Preached · August 27, 2017
Four Generations of Disciples
How are we going to be radical? How are we going to be people who are rooted in Jesus? How are we going to be reproducing? How are we going to be disciples that make disciples? And how are we going to become the kinds of people who do what Jesus does, say what Jesus says, live the life that Jesus would live if he were in Northwest Iowa, Southwest Minnesota, United States, in 2017?
So to answer that question, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to join me in the book of 2 Timothy, chapter 2. Paul, early Christian leader, planted a lot of churches throughout the ancient Near Eastern world. And he had a friend, a partner named Timothy. And Timothy, he has left to pastor a church in Ephesus. So 1 and 2 Timothy aren't written by Timothy, they're written to Timothy by Paul. Basically everything Paul knows about being a pastor, being a leader, being a disciple-maker, he's imparting into these two letters. And this is what Paul writes to Timothy. He says, verse 1:
My son, be strong in the grace of Jesus Christ. And the things that you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to reliable people who will be qualified to teach others.
And this verse right here is the key to how the church is going to survive in the 21st century. This passage is the foundation of everything that Good News does. It's the foundation of how and why we do what we do. It's how the church is going to survive and thrive in the world in the 21st century.
So the first question I want to ask you about this verse: how many generations? How many generations of disciples are in this passage? There are four generations of disciples in this passage. First generation is Paul. Paul has an encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, meets Jesus, becomes a follower of Jesus. Paul dedicates his life to telling others about this Jesus, about this Messiah, about this King of the world. And so one of the people he tells is Timothy. He leaves Timothy to be a pastor in a church in Ephesus. And Paul gives Timothy this charge: entrust what you've heard me say, the gospel, to reliable people who will then be qualified to teach others. So Paul tells Timothy. Timothy is supposed to tell others. And those others are supposed to be qualified to teach still others. There are four generations right here. These are disciples who make disciples, who make disciples, who make disciples.
And it's not just teaching. It's not just doctrine that Paul wants Timothy to pass on. It's a way of life. It's how you actually shape and form your life to look like Jesus. And this is woven into the DNA of the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians chapter 4, Paul writes, "I urge you to imitate me. If you see me doing it, you do it. I've sent you Timothy, and he's going to physically remind you of my way of life in Christ." 1 Corinthians 11: "Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ." 2 Thessalonians: "We offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate." Hebrews 6: "We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised." Hebrews 13: "Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you. Consider, think about, meditate on the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith."
And so the way that the Christian faith was passed on was through the imitation of Jesus. People would imitate Jesus. They would collect the stories of what Jesus did and said, the rhythms of his life. They would imitate that way of life and then invite others to imitate them as they imitated Jesus.
So if this is the normal Christian life, if this is the way the first-century church kind of saw their job, then we need to ask ourselves, how are we doing at that? If Jesus' last commandment and commission to the church is to go and make disciples who make disciples who make disciples, how are we doing? Literally, really — have you made a disciple today, this past week, or month, or year, or ever?
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When I was a kid, we used to play this game called Simon Says. Most of us have played that, unless you're really young, because there's no app for it. Simon Says is, you know, Simon says, pat your head, so okay, Simon said it. It was a very simple game. But it's so weird how, in the church, "Jesus Says" is a totally different game. If Jesus says something, you don't have to do it, you just have to memorize it. You study it, you memorize it. It doesn't make any sense, a lot of the things we do. When he tells us to go out and make disciples — how many people in our churches are actually making disciples? They memorized it. You know, I tell my daughter, Hey, Rach, go clean your room. She doesn't come back to me two hours later and go, I memorized what you said. You said, "Rach, go clean your room." I can say it in Greek. My friends are going to come over and we're going to have a study on what it would look like if I cleaned my room. She knows better than that. So why do we think we're going to come before the Judge one day and quote everything that he said and talk about how much we know? If I just started with Scripture, here's what I would do: I'd start making disciples.
Three Questions
So if this is what Jesus has called us to do, then I want to propose that there are three main questions that we need to ask ourselves. Three key questions about whether we are living as a people with a purpose.
Question One: Am I Living an Imitable Life?
The first question is, am I living an imitable life? Is my life worthy of imitation? Paul writes to Timothy, entrust the gospel to reliable people, people whose lives you would want to emulate, people whose lives you would want to look like. In other words, if I had an apprentice to my life — every aspect of it, my work, my spiritual life, the way I raise my daughter, the way I love my spouse, the way I handle being single (if I were), my sleeping habits, my eating habits, my drinking habits — if someone were following me around with the task of imitating everything I did, would I want that, even for my worst enemy?
Most of us are very aware of the things that we sort of kind of don't want to do, but we do anyway. But it's not really hurting anybody but us, so why bother stopping? If you have a kid, at an early age, they love to start imitating — Simon Says, things like that. I knew that when my 18-month-old daughter started starting all of her sentences with "uh," I knew she was getting that from me. Made me think about how I start all my sentences. Uh.
So try this exercise on for size. Let's say Jesus kind of mysteriously burst into your living room one day, and he says, Hey, Anthony, I want you to meet Jimmy here. And Jimmy, he's going to follow you around. He's going to live with you, and whatever he sees you doing, I've told Jimmy that that is what a Christian does. So I've told Jimmy that however he sees you live, that's how Christians are supposed to live. And he believed me, since I'm Jesus. So good luck with Jimmy. Now, I bet a lot of you feel bad for Jimmy right now, right? Now, what if Jesus did this to you? Hey, this is Jimmy, this is Jane. Jane, Jimmy, they're going to follow you around all day long. I've told them, this is what a Christian does. This is what a Christian looks like. Good luck. If Jesus did this to you, what would you start doing that you weren't doing before? What would you stop doing that you wish you would have stopped doing a long time ago?
Emily and I, my wife and I, we are haunted by this question constantly. Are we living an imitable life? We have made it our life's rhythm to be continually asking folks to imitate us, to be discipled by us, which therefore forces us pretty constantly to be asking, would we ask other people to do this? If they saw our schedule, if they saw our checkbook, if they saw our lives, would we invite anybody else to do what we were doing? That's a rough, tough question that really gets at the heart of the matter.
Now, next week, we're going to hit on this a little bit more. We're going to look at Jesus' words on letting your yes be yes and your no be no. But I think most of us are aware that we all kind of have the same disease called busyness. We pack our schedules so much that of course no one would want to imitate our life. And of course we wouldn't ask anybody to imitate our life, because it's not even sustainable, much less imitable. So if we all have this busyness cancer, how are we going to answer this question?
Question Two: Who Am I Imitating?
Question number two: who am I imitating? Paul says to Timothy, my son, the things you have heard me say. Timothy spent years of his life with Paul. And it's not like Paul led this cushy life. Paul was beaten and abused and persecuted and thrown out of city after city and shipwrecked for his dedication to the gospel of Jesus Christ — the gospel that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. And so Timothy imitated this way of life. Even though it wouldn't have looked like anything you would have wanted to sign up for, it's what Timothy signed up for.
So who am I imitating? In other words, who's my Paul? Can I identify somebody in my life who is investing into me, pouring into me, giving me a model, a way of life to imitate? In many ways, my life can be summarized or chopped up into blocks of people who have said, Anthony, I see in you — it's a phrase we use at Good News, the four letters, I-S-I-Y, I see in you. I see in you something. Folks who have come alongside me and said, I want to mentor you, train you. And so any success that I can claim, anything I can boast in, I have a dozen people who came before me and showed me the way ahead.
One of the first was a man named Pastor Dan Cloud. And Dan Cloud was the reverend, the pastor at Brenneman Church in Goshen, Indiana. And when I was 13 or 14, he said, Anthony, can I mentor you? And so this venerable man of the faith who had been in ministry for many years came to a 14-year-old boy and said, I see something in you. Can I mentor you? Can I show you the way of Jesus? And that began a way of life for me of always seeking out those kinds of people. And hopefully the other way around, for me to be doing that with someone else as well.
Now, for far too many people, no one has invested in them. And not because you didn't try. There are plenty of Christians who long, who desire, for an older person, a person further along in the faith, to just come to them and say, Can I mentor you? Can I disciple you? Can I show you the way of Jesus? But somebody needs to make that first step.
Author and speaker Bob Goff sets up a really simple framework. He says, if you're in your 60s, you're a six. And if you're in your 40s, you're a four. If you're in your 30s, you're a three. And so sixes, you need to be mentoring fives. Fives, you need to be mentoring fours. Fours, you need to be mentoring threes, and so on. You're that much further in your life. You see what's coming. And so you can warn those who are coming up the ranks and show them the ropes.
Question Three: Who Is Imitating Me?
So this leads right into question three: who is imitating me? Paul says to Timothy, entrust to people who will teach others. Paul left Timothy behind as the pastor of the church of Ephesus. But Paul didn't want Timothy just to maintain a grip on power. Paul wanted Timothy to pass the gospel on. And so practically, are you making steps to invite people to imitate your way of life, to invite people into your home, to follow what you are doing? Are you mentoring or discipling anybody, teaching someone? Have you taught someone how to read the Bible or how to pray?
Now, many of us start saying things like, I'm not qualified. Well, Anthony, I'm not a pastor. Or, I don't have enough teaching or training. I haven't been to school long enough. I'm not good enough. Or, there's a part of my life that's not worthy of imitation, so I'd rather have nobody imitate anything at all. So I'm going to put this as bluntly as I can. If you are not multiplying your life into the lives of others, you are not within the will of God. I'll say it from the screen. If you are not multiplying your life into the lives of others, you are not within the will of God.
A lot of us struggle: Oh, what's God's will for my life? What am I supposed to do? What are the next steps I'm supposed to take? Jesus makes it pretty clear, at least in the big picture. If you are not multiplying your life into the lives of others, if you are not going and making disciples, if you are not hearing what the gospel is and entrusting it to people who entrust it to others, then you're not within the will of God. Jesus' invitation and call for us to imitate him, by definition, means that we are to call others to imitate us. And when Jesus told his disciples to go and make more disciples, that imperative didn't go through 20 centuries of the church and then magically stop with you. You are not somehow the one exception to God's command. God's Scripture is crystal clear on this issue.
Progress, Not Perfection
And so my encouragement is, don't opt for perfection or nothing. Winston Churchill said that perfection is the enemy of progress. We've heard it said that good is the enemy of great, and I believe that's true. But perfection is the enemy of progress. When it comes to things like discipling others, mentoring others — like, well, there's a part of my life that's not worthy of imitation, so I'd rather not invite anybody to do it at all — but that stops you from doing anything.
Now, this church, Good News, is a great example, actually, of living out the opposite of this. We don't do perfection all that often or all that well. And many of you are happy to tell us that. But we believe that perfection doesn't come through our efforts. Perfection comes through the grace of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the author and the finisher of our faith, not us. And so even though our attempts at progress may not be perfect — our attempts at discipleship, our attempts at imitating Jesus, our attempts at asking others to imitate us — even though none of them is perfect, we know the one who will take our attempts and put them through the filter of perfection and perfect them for his purposes.
The Reveal Survey
So, speaking of imperfect attempts at discipling others, I want to present you one today. Earlier this spring, we conducted a church-wide spiritual life survey called Reveal. And it measured literally a hundred different metrics and markers of spiritual growth, maturity, and practices. The survey lived up to its name. It revealed a lot to your church staff and leadership. It told us a lot about how you all are doing spiritually, and you got the opportunity to let us know, as church leadership and staff, how we're doing at leading you spiritually and helping you grow.
So there are a lot of things to celebrate from that survey. Reveal measured what are called faith-in-action markers, things that show how your faith makes a day-to-day difference in your life. And this was measured against 2,000 congregations, a database of 400,000 people. They measured things like: Do we have spiritual friendships and mentors? Are we imitating and asking others to imitate us? We do. We are well above the national average. How do we do at evangelism, having spiritual conversations with non-believers in the last year? We're well above the national average. How are we doing at serving those in need through church activities? We are twice the national average. We do great. We serve those in need on our own — we're 62% above the national average. We give away our time to serve and help others in our community well above average.
The Reveal survey puts each participant into one of four quadrants on the spiritual continuum. So from not knowing Jesus at all, but kind of exploring who Jesus is, all the way up to spiritual maturity, a Christ-centered life. And I want you to notice, 57% of our congregation is in the top two categories, close to Christ, Christ-centered. There are very few "exploring Christ" people here, which is something we need to talk about someday. But the largest quadrant by far is the growing-in-Christ quadrant. And these are people who say, I believe in Jesus, I'm a Christian, and I'm working on getting to know him. In other words, you're willing to admit — 41% of you are willing to admit — that you're still trying to wrap your mind around this whole Christian life, following Jesus thing. And of that 41%, 60% of them have been at Good News six years or more, and 40% have been here for 10 years or more. So that means you've kind of been stalled out spiritually for a little while, or maybe quite some time. Or you're not even sure if there is anything more to the Christian life.
Now, from your perspective — all of you, when you took the survey, we asked you to rank how the church does in helping you grow. Does Good News encourage me to take personal responsibility for my spiritual growth? We were ranked below average. Good News challenges me to grow and take next steps spiritually? Below average. Good News provides a clear pathway that helps guide my spiritual growth? Below average. So your staff, your leadership, we looked at metrics like this, and we said, Okay, we have some serious work to do.
Core Classes
So I want to introduce a first step in beginning to rectify this. What we're going to be introducing this fall and spring is what we're calling core classes. There are going to be four core classes. They're each six weeks long, and we're inviting anybody to participate in them on Sunday mornings.
The first we've done for a while, but we're continuing to revamp it. It's called Foundations, or GNCC 101 — basically introducing you to the basics of the Christian faith, following Jesus, what it is to be a disciple of Jesus, and how Good News plays a part in that. And then the new ones. 201, Personal Practices: How do I read the Bible? How do I pray? I don't even know how to pray. What does it look like to follow Jesus practically in day-to-day life? 301 is Spiritual Gifts and Roles. A metric we learned from the Reveal survey is that about 5% of you said that you knew your spiritual gifts and your role in the church. And so we want to offer you an opportunity to rectify that. We want that to be 100%, not 5%. And then the 401 is Life on Mission: How do I structure my life in such a way that it is fully in alignment with God's will for my life and God's will for the church?
The schedule for this is fall and winter, so September through December. We'll offer 101 and 201, and they'll swap places depending on if you are a 9 o'clock or a 10:45 person. So Good News 101, 9 o'clock in the early fall, 10:45 in the late fall. You get the idea. Winter and spring, then we'll offer 301 and 401. Again, they'll swap places depending on if you're in early spring or late spring. And so hopefully there's an opportunity for anybody to be able to make it to these. And then our hope is to be able to expand this, to offer them on Wednesday nights as well. We're trying to keep it contained to just Sundays and Wednesdays so we're not adding another night to the week.
Now, it doesn't mean that you're going to reach perfection and glory and heaven-land when you're done with these four classes. This is a first step and a pathway toward spiritual growth. But it's an opportunity for you to say, I want to take charge of my spiritual life. I don't want to just float along the lazy river of spirituality until Jesus comes back. I want to be actively pursuing him. So that's how we're going to do it, at least for now. It's version 1.0.
Wednesday Groups
Now, that's Sundays. Let's talk about Wednesdays for a second. Last spring, we began to introduce some adult classes. We're going to expand that this fall. So we're continuing to offer a men's group and a women's group. And then we're going to offer a sermon-series group. Early fall, we're going to be doing a series called The Neighboring Life. What if Jesus' command to love our neighbors meant to love our literal next-door neighbors? And then late fall, we're doing a series called Sorry, I'm Not Sorry, all about apologetics, evangelism, defending your faith, why it's worth believing in Jesus and Christianity. And then, late fall, we're going to be offering a financial training course. So, the basics of budgeting, investing, retirement, called I Was Broke, Now I'm Not. What did you call it, Steve? "I was broke and now I'm used to it"? "Now I don't care," yeah. Hopefully that's not what happens at the end.
So, four learning opportunities. These are all elective-based on Wednesday; the core class is on Sunday. Now, some of you are going to ask, is this replacing missional communities or small groups or anything like that? So let me show you a quick chart to show you the difference. Classes and groups are in the personal-space context. So, back in the spring, we talked about the different kinds of social spaces. These are groups of 10 to 20. Missional communities are more the size of an extended-family social space. Classes and groups, the goal is learning. Missional communities, the goal is belonging. So classes, it's a classroom setting. Missional communities, you're about belonging to something bigger than yourself. Classes and groups are organized. Missional communities are a little bit more organic. Classes and groups are forced friendship — you may not be peers with these people. Missional communities, the goal is that you have 2 a.m. friends, people that you can call up when life gets hard. Classes and groups have a start date and an end date. Missional communities are meant to be a fabric of life.
You don't have to do everything at once. I know some of you are already plotting how you can fit in every single one of these courses and join a group and serve and all of that. Our expectation, our hope, actually, is that you don't try to do all of this at once. Take your time. Take it slow. Remember the first question today: Are you leading an imitable life? So don't try to do this all at once. Don't try to pile this all on. If you're taking a Sunday class, don't take a Wednesday one, or vice versa. If you're serving two or three nights a week, it might be time to say no and stop serving one of those times. And if you're not serving, it may be time to start saying yes and start serving somewhere.
Closing: Three Questions and Offering
All right. So I want to leave you with three questions. Am I living a life worthy of imitation? Who am I imitating? And who is imitating me? And we hope that these core classes and these Wednesday groups give you an ability to hopefully begin to answer two and three — that you have leaders that you can imitate and learn from. And the goal of a core class, the goal of learning, isn't just so you can keep it for yourself. But eventually, you can pass it on. And then next week, Labor Day weekend, we're going to be talking a little bit more about question number one: Am I living an imitable life? A life worthy of imitation?
Right now, our ushers are coming forward to take up our offering. And one of the ways that Jesus calls us to live an imitable life is to live life with an open hand and not with a closed fist. To live life in such a way that we trust God with our finances. We trust God with our money. And so that's right now an opportunity to practice that kind of living. Do we trust God with our money? So we ask that you would give joyfully and cheerfully today, supporting the ministries of Good News, the missionaries and organizations that this church supports, and to be part of something bigger than yourself with your finances.
So God, we thank you that you call us to make disciples who make disciples. That you call us to follow you so we can call others to follow us as we follow you. God, help us by the power of your Holy Spirit to do that in your grace. Not in our own power and strength, God. Not just by gritting our teeth and making it work. But by believing that you are God who makes all things possible. That you will finish what you started in us. God, take these tithes and offerings, we pray. Multiply them and grow them. For the sake of people knowing your Son, Jesus. For not needing to live life with uncertainty, but certain of your love for them. We pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.
