Are we stagnating or are we learning? How are we doing helping others with that question? Pastor Tim tonight leads us to consider those questions in light of Jesus’s command to teach each other as his disciples.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome back to Steadfast. I am so glad to have you here with me tonight. As we continue our series, we’re going to pick up where we left off last week, considering Jesus’s great commission for his disciples, including us. As we think about the great commission, we talked last week about baptism and how it implies that we should be a church that is going and actually seeing new people, people who weren’t yet disciples, coming to the faith, people coming to know Jesus, people being able to be excited about the expanding of God’s kingdom. But it doesn’t stop there.
I was thinking as I was reflecting on this passage this week about a house I used to drive by years ago, probably for 10, maybe even 20 years. That house, it was a beautiful house alongside the road, right next to the woods, and it looked so inviting. It probably wasn’t built for entertaining. It looked like a great place to invite people over. But it had a problem. You see, that house, as nice as it was, as big as it was, as beautiful as its gardens were, didn’t have any stairs up to the front door. And so it was this beautiful, inviting house. It was a house that could provide shelter for people, and yet if you arrived at it, you couldn’t just walk in the front door. I presume the owners went through the back door or through the garage or something, but it actually couldn’t fulfill its full purpose of being a welcoming place for years.
And so often in the Christian life, that’s what we do as well. We may come to believe, we hear the gospel, we feel the tugging of God’s Spirit on our hearts when we come to believe, and yet we don’t do anything to dig into God’s word and see God build those stairs in our lives so that we can welcome others into his kingdom. And as we see others come to the faith, we’re so excited the houses are being built, but all those stairs are being left out. And I think it’s crucial that as Jesus sends out his disciples, he says, you need to build the house. You need to see people coming to faith, but you need to keep building as well. You need to finish the project. That’s what we’re going to dig into tonight.
So let’s go ahead and come before God in prayer, ask Him to help us to see where we’re missing the stairs in our lives and how we can help others have stairs going up to their front door so that we can be a people that is welcoming, that is equipped to do what God has made us to do.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for being with us, for not leaving us to figure out all these things on our own, but you’ve sent your Spirit that we might be equipped, that we might be strengthened, that we might be encouraged. We know as we reflect on what you call us to do, even after we’re believers, Lord, you’re doing that because you love us and you desire to see us be the men and women that you have made us to be. Lord, would you encourage us in that tonight? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s go ahead and return to Matthew 28. We’re going to look at the same passage we looked at last week, and we’re going to think about some of the implications. Turn with me, if you would, to Matthew chapter 28, verses 19 to 20. Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Before we go too far into the second part, besides baptizing and teaching, let’s think for a moment about what it means simply to be disciples. After all, Jesus is telling the men who have been referred to repeatedly as His disciples to go and make disciples. And so it’s important that we really understand what it looks like to be a disciple. What does living like a disciple mean? If we think about this word, essentially what it boils down to is it’s someone who’s a learner, someone who comes under a teacher and learns from that teacher. Jesus, His disciples were called His disciples because they were learning from Him, just like we do. When we come to God’s word and we’re convicted by it and we’re transformed by it, we’re being transformed, we’re learning from Jesus. We’re experiencing what it is to live as a disciple.
It’s God’s grace that trains us, that enables us to do that. And that’s why we see this process, both baptism, that is conversion and the experience of entering into the family of God, and then that continued growth of teaching everything that Jesus has commanded.
Turn with me for a moment to Titus chapter two. We read these words in verse 11. Paul writes, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.” Paul says likewise in Romans chapter eight, “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined,” notice this, “to be conformed to the image of His Son in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers.”
In both of these passages, we see that Paul is affirming the same thing that we’ve seen throughout scripture in general, which is that it’s God’s grace that saves us. It’s God’s grace that allows us to be a part of the family of God. And yet, because God loves us, because God calls us into His family, He also in that grace equips us. He conforms us to Himself, as Paul says, not to the world.
So it’s really important to note that when we read about that we should be being taught, that we should be learning, it’s not talking about somehow that we are going to learn enough to earn God’s grace, that we’re going to somehow only after we can pass a certain, some kind of examination or test, that God’s going to say, okay, now you’ve passed the test, you get your Christian certification and you’re saved. It’s not that. Rather, what it is, is the very process of learning is a demonstration of God’s grace. He loves us enough to not just rescue us from destruction, but to actually spend the time polishing us and transforming us to be what we were always meant to be.
To truly experience the fullness of God’s grace, it’s not simply knowing that He has saved you, but it’s living in the grace of being remade by God’s loving Spirit. The Holy Spirit, as He is in us and He convicts us of the things we’re doing wrong, and also calls us to His word to learn more about who God is and who He’s called us to be, is remaking us. And that’s part of the joy of the Christian life. Sometimes it’s a painful joy because it’s not always fun to be, to experience that sense that we need to be remade, to realize that things aren’t exactly how they should be in our lives, and yet there’s also the joy of knowing that we can be remade without fear. We’re not remade because we’re afraid that God is going to cut us off, that God is going to realize He made a mistake by calling us. No, we’re remade because God has already claimed us as His, and we just want to be more like Him.
When we face a world as we do today, where so often being remade like Him means being less like those around us, being less and less like what the world says is good, it can be really challenging to hold on to that. And that’s why it’s so important why Jesus tells His disciples, you need to go and teach people not just a few of the things I’ve commanded you, but everything, all that I have taught you. You need to go and teach that to those that you make disciples.
Because when we have that superficial knowledge, we know a few things, we know, oh, I guess I should live a little differently here or there in my life because now I’m a Christian and I know that can’t be pleasing to God. Here’s the problem. We go back into that world, the world that isn’t yet being remade because so much of it isn’t in any sort of relationship with our God. And that world starts to question, well, why aren’t you willing to do this? Don’t you want to be fun to be around? Don’t you want to be caring? Don’t you want to not be judgmental?
And we feel the pull to let go of those superficial convictions of the things that God wants us to do because they are just that, they’re superficial. What happens when we really delve deeply into God’s commandments, when we are taught and are teaching all the things that Jesus has commanded? They’re no longer superficial. They take root. We start to understand more of why God has called us to do things. We start to understand more of how we can have confidence that even when the going is really, really tough because people don’t understand why we’re living as we do, we know that God does, that God is with us.
We need to constantly be moving from that superficial understanding, which it’s okay if we’re superficial at first. We’re not going to start out deeply understanding God’s grace and His call for our lives, but our lives should be a process of digging deeper and deeper, mining into the wonderful truth and the grace of God. And when we do that, we start to be able to resist those temptations to let go of God’s commandments because we understand them better. We understand God better. We understand who we are supposed to be better.
That’s why we need to ask ourselves this question tonight. Wherever you happen to be in the Christian life, we should ask, am I stagnating or am I learning? Those are really the two options. We can be at a point where, whether it’s we’ve just read the Bible a little bit and we understand that Jesus is our Savior and we’ve just stopped there and we’ve never grown at all. We could be that years ago we were digging into God’s word and being transformed by it and understanding it better and now we’ve gotten lazy. Either case, we can find ourselves in a place where we’re stagnating because we’re not going any further. We’re not experiencing the grace of God remaking us in the moment because we’re finding other things more interesting or important.
Or the alternative is that we’re learning, we’re growing. Even if we look at this and maybe you’ve just started to read the Bible and you see the Bible just sitting here and you look at this giant text and you think, it’s going to take me so many years to understand this, much less have God’s Spirit transform my life to match what He says in His word, it feels almost hopeless. But God doesn’t understand, doesn’t rather call us to understand everything right away. He understands when we’re not there yet. The thing that He calls us to do is to constantly be growing.
Think about if you’re at your computer and you hit a button to load something and a little progress bar comes up. If that progress bar is only a little bit full and it’s edging along, it doesn’t necessarily make you joyful that, oh good, it’s 1% done, 2% done, because of course we don’t want to sit there and wait. But as long as it’s 1% done, 2% done, 10% done, we see the progress. Even if it’s not there yet, we at least know that whatever we’re trying to accomplish is going to be completed.
Where do we start to worry? Where is the problem? It’s when it gets to 45% done and then an hour later it’s still at 45% done and we realize the computer is frozen or something’s gone wrong. It’s stagnated. In our lives, if we’re at 1% done or we’re at 45% done or we’re at 60% done, because in this life we’re not going to get to 100%, that’s in God’s work in the life to come, we’ll someday be perfect. What’s important is that we’re not staying at 1% or 10% or whatever percentage we’re at. We’re constantly seeking and praying and exploring who God is so that we’re growing. And when we’re doing that, it not only enables us to live more as the people that God has made you and has made me to be, but it also enables us to help others experience that.
Take a look at this quote. I really like this quote. “We must see ourselves as learners in a family of teachers who themselves are also learners. The believer who is most mature will be most ready to listen and learn, even from the newest member of the family.” You see, it’s not about whether you’ve been a Christian for two weeks or 20 years. So much of what speaks to whether we’re mature in Christ or not is, are we willing, are we ready to learn from others? Are we ready to have the body of Christ helping us along in this journey of being remade in God’s image, to see those stairs being built so that we can be the welcoming people of God who expand His kingdom, who see more people being baptized, like we talked about last week, who see more of God’s will being done.
When we’re growing, we’re prepared not just to do what Jesus commands in our own lives, but in those calls that He gives us to go outside into other people’s lives, to be disciple makers. And that’s the second question I think we need to explore tonight is what does living as a disciple maker look like? It’s not just what does it look like to live as a disciple? A crucial part of that is a disciple who makes disciples.
Let’s take a look again at verse 20, the very beginning of it. Jesus says, “Teaching them to observe all that I’ve commanded you.” Teaching who? Teaching those that God puts in our lives, whether it’s people at work or people at school or people in our own families or people in some far off land that you feel called to. It doesn’t really matter where. What matters is that God has called each of us to be those who teach His commands to others. Our mission in life is to help others experience the grace of knowing Jesus, the joy of knowing a God who loves us and restores us.
Now you might have a fear, you might be thinking right now, Tim, you’re saying that Christians are supposed to teach others, but I’m too afraid to teach others. I don’t know how I could possibly ever teach anyone anything. But as we come together as Christians, what we should be doing, it doesn’t have to be in big grand ways. It doesn’t have to be talking in front of a bunch of people. But in our own ways, in the ways that God has equipped us to speak into other people’s lives, we’re supposed to be seeing the body built up and each of us should be building up each other.
Let’s take a look at Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 to 16, and as I do, note, there are two parts to what Paul says here. He says, “And He that is God gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
Yes, God has appointed some people to be evangelists, to be teachers, to be pastors, but notice what their job is. The job of those called specifically to those roles are, as Paul says, to equip the saints, to equip every believer so that every believer can be building up each other. And He goes on and He talks about the different parts, and it comes back at the end that we’re building each other up to show the love of Jesus through what? Through teaching each other who God is, to speaking into each other’s lives so that we are all learners, learning from each other, learning from the one ultimate teacher.
Now you might, again, have another fear and you say, okay, that’s starting to sound good, but teaching, Jesus is teaching here, and that just sounds so academic, it sounds so college-y. I think of teaching and I think back to classes and maybe you didn’t like being in classes or maybe at least you had your fill of them and so you think, why does the church have to teach? Well, again, if you think about what we were talking about a little while ago, when we face opposition, when we face people who are going to question why we hold to what we do, when we live differently, why we do so, if we don’t understand who God is and what He’s done for us, we’re going to be in trouble.
And it doesn’t mean that every time that there’s an opportunity to teach, it needs to be in a classroom. In fact, if that’s the only time that Christians are teaching other Christians, we’re falling desperately short. We shouldn’t eliminate that either though. We should have all kinds of different opportunities and we should seek as Christians to experience those both as learners and teachers so that we’re not separating and saying, well, there’s some head knowledge that I can learn about the Bible and then I need to learn some practical knowledge and that’s what I really want to focus on because the two bind themselves together.
God has given us His entire word because we need all of it. We need to know who He is and what He has done so that when we come to those quote-unquote practical situations in life, we’re not just going off of someone’s opinion of what God has said, but we actually understand more of who God is and through that, His Spirit will guide us more and more to know what to do.
So when we’re learning about, say, the judges or the kings, that might seem very class-like but even as we’re doing that, we’re seeing God’s heart, we’re seeing what’s important, we’re seeing how He’s had patience with His people, how He’s shown mercy to His people, how He’s been there for His people. Learning who God is is always the most practical thing we can be doing and through that, then, He transforms us, He transforms our lives, He transforms our choices, He transforms the lives of those around us.
It’s not that we’re going to somehow get it all right. We’re always going to have that progress bar less than full in this life. It’s not that if we just know enough of His commandments, we’ll actually follow them all and God will say, you’ve done perfectly and you’ve earned your way into My presence. No, we’re going to fall short. But the closer we come to understanding who He is, the more of His commandments we are able to follow, we get to experience the joy of following them, of understanding more of what God intended for us.
And as we dig into all parts of scripture for that, what do you know? You find that each and every one of those parts is useful on different occasions. Here’s what Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16. He says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” All scripture, every single word in the Bible is useful for that.
And when we say, well, some parts just don’t really speak to me. You know, the interesting thing about that is often the parts that don’t speak to us now are parts that God wants to make sure that we have in our heart for a time later on when they will speak. There have been times where there have been Bible studies I’ve been in, there have been classes I’ve taken on scripture where something wasn’t really speaking to me, but later on I was so glad I knew what I did know. And all of us should be constantly desiring to soak up more of that because it takes a lifetime to soak up the truth of scripture.
When we’re soaking it up and we’re understanding it and then we’re living it out, that’s the experience of being one of those who’s been taught everything that Jesus has commanded and then doing that the same for others. When we stop short and we say, well, maybe people just need something simpler. Maybe the whole of the scripture is just too much in today’s society. What we’re saying is maybe people don’t really need to be strengthened. Because when we boil it down and we try to simplify it and we think, well, this is how it really should be, we wouldn’t ever say this, but we’re essentially saying, well, maybe God got it wrong and He put too much in there. And yet we know He didn’t. He put this in there for you and for me.
And so when we’re willing to engage with it and we’re willing to help others to engage with it, when we’re living lives as learners so that as new people come into the church, they realize that knowing a few basic Christian facts and being able to have an inspirational quote on our wall isn’t the sum total of Christianity, but just the beginning.
What are we doing? We’re helping others to be strengthened for the hard times that each of us are going to face. This year has reminded us of that, that we face hard times. If any of us needed that reminder, it’s unavoidable now. But good times will come again and then hard times will come again. And throughout all of it, we should be encouraging each other. In the church, we should have fellowship, of course. We should do that so we can encourage each other. And we should go into the basics, but then we should constantly be pushing each other to go deeper into God’s word as well, because it isn’t loving to leave people with just a basic understanding of the faith.
When we do, it’s sort of like this Christmas tree that was put up this week. This is, if you will, the Christian life when we first come into it. We look like this tree, and if you’ve seen Charlie Brown Christmas that so many people were comparing this tree to, I suppose we can say, well, there’s something endearing about this poor, just misshapen tree, this tree that doesn’t look like it can really fulfill its purpose of bringing Christmas joy. But this tree wasn’t done.
The problem was the crew was too small that was working on it. There weren’t enough people like they normally would have working on the tree. And so this is the tree as it was. And you look at that, and you think, this tree is falling short of its purpose. What happens when the crew kept working and kept transforming this tree? Look how much better this tree looks, and they weren’t even done yet. This was just the progress on that tree and rearranging its branches again.
In our lives as Christians, we stop far too often at that first spot, either in our own lives or in the way that we serve others. The crew doesn’t seem big enough, and we’re not necessarily always willing to get on board being part of the reshaping crew, because it’s hard, it’s time-consuming, it requires us to dig deeply, it requires us to bring up hard things to others, it requires us to confront hard truths in ourselves. But if you were that Christmas tree, would you want to be that first picture? Of course not. You want to be the one where you can be grand and beautiful and people will celebrate.
And in the Christian life, we should be both those who are being spruced up and those who are sprucing up others, those who are helping others to understand what God’s purpose is for them in their lives. When we say, we’ll just stop at the basics, when we say, what we need to do is just make converts and we don’t actually dig deeply, we’re leaving all those branches astrewn.
But God has more that He intends for us. He intends for us to experience the fullness of His love and His grace, and He intends for us to help each other to experience it. So let’s go ahead and pray right now that God would help us to spruce up our own lives and those around us through His Spirit.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your goodness and your love that you have given us your word. You’ve also given us each other. We’re not called to just enter your kingdom and then be there like that tree with our branches going askew. We’re called to be reshaped by your Spirit. One of the main ways that you do that is through us working with each other, helping each other to grow, to dig into your word, to understand your word, to understand how it applies to our lives. Lord, would you help us to see in those areas that our branches are misshapen and we need someone to help. Would you help us never to be satisfied to leave others just entering the Christian life, just there astrew. Would you help us to go with enthusiasm forward as those who teach everything that you’ve commanded. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, that’s a tall order, isn’t it? That’s why next week it’s so important that we come to the third part of this series, which is that Jesus is with us through everything we’ve been talking about. Preaching the gospel, sharing the gospel with people, that’s hard. It’s hard to talk to people about our faith and try to get them to hear it. And it’s hard to then teach and to be taught. But we have a God who is with us through it all, and so those hard things are made, not necessarily easy in the moment, but are made possible through Him.
And so I hope you’ll come back next week at 7 p.m. and join me for that. In the meantime, though, I do hope that you’ll also join us for the first bit of Christmas celebration that we’re doing. We’re co-sponsoring with other local churches, FaithTree’s Christmas Surprise Movie. And we’re posting clues up this week on the FaithTree Facebook page that you can guess and maybe even win a prize through what the movie’s going to be. But on Friday night, we’ll watch the movie together and discuss it. And if you’ve been thinking a lot about how you need a little Christmas right this very minute this year, well, please come at 6:30 on Friday evening. It’s going to be a wonderful time.
In the meantime, if there’s any way I can be praying for you, if you have any questions about anything we talked about tonight or the movie or anything else, feel free to shoot me an email. I’d love to hear from you. Of course, if you have a prayer request you’d like to share with everyone watching, feel free to leave that in the comments as well, and we can all pray for each other.
And please do follow us on social media. We have lots coming up this Christmas season. I hope that you’ll follow us and that you’ll invite others, that you’ll share the videos that we’re putting out so that others can hear the hope of the God who is with us through everything that we face in life. And I hope that you remember that He is with you this week. Have a blessed week.