you and your example, and we need to set a proper example in the way we live and the things that we teach, the things that we say, so that we could say, be imitators of me as I imitate Jesus Christ. And that’s pretty convicting, because I have moments when I would not want to tell somebody, no, do the things that I’m doing. Yeah, I want you to have exactly the same attitude I have.

No, sometimes that’s not the case. But if I’m focused on discipling others, I need to do my best as the Holy Spirit enables me to do that, to have an attitude, to have a perspective, to have a way of life that I can look at people and say, do these things. Do what I say and do what I do.

Then Paul reinforces the example he’s giving with others in verse 17. He says, for this reason I’ve sent you Timothy, I’ve sent to you Timothy who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord. This is somebody else that Paul has invested in their spiritual walk.

And Paul, if I remember correctly, is not even the one that led Timothy to faith in Christ. And yet he calls him my faithful child. This is somebody that Paul had invested in spiritually the way a father would. My beloved and faithful child in the Lord, and he will remind you of my ways which are in Christ. And this tells us that it helps when we disciple somebody to surround them with other people who can contribute to their walk as well.

It doesn’t all have to be about making ourselves the indispensable person, making ourselves the one that they must follow and they must learn from, as though it’s all on our shoulders. Like Paul, we’re not trying to build a following here. We’re just servants of the Lord trying to shepherd people closer to Jesus.

And so Paul said, I’m going to send you Timothy. Look at Timothy. Timothy’s doing the things that I taught him.

Timothy’s doing the things that I showed him. Timothy’s a wonderful example. And so he’s bringing in other people.

who could be an encouragement as well. If you seek to disciple others, you don’t have to do it all on your own. There’s a whole church of people that we should all be doing these things and we can work together.

This ties into the previous one. But we need to be consistent in what we show and teach. He says in verse 17, just as I teach everywhere in every church.

He said, Timothy’s going to be an example to you of these things, of the things that I’ve exhibited when I follow Jesus Christ, just as I teach everywhere in every church. and we can glean from that that Paul is the same, he’s teaching the same thing in Corinth that he taught in Galatia, that he taught in Rome, that he taught in Ephesus, that he taught everywhere else. Paul was the same person wherever he was, that he was teaching the same things, that he was teaching the same things by his example everywhere he was.

He says, you can look at all the churches everywhere I was, and Timothy’s going to follow that example. You and I have to be consistent in what we show and teach, that as we disciple people, the Christianity that we teach and practice needs to be the same out there that it is in here. And that can be a challenge at times.

And the answer there, by the way, is if you’re struggling out there, the answer is not to lower what you’re doing in here. It’s to pray for the Lord to help you to do out there what you do in here. But Paul was consistent and it helped because nothing will undermine your witness and your efforts to disciple somebody more quickly than them saying that, or them seeing that you do and say one thing here and do and say another out there.

And then we come to the final three verses of this passage, and we see that sometimes discipling means to offer gentle correction when necessary. And I don’t want to spend too much time on this and make it look like we’re just out to police new Christians and make sure their behavior is absolutely right. Because is our behavior always absolutely right?

We need people up the line policing us, right? But sometimes if you’re discipling people, there is a time when gentle correction is needed. No, my friend, this is not right.

Or if they’re studying their Bible and they say, look at what I found, and they get something completely wrong. You don’t have to shame them. You don’t have to berate them.

You shouldn’t do those things. You can say, no, let me show you what this actually is, what this actually means. Or if we see the old ways still showing up on our behavior.

We lovingly remind them of what the gospel calls us to. This is just what I heard old people back in the old days talk about seeing about somebody. Looking after our neighbor.

This is not trying to get people. This is not trying to police people’s behavior. This is being involved in each other’s lives to the extent that we’re able to say, hey, there’s something over here you’re supposed to be doing this differently.

We’re supposed to be doing this differently. Talked about this with the kids just the other day. Because sometimes they get upset when we try to, and I’m not naming names on children, but they get upset sometimes when we try to correct their behavior to the point that I told one of them, calm down, am I yelling at you?

Am I threatening to beat you? I’m getting on to you and I feel like my tone of voice has been just like this the whole time. I think that’s pretty reasonable.

And I had to tell one of them the other day, we don’t do this to make you feel bad or to put you down. And I said, your mama and I have to do this to each other. If I’m having a bad attitude, my wife will come and say, this is not right.

And it doesn’t always make me happy. But she’s always right when she tells me that. And I told our child I’ve had to do the same with her.

That this attitude is not right or you might need to let this go. We have that kind of relationship where there’s a loving, mutual respect and the ability to correct each other. And that’s what I try to do with my kids.

Not say, you’re not living up to the rules. Shame on you. You’re a terrible person.

I’ve started just asking the question, is the choice you’re making here helping you be more like Jesus or less like Jesus? By the way, that’s an easy question to ask them. Then when the Holy Spirit repeats it to me later, it’s not as much fun.

That’s what I’m talking about with gentle correction. We can’t grow as disciples and we can’t disciple other people if we try to do this alone and not let anybody see the things that we struggle with. Or if we can’t have the permission to speak into the lives of the people we’re trying to disciple.

And sometimes we don’t want to do that because it’s going to hurt feelings. But Paul points out here that sometimes gentle correction is needed. I will caution you on one other thing with that, though.

Don’t take this as permission to be the busybody of the church and run up to somebody you’ve never had a conversation with before and tell them all the things that they’re doing wrong in life. This is talking about we have a relationship where we’re growing together in Christ. We know each other. We’re friends.

We’re co-workers in the gospel. But sometimes gentle correction is needed. Sometimes I need that gentle correction.

Sometimes you need that gentle correction. It’s all part of the discipleship process, bringing the sheep back to where they’re supposed to be for the shepherd. These are just some of the things that Paul outlines in this passage that are part of his approach.

Ultimately, discipleship is bringing people closer to Jesus Christ. It’s helping them become more faithful followers of Jesus Christ. I’ve written down a better definition of it that I should have brought with me. But it’s basically that.