A Church-wide Call to Disciple-Making [B]

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Transcript:

Turn with me again to Acts chapter 18 tonight, and we’ll see if we can’t finish what we started this morning. We began talking this morning about a church-wide call to discipleship. And I didn’t really have this in mind, I guess, when I was putting this message together.

But as I was looking back over the notes again tonight, it occurred to me that really this passage deals with a lot of the excuses that we can come up with for not making disciples. And as I said to you this morning, It can be involved. It should be involved.

It can be time-consuming. It can be messy. A lot of times we don’t want to get too involved in other people’s lives because it’s messy.

People’s lives are messy, aren’t they? And there can be all sorts of reasons and all sorts of excuses why I can’t disciple somebody or why I can’t disciple somebody right now. But I think the story of Priscilla and Aquila answers a lot of these.

Just to read the passage to you again, to make sure we’re all on the same page here, we start in Acts chapter 18, verse 1. After these things, Paul departed from Athens and came to Corinth, and found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla, because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome, and came unto them. And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them and wrought, for by their occupation they were tent makers.

And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks. And then we’ll skip ahead to verse 24. And a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the scriptures, came to Ephesus.

This man was instructed in the way of the Lord, and being fervent in the spirit, he spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John. And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue, whom when Aquila and Priscilla had heard, they unto them and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly. And when he was disposed to pass into Achaia, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him, who, when he was come, helped them much which had believed through grace.

For he mightily convinced the Jews, and that publicly, showing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ. So he used the scriptures not only just to preach the message of John the Baptist, to repent because the kingdom of heaven was at hand, but that now there was a basis for God to forgive us. There was a basis now for God to forgive man because Jesus Christ had come and been the promised Messiah, and he’d shed his blood, and he had died to pay for the sins of mankind. And so they understood that, and understanding the gospel even more fully, he began to speak with even more power and persuade more people.

And this only happened, ladies and gentlemen, this only happened after Aquila and Priscilla heard him speak and realized here was somebody who was trying to follow God. Here was somebody who was trying to do the right thing, but he wasn’t where he needed to be. And they said, we can help him get to where he needs to be.

And Aquila and Priscilla, we’re not told in here how long this process took of them instructing him more perfectly. I would expect it took more than just one sit-down meeting, but they poured some time and invested some energy in this man trying to get him to where he needs to be. And folks, that’s all disciple making is.

Teaching people to follow Jesus Christ. And they’re not a disciple until they belong to him, but we can start leading them along the journey even before they trust Christ. Because sometimes we will have to talk to people multiple times. Sometimes multiple people will have to talk to a person before they come to Christ. And I’ve seen that to be true. I’ve told you before, I’ve seen that to be true more often here lately.

Growing up, I thought it was my job in one setting to take somebody, even if they knew nothing about God, knew nothing about Jesus Christ, and twist their arm into making a decision right then and there. And I found that that doesn’t usually work. See, I’ve led some people in the sinner’s prayer, and yet I have no idea where they are today, have no indication that they’re serving the Lord.

And I think, okay, it was a decision, but they may not have been convicted, they may not have really been born again. And sometimes people will say the sinner’s prayer just to get you off their front porch. But what I have seen more effective is people praying for someone and people talking to someone multiple times and sometimes more than one of us talking to somebody.

And you can think they are just never going to understand. They’re just never going to get saved. And then six months, a year, two years down the road, after all this time of various people praying for them, various people talking to them, various people approaching them with the gospel, something clicks, and they trust Christ for the first time.

And sometimes none of us are even around when it happens. And I’m reminded of what Paul writes that some of us, I’m paraphrasing here, but some of us plant and some of us water, but God gives the increase. And we begin, even before conversion sometimes, working on somebody and trying to lead them from where they are to not only salvation, but to maturity in Jesus Christ. Folks, that’s what they’d done.

That’s what they had done with Apollos, and that’s all of our job. It sounds like a hard job, and there’s a reason for that, because it is a hard job. There are some times when you’re discipling somebody, you will get frustrated, or you’ll get tired, and you just want to throw in the towel because it’s a hard job, but yet it’s something God has commanded us to do, and it’s for everybody.

I shared with you this morning that Aquila and Priscilla, at least at this time, we see no indication that they were leaders in the church. Now Priscilla wouldn’t have been an elder or a deacon, but Aquila, he was just a tent maker. And as I shared with you this morning, some of you may think I’m just a mechanic.

I’m just a farmer. I’m just an accountant. I’m just a housewife.

I’m just a retired person. I don’t know what Brother Jared knows. Folks, thank goodness you don’t know what I know.

I’m not the standard, thank goodness. And I don’t know as much as I think I do sometimes either. Folks, it’s, again, like I said this morning, it’s not my job to make disciples because I’m the pastor.

It’s my job to make disciples because I am a Christian. And so it’s no less your responsibility to make disciples than it is mine. As a pastor, as a church leader, I have the added responsibility of helping you and equipping you.

And that’s why I told you this morning about the coach and the cheerleaders, and no team in America would win, would get to the Super Bowl, let alone win, if the team just sat back and let the coach and the cheerleaders go in and play the game for them. They would lose every time. Folks, don’t just send me.

Don’t just send Brother Phil. Don’t just send Brother James, the other deacons, the other ordained and licensed men of the church. Don’t just send us and say it’s their job, they’re leaders of the church.

Folks, it’s all of our job to do. Aquila and Priscilla were just tent makers doing what God expected them to do because they were Christians. But tonight we move on to what may be the most common excuse from time to time.

Disciple making, and we’re on the same notes if you still have your notes from this morning, disciple making is not just for those who have the time. Disciple making is not just for those who have the time. If disciple making is our job, if it was given to us by Christ and it’s our job, then it should be a priority.

It’s not something we come around to when we have the time. I remember when I was growing up, my mom would tell me to clean my room, and I would tell her, okay. And we were expected to go clean our rooms right then.

It would not have been pretty, and I tried this at times, and it was not pretty to come back, and she says, why is that room not clean? Well, Mama, I just haven’t had time yet. Ooh, that would be ugly.

Some of you all can relate. Folks, when Mama told me to get that job done, that was to become the priority. When God tells us to make disciples, that becomes the priority.

Besides, if Aquila and Priscilla could make disciples with where they were, none of us have the excuse that we don’t have time. Because you see, we may have glossed over this fact a little bit, but I intended to come back to it. Aquila and Priscilla were refugees.

They weren’t just living in Corinth in the lap of luxury, living lives of ease, nothing to worry about, and just making their little tents. They had lived in Rome, and the Emperor Claudius said all the Jewish people, and even though they were Christians, The Romans didn’t differentiate a lot between Christians and Jews at that point. He said, all the Jews have got to get out of the city of Rome.

It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t a polite suggestion when the Roman emperor said, you get out of town, you might have time to pick up your belongings, but you pretty much run for your life and get out of there. Because the Romans weren’t known for wanting to tell you twice. And so these people got up and they left and they went to Corinth.

They probably went other places in the meantime. Later on, we see in verse 24, they are in Ephesus. And if you’re familiar with the geography of that part of the world at all, Corinth is in Greece, Ephesus is in Turkey, what’s now Turkey.

It was Greek back then. And so they were traveling all over the place. And I’m guessing wherever they ended up, they were just kind of gypsy tent makers.

And they’d make some tents and sell them to make a living and to survive. But these were not people who were living the good life, as we would say. they didn’t have their little house with the picket fence and the 2.

4 children or whatever the average is today. They didn’t have a steady income. There may have been nights they didn’t know where they were going to be sleeping.

I’ve never known exactly what that’s like, but there have been times like after the tornado or after we’ve had a flood at our house or things like that where you just take what you can throw in a bag and you go sleep at a relative’s house. And I’ve joked about being a refugee before. Well, in dire situations, a lot of times, all your time is taken up by just trying to get through the day, trying to survive, trying to find a place to sleep that night, trying to find, okay, where are we going to eat?

What are we going to eat? Where are we going to find water? Where are we going to do these things?

And everything takes a long time. Folks, they were refugees. They had their hands full, and yet they found time to make disciples.

They found time to make disciples. We don’t get out of the job that Christ has called us to do just because we’re busy. And we are busy.

It amazes me how we have all these things that, these inventions of convenience that should make our lives easier and should make us have more time, and yet we are probably busier now than we’ve ever been. Computers alone. Some of you know this all too well.

Computers alone are supposed to speed up our lives and make things easier. And we spend more time pounding on the things trying to figure out how to get them to work. or the car, or the washing machine.

We have all these conveniences that are supposed to make things easier and free up time, and we find ourselves busier than ever. Folks, disciple-making isn’t an optional activity that we put at the bottom of the list, and we’ll get to it someday, kind of like cleaning up my garage. It’s the priority.

It’s at the top of the list. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re busy in our lives of ease, or if we’re busy running for our lives. It is the priority to make disciples. If Aquila and Priscilla found time to make disciples, so can we.

As a matter of fact, God used some of this turmoil to get the job done. Because he told the people to begin with in the book of Acts, he told them to leave out of Jerusalem and be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the world. And a lot of the people just sat there at Jerusalem.

And so God used persecution to scatter the church so that then they would have to go out. And as they ran for their lives, you know what? They shared Christ along the way.

And new churches sprung up all over the Roman Empire. People trusted Christ and people grew in Christ. And so just being busy is not an excuse. I have no idea who the preacher is that I was listening to, but knowing the station I was listening to, I’m sure he was sound.

I wouldn’t just spin in the dial listening to any heretic that was on the radio. But this week I heard a preacher talking about this very concept. And he was talking about how much time we waste that we could be making disciples.

and even doing good things when we could be making disciples through those good things and we just don’t think about it. Talked about how many times, how many hours a week do we spend in the car? And he was talking to pastors in particular and said, how many hours a week do you spend in the car when you may have some man at the church who just wants to do ministry and you can put him in the car with you and you can talk about ministry and talk about life and do ministry together?

That’s exactly right. How many teachable moments do we waste? How many times do we sit around the table with our kids or our grandkids and we think we’re just having a meal when we could be imparting spiritual wisdom to them?

We’ve been trying to teach Benjamin how to pray at the dinner table. And sometimes he’ll repeat the prayer all the way through and sometimes he just says no. But we didn’t do that at first. It took us some time to think of it and say, you know, we really should be doing this. We’re kind of wasting this time.

We could be using it to disciple this little boy. sometimes just driving around here lately. I’ve enjoyed conversations where Vincent and I just get to talk about ministry as we’re driving from one place to another.

Folks, that’s discipleship. It’s not about I’ve got to have time set aside to teach a class. I’ve got to have time set aside so that me and somebody else can meet from 8 to 9 in the morning two days a week, and we’re going to sit down and have a set curriculum.

Folks, it’s about living our lives in such a way that we are looking for people to invest time in, to share with them what we know and what we’ve experienced, to bring them from where they are to maturity in Christ. And by the way, we can do that, yes, even if we’re not completely mature in Christ. And we never will be completely mature in Christ on this side of eternity. But we all need to be headed the same direction, and we look behind us to see the people who are behind us, and we bring them along with us. And see, we think of discipleship as being something difficult.

It is difficult, but we think of it being something complex, where we have to teach a class, we have to have a program, we have to do this, we have to do that, and it’s as simple as bringing people along for the ride as we serve Christ, and any of us can do it. Third of all, tonight, disciple making is not just for experts in theology. Disciple making is not just for experts in theology.

See, this is the excuse, or maybe not the excuse, but the statement that says, I just don’t know enough. How in the world am I going to make a disciple? I don’t know enough.

I can’t teach somebody how to follow Christ. I don’t know if it’s a pre-trib rapture or if it’s a millennium. I don’t know all this. I can’t name all 12 apostles.

Folks, it’s not a Bible test. It’s not a Bible quiz that you have to get 100% on or you can’t make disciples. You but you don’t have to be able to fully explain it. You don’t have to be able to reconcile free will and God’s sovereignty.

You don’t have to be able to do so many of the things that we look at and think, well, I can’t bring anybody along. I can’t teach them what I know because I don’t know all of this. Folks, it’s not about what we don’t know.

It’s about what we do know. It’s about sharing what we do know, and it’s about sharing what we have experienced. And there’s always somebody behind us that we can impart wisdom to.

You see, for them, I’m sure Aquila and Priscilla were very nice individuals and probably pretty smart, too. I don’t want to get to heaven one day and find out that I’ve maligned them falsely. But the Bible doesn’t speak of them in the same terms exactly that it does of Apollos.

See, it says that Apollos was an eloquent man. It says he was mighty in the Scriptures. It says that he was fervent in the Spirit, and he spoke and taught diligently the things of the Lord.

Folks, the Bible doesn’t praise Aquila and Priscilla in this passage. their eloquence, their intelligence. It doesn’t say how brilliant they were.

And so we’ve got Apollos. We’ve got Apollos who’s a brilliant man and a very learned man on top of it, a very eloquent, passionate teacher. But there were things he didn’t know that Aquila and Priscilla did know.

And it would have been natural for them to say, how can we teach that man? There’s so much that he knows that we don’t. He’s so far above us intellectually.

He’s so far above us in the power that he speaks with. Who are we to instruct this man? But the fact is, when it came to spiritual things, they had much to teach him, because he didn’t know the whole story.

Now, he was from Alexandria, the Alexandria in Egypt, I believe, and it’s quite possible that this early, if the gospel had made it to Alexandria, it may not have been where everybody had heard by now. And so Apollos only knew part of the story. Aquila and Priscilla didn’t have to be brilliant theologians.

All they had to do was know what the truth was of the gospel, and they saw there’s a big gaping hole here in what he’s teaching, and we have the piece that fits that hole. And they shared the gospel with him. They told him that Jesus was the Messiah he was looking for.

They told him how Jesus had died on the cross for our sins. Apollos, after this, goes on to be one of the great evangelists of the early churches. But it only happened after Aquila and Priscilla came along and said, there are things you don’t know.

There are things that we know that we can teach you. And you could take somebody, just to give you a broad example, you could take somebody from out of the field with a sixth grade education, doesn’t know a whole lot about books and literature and all the things that Apollos would have known, but he knows Jesus and he’s walked with him for a lot of years. And you could take a university professor who knows a lot about the world, knows a lot about literature and science and just a very learned, eloquent man, but doesn’t know Jesus Christ. And it doesn’t matter that the farmer is not a theologian.

It doesn’t matter that he’s not an expert on all these things. What matters is that in the spiritual journey to maturity in Jesus Christ, he’s a head of the university professor. And you could have a farmer with a sixth grade education disciple a university professor.

Because for all the things that he does know, it’s the things that he doesn’t know that are most needed. And the farmer knows what they are. Folks, don’t you ever sell yourselves short saying, I don’t know enough.

I don’t know enough about the Bible. I don’t know enough about this, I don’t know enough about that, to be able to disciple somebody, don’t you dare sell yourselves short. When God has given all of us the responsibility and all of us the opportunity to make disciples.

Folks, God thought you were good enough to make disciples because there’s always somebody behind us that regardless of what they know about the world, needs to know what we know about Jesus Christ. And at the same time, there are always people in front of us that we can learn from. People sometimes think the pastor is supposed to know everybody. there are still people I call on the phone and say, what do you think about this?

Tell me what you know about this. I’ve pulled Brother Phil aside after church before and said, can I talk to you about this? I called my friend Mike in Oklahoma, who used to be my youth pastor, and really is the one who discipled me, and still call him and say, let me ask you some questions.

Folks, there’s always somebody in front of us that we can learn from, and there’s always somebody behind us who needs to be taught. And if you know Jesus Christ, and if you’ve walked with him, you have something to tell the world that needs to know him. Disciple making is not just for experts in theology.

Fourth and finally tonight, as we close, disciple making is not just needed by the new believer. It’s not just the new believer who needs to be discipled, as I said just a second ago. There’s always somebody ahead of us who knows more than we do and always somebody behind us who knows less.

We don’t get to a point. We don’t ever get to a point where we think, okay, I can sit down now, I can relax, I’m completely spiritually mature. If you ever get to the point where you think you’ve figured it all out, you haven’t figured any of it out.

The most brilliant thing I ever learned was that there are so many things I don’t know. You get to a point in life when you’re a teenager, you get to the end of high school, you think you just know everything. Well, I figured out very quickly that not only did I not know everything, that there was more that I didn’t know than what I did know.

It’s the most brilliant statement I’ve ever come up with in life is, I don’t know. Folks, if we ever get to the point where we say, I’m completely spiritually mature, oh, no, we’re not. And we’re probably not as far along as we think we are.

It’s a process. Growth in Christ is a process. It’s never completed.

But when the prize is being conformed to who Jesus Christ is, it doesn’t matter that we never get there all the way to the finish line on this side of eternity. What matters is that every day we’re trying to be more and more like Him. When the prize is to be more and more like Him, It doesn’t matter how far we have to go.

What matters is every day getting a little closer and a little closer. So disciple making, I want to encourage you in this as well, because I’ve laid out a lot for you today about how it’s our job to make disciples. One thing that’s going to make it easier for us is if we’re being discipled ourselves.

Because when we get to the points where we say, I don’t know what to do with this person. How do I handle this situation? It helps to have somebody on the other side that we can go to and say, how would you deal with this?

And as Proverbs tells us, as iron sharpens iron, so does one man sharpen another. Folks, it’s not just new believers who need to be discipled. It’s all of us.