Multiplication and Discipleship - Finny Kuruvilla | KFW 2016

When I was in college, I took a standardized test my junior year. The test, it's called the MCAT. It's the test that you have to take in order to apply for medical school. The way that the testing worked back then, this was in 1994, I think it's changed since then, but there were several dozen of us that converged at a testing center, and there we were brought into a particular room.

We were assigned a desk. You sit down at your desk, and there is an exam monitor who gives you two things. Our exam monitor gave us a question book which had all the questions that they wanted us to answer, and you could write notes in there, you could do calculations. It was basically the questions in the scratch paper.

And then there was a second sheet of paper which you were supposed to record your answers on. Now, I don't think they do this today, but back then they called it Scantron, where you would take these number two pencils and you would fill in these little bubbles in a multiple choice test. Probably all the young people have no idea what that's about, but I think many of us do, where you fill in all the answers as you believe they should be.

Well, I was taking this test along with everybody else. The way they announced the end of the test was quite interesting. They have this, I mentioned this exam monitor who's sitting at the front watching everyone to make sure no one's cheating.

At the very end, the monitor almost yells out in a loud voice, "Pencils down, stand up." So they want everybody to put their pencils down. They want everyone to stand up at their desk because they don't want anybody to have any more time beyond their allotted period to mark any further answers in their answer page.

So the time came, and our monitor said, "Pencils down, stand up." And like that, the whole room stands up. You can hear all the seats scooting. Except right in front of me, there was a young lady about my age who was sitting there furiously putting down answers in her answer sheet.

Everyone saw it. The monitor saw it. And again, the monitor yelled out, "Pencils down, stand up." She just proceeded to keep going, keep going. And we're all thinking, "Does she want to get disqualified? What's going on here?" Well, the monitor was obviously perturbed at this, and so she walked over to the students and literally grabbed the pencil out of her hand to prevent her from taking the test any further.

So a few of us were curious what happened there, and so we chatted with this young lady after this episode happened. And she told us that when she was taking the exam, she decided to do everything in that answer book. She did. She put her answers down in that, sorry, in the question book. She put all of her answers there. She marked it all up. But she hadn't put anything down on the answer key, on the answer sheet, rather. And so when the woman yelled out, "Pencils down, stand up," she looked at her answer sheet. She hadn't written anything down on her answer sheet. It was all in this basically scratch book. And so she panicked and tried to get as much as she could from her question book into this answer sheet.

And the reason I tell this story is that I think it's a great picture of something that I have a lot of concern about in the church broadly and certainly for us today. At these conferences, we talk a lot. These retreats, we talk a whole lot. Some of you have come to this weekend to hear fairly well-known, fine speakers, people like Dean Taylor and others.

You may be taking notes. But I get worried that we're doing all of this intake, all of this head knowledge, but very little gets implemented into action. I get worried that we're stuck in the question book. We have all these fine thoughts. We have these nice CDs. We have these feel-good moments. But that's not going to matter because there's going to come an hour where we're going to hear from God, "Pencils down, stand up." And the question that we have to answer is, what will we have to show at that moment?

The right way to take a test is as soon as you have an answer figured out, you put the answer down on that paper. You don't wait until the very end. You do this in real time. You figure out something. You solve it. You put it down. You just keep moving, steady, steady, steady all the way through. You don't wait till it's perfect. You put it into action.

What we're going to talk about in our session today is the very first command in the whole Bible, which is, of course, "Be fruitful and multiply." As Matthew records it, he records Jesus's last command, of course, being to make disciples, which I take as being to multiply as well.

So when we hear from God one day, "Pencils down, stand up," what are we going to say? "Hey, we read a bunch of good books. We went to Kingdom Fellowship weekend. I listened to all these great CDs." All of that is like marking up writing in the question book.

This meeting gets bigger and bigger each year. I think this is my sixth consecutive Kingdom Fellowship weekend. Praise God for that. But I worry that sometimes with these meetings, more and more people come because there's buzz and excitement and a way to get stimulated as opposed to a way to learn how to act and implement and actually advance the kingdom forward.

So my goal for this message is to take those of you who are serious into very concrete applications, which I'm going to leave you with, to honor Jesus in a specific way.

It is amazing by way of correction how much bad theology there is in hymns. This is one of my pet peeves. I talk about this a lot in our group. Many people have heard me say this. It's very interesting because if you want to control what people think, control what they sing.

Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist, used to say this all the time. He said, "If we can control the songs of our people, we will control what they believe." And so there was a whole repertoire of songs that they introduced, songs like "We Shall Overcome," that were designed to get their people to believe a narrative, to believe a story. Well, there's one type of line, and I've chosen one line from one song. I won't say the name of the song. That says this, "For you are my God, you alone are my joy."

That actually irks me. I don't know if that irks you, but this is the kind of thing that when I read hymns, it bothers me. Does it sound innocuous to you, or does it irk you? "For you are my God, you alone are my joy."

It's a real hymn. The reason it bothers me is that the Bible doesn't say anything like that. In fact, the Bible actually says something that's almost the opposite of that. In First Thessalonians 2:19, it says, "For what is our hope or joy or crown of rejoicing? Is it not even you in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming?"

The notion that we have this solitary joy in God and God alone is an extremely Protestant, unbiblical notion. In fact, a far more biblical idea of the source of our joy and hope and crown of rejoicing or crown of boasting, as some translations render it, yes, God is obviously the primary actor in that, the primary figure, but just as much, it is supposed to be bound up with people. That is a very important notion that we need to get our minds straight around.

So when our days draw to a close, what are we going to say? Who will we say is our hope, our joy, our crown of rejoicing? Which individuals? If I asked you right now to we won't do this, but if I asked you right now to get out a piece of paper and mark down who are those individuals that are your hope, your joy, your crown of rejoicing, what would you put on that paper?

It's a good exercise for us to think about. In fact, discipleship is what generates that hope, that joy, that crown.

What I want to do now briefly is just do a small thought experiment. I don't know if you've ever done this type of thought experiment, but I have, which is to ask this question about Jesus. What if Jesus, when he was on this earth, was killed as a baby by Herod? So I think virtually all of us know the story that Herod tried to kill all of the baby boys in the Bethlehem area. What if he had succeeded?

The reason I ask that question is that many, if not most, of the creeds throughout church history, they go right from his birth to his death. They talk about he was born under a virgin, and they jump to his death under Pontius Pilate.

And so if that's the case, then is it really that big of a deal? What about just saying he was born of a virgin? He died under Herod. Would that blood have satisfied the wrathful God just as much that way? You ever thought about that?

Well, hopefully, we have enough sense as kingdom people to know that that notion of salvation is very wrongheaded. There was much more that Jesus accomplished than merely shedding his blood. Obviously, shedding his blood was incredibly important. Going to the cross and dying was very important. But there were several other elements to the incarnation and what he brought that are just as important to putting together the package of what salvation is. So one of those elements is his teaching. So Jesus said, "The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life." That's John 6:63. That's a strong statement. "The words that I speak to you are spirit and life."

In First John, it talks about how he was going to he came to earth. One of the reasons he came was to destroy the works of the devil. That's another important reason. But the third reason that I want to highlight for our purposes this morning is to note that Jesus had to show us how to make disciples, that that third element of his mission was just as integral to the plan of salvation as the others.

Now, if we believe that Jesus came to this earth not just to die of course, he came to die for us and to suffer for our sins. But if he came to show us how to make disciples, we should then ask the question, was Jesus aimless in his methods? Was he just sort of bumbling through and figuring things out as he went?

Now, I think all of us have enough sense to know that that is a ridiculous answer, that Jesus, of all men, was the most purposeful, the most calculated, the most intentional and wise man to ever have lived. And once you see his strategy, once you see his method, it is unmistakably clear. And I'm going to walk through some things which I think probably most people in this room have missed.

In Jesus, we see the plan for ultimately conquering the world. What's so interesting is that it's almost like he's a great general where generals craft these plans, and often, their plans are misunderstood. They're misunderstood because they have the art of surprise. There's something to it that people don't get. When it's all done, you look back retrospectively, and you see the genius of the general. You see the genius of the plan as it unfolds.

Just as the plan to rescue humanity through a baby in a manger was humble and unassuming, it is just as much the case that this plan to make disciples of all nations is filled with genius and is awe-inspiring.

The Son of God contemplates and weighs all of the alternatives, and he designs a method that will secure the salvation of his people. Jesus knows that his plan will win. At Dean Taylor the other day, he noted that Jesus's discipleship can be summarized in two words, and I think that's absolutely correct. Follow me.

You pray like I pray. You teach like I teach. You heal like I heal. You love like I love. That's his plan. I've sometimes called this intensive companionship. That's my way of summarizing what Jesus was doing in his way of discipling his 12. And the thing that I sometimes ask myself is, if Jesus was on earth, the perfect man, the Son of God, had to spend three years pouring out, investing into this small little group of men, dare we imagine that with far less effort, we can accomplish discipleship in other people? Have you ever thought about that, that Jesus himself, the perfect man, the Son of God, it took him and his plan took him three years to pour into these people?

And somehow, we think with some little cliché or class or something like that, we can accomplish what Jesus called discipleship. I think we're mistaken in that notion.

Yesterday, there was a comment that was made several times by a few speakers that said, "There's no command in the Bible to be in community." And that's correct. But let me offer my humble thoughts about that particular subject.

Neither is it the case that there is a command in the Bible to plant churches. You can look in the whole New Testament. You will not find a command to plant churches.

So is planting churches wrong? Should we be part of churches? How does that work? Well, of course, once we realize the primary command is to make disciples, disciples self-organize themselves into churches, and churches are the natural outflow of the process of making disciples.

My contention is that in a very similar way, we are given many commands that are the one another commands. You've probably heard that phrase before. The one another commands are the many commands in the New Testament where we're commanded to do things like, "Love one another. Bear one another's burden," Galatians 6. "Through love, serve one another," Galatians 5. "In honor, give preference to one another," Romans 12. "Receive one another," Romans 15. "Submit to one another," Ephesians 5. "Confess your sins to one another," James 5. So my contention is that if you are trying to do the one another's, out of that will spring something like a community, just like churches spring out of making disciples.

There's a natural and organic connection between the two. Discipleship is to church planting as the one another commands are to community. So this is why the kind of the typical Sunday-Wednesday model that so many people have is broken. We are unable to live out those one another's with the same degree of intention.

So I mentioned that Jesus practices an intensive companionship. There's another great way to think about how Jesus does discipleship. And I get this phrase from the medical world. When you're first on the wards and you're first seeing patients, you're very intimidated. You have no idea what end is up. You hardly are able to have even a shred of confidence. But I remember when I was on the ward, someone told me this. They said, "Just remember this phrase, 'See one, do one, teach one.' 'See one, do one, teach one.' Simple as that. He said, "You're going to see a bunch of things. But when you see it, know that the next time, you're going to be asked to do it.

So watch it with the intent that you're going to be doing it shortly after. And then as soon as you do it, know that as you do it, you're going to be teaching it to somebody else right after." That is actually a very good way to describe what Jesus does. He, of course, prays and does miracles and heals. And then he asks his disciples to do that. And then he asks his disciples to teach others to do that. See one, do one, teach one. But there's another very important dimension to this conversation. And I want you to notice this, that Jesus ministers to three basic groups. And we're going to call them concentric rings.

The first group that Jesus ministered to, we'll call the crowds. So there's just this large, amorphous group of people that don't really have well-defined boundaries. And they're here and there. And they kind of fall around Jesus. They're slightly different in every different place that he goes. That's the largest ring. That's the largest circle that Jesus is ministering to. Then there's another ring inside of that, which we'll call the 12. The Bible calls them the 12. Those are the 12 apostles.

But there's another ring. There's another ring inside of the 12, and they are the three. The three are, of course, Peter, James, and John. Now, I'm going to make a statement that hopefully isn't controversial. This is not by accident. This is actually by design, these three concentric levels of ministry that Jesus operated in. He didn't just happen to do this.

By way of analogy, I will make a loose contention that our Sunday gatherings in most churches that we're a part of are sort of like the crowds. There's visitors. There's people there. There's often kind of you don't know who's going to show up. And they're fairly amorphous. I mean, the core group will be there, of course. But there's just this large mass of people.

The 12 is probably a lot like your midweek, where your midweek, hopefully, there's a relatively stable core of people there that you know are going to be there time and time and time again. You can count on them. But the question is, what about the three? Where does that happen? Where does that happen for you? Where does that happen in your church life?

The contention that I will make is that for most of us, probably, there's a missing link, which is that Jesus modeled this final concentric ring that most of us tend to overlook. There's a principle in Jesus's ministry that we see time and time again, which is that to win the many, focus on the few.

To win the many, focus on the few. And the beauty of the kingdom parables of the leaven and the mustard seed is that the smallness of the means is contrasted with the greatness of the end. There is something very beautiful in Jesus's ways that he demonstrates that even with the three. So with the three, think about where were the three present in Jesus's most intimate moments when he goes to the Mount of Transfiguration? He brings Peter, James, and John along with him. When he's praying at Gethsemane and weeping and the drops of sweat are falling like blood, he invites Peter, James, and John to come with him.

I believe we all, as individuals, as part of our congregation, should have these three layers as well. Remember what Jesus said, "For I have given you an example that you should do as I have done to you," John 13:15. Now, you may think I'm being too literal here and pressing things too far. But hopefully, you're not. And hopefully, you can work with me through this. Now, I want to ask you, do you have people at these three levels? Do you have a sense? When you hear that, you think like, "Oh, yeah. I get this. I understand what this means. Do you know what this looks like?" Well, I have some great news for you, which is that if you don't, Jesus has an answer for us about how to do this.

We're going to walk through that, what this actually looks like practically. And the answer is such that when we hear from God, "Pencils down, stand up," we will be able to bear incredible, multiplicative, as we will see, fruit.

So I told you I was going to give you a specific challenge. This is a very specific, "Be like Jesus," challenge today. Now, before I give the specifics of the challenge, I want to motivate you with a particular example. So I don't know exactly how many people are here in the room today. Somebody told me 500. 9:13. 9:13. Wow. Okay. So there's almost 1,000 people here. It's impressive.

What I want to do is the following exercise. Let's pretend for a moment that none of us, not a single person in here except for one, knows the Lord. We're all lost. And for the sake of our example, I'm going to choose here, Brother Tim, as the one person who knows the Lord. And he has purposed to do outreach to this group of 900 people. Now, this is an intimidating group. This is a big group, right? How do you even tackle something like this?

But let's have Tim choose and I want you to stand up, choose three different people. And maybe you can scatter them throughout just to stand up. And we're going to pretend that you're going to pour yourself into these three people just like Jesus did over the course of a year. So go ahead and choose three, maybe one in the front, one in the middle, and one in the back.

See if he can stand up after he picks you.

And you can choose a man or a woman. It doesn't matter for this example.

Okay. Great. So now, we have a total of four people, right, Tim plus the three people that he selected. So now, I would like all four of you to do just what Tim did. Each of you pick three people and have them stand. So we're at the end of year one now. Tim has poured himself into three people. And you have said, "At the end of this year, we're going to pour ourselves into three more people." So we're going to do that. So each of you go find three people and ask them to stand.

Okay. So now, we are at the end of year two. And we have 16 people standing up. Now, let's do it again. Each of the 16 of you choose three people, have them stand up, and try to distribute it so they're not so clustered together.

And make sure you stand. It's really important that after you get picked, you stand up because we need this to know who's been picked and who hasn't.

Okay. Did we get all of them? Okay. So now, we have or should have, if everyone did their job, we have 64 people standing up. Okay. Let's do it. So now, we're at the end of year three, right? We've done these three cycles. Now, let's do it again. Each of the 64 of you, select three people, ask them to stand. Again, try to distribute it out a little bit.

Okay. Make sure you get all three.

All right. Now, there should be 256 people standing up right now. So each of you go and find three people and ask them to stand.

There's a cluster in the front here that I think has been ignored. I think most of you are going in the back, assuming there's people. But there's a bunch in the front.

Okay. From my vantage point, I'm a little higher up than all of you. I can't see anybody sitting. But I can't see some of the recesses between people. If we did it correctly, we had the capacity to reach 1,024 people with that. So we can all take our seats at this point.

So I don't know about you. But for me, to think about working with three people is much less intimidating, much more workable than looking at 913 people who are sitting here.

This is the power of multiplication as opposed to the power of addition. Jesus gives us the principle of multiplication. There's many ways we can see this. I'll tell you a couple of other examples that, for me, are compelling. Let's imagine that you meet someone who's a super discipler, kind of a mega discipler. This person can disciple 1,000 people a year. It's almost unbelievable, right? I've never met somebody who could do that. But let's say there's a person you meet, and they legitimately can disciple 1,000 people a year.

With our little humble strategy of just working with three people, pouring into them very simply for one year and repeating just like we did, after seven years, our super disciple has now discipled 7,000 people. How many would we have achieved? Over 16,000. After seven years, we beat the super discipler.

Isn't that amazing? This is a genius strategy that Jesus had. You don't have to be the super discipler. You pour into a small number. Make it even more amazing. Let's say there was one follower of Jesus on the planet, just one. And you said, "I want to reach the whole world." And you were the only one. There's roughly 7 billion people on the Earth. With our exercise, what we just did today, reaching out to three people, you could reach the whole world in 16 years, one-sixth years, every person on the planet.

This is amazing. This is the power of multiplicative growth. To win the many, focus on the few. Quiet and unassuming is the growth of the mustard seed. But great is its growth.

So what inhibits multiplication? We could spend a whole sermon about this. I'm just going to spend a very short amount of time on this so we can get into some of the practicals. There's a couple of things. One of the most common causes for multiplication being hindered, even in the biologic realm, if you, for example, look at humans who smoke, their fertility actually falls quite a bit as a result of all the toxins that go into their body.

Toxins are naturally what inhibit reproduction. So I will make the contention that the best way to safeguard growth because I care a lot about sustainable growth. There have been many movements in the last 30 years, 30, 40 years. I can think of a handful right off the top of my head that have grown very quickly but have collapsed very quickly as well. What I have not seen in, frankly, any of those movements is a teaching of separation from the world.

Separation from the world is what prevents toxins from getting into our blood, into our community. If you take away separation from the world, I guarantee you, you might get some flashy growth in the beginning. But I guarantee you, it will not be sustainable.

There is something very, very important that most people don't appreciate. They think separation is this weird doctrine. It is the safeguard that our Savior has given us to allow us to grow without toxins. There's another reason that growth doesn't happen. And again, think biologically about this. Think about husbands and wives. Husbands and wives have to be intimate in order for there to be reproduction. If there's no intimacy, there's no growth.

And one of the reasons why I wanted to touch on community and those principles there is that there's nothing like the power of intimacy, the power of a group that truly loves one another, where there's true friendship, there's true sacrifice, there's true bearing up that can multiply. If there's tension, if there's hostility, if there's divisions, it will never grow. This is a very important principle. We can talk about other causes that inhibit multiplication. We won't for our purpose today.

So I mentioned that discipleship is intensive companionship. It's follow me. We're going to try to share life together. But there is a value in meetings. And for me, the way that I think about meetings in the setting of the church is I think about meetings almost like families think about meals. So all of us have grown up in families. And all of us know what it is to have meals together. It would be a strange family that just came together, had meals, and left. They didn't see each other except for sitting around the table, right? It would be almost like a fast food restaurant.

That's a lot like many churches, frankly, where there's some meetings, and then they go. There's no life together. In fact, the meals are supposed to be the overflow where you process and talk about things and have lots of things come together. And it would similarly be dysfunctional to share life together but never have meals, right? A lot of American families today, they just plop themselves in front of the TV and have a TV dinner. They don't talk to each other. That's strange too. So there's supposed to be the life together, the intensive companionship. And there is a good and healthy place for meetings. I've seen people who have, because they've gone to a more, call it, organic extreme, they've rejected the value of meetings.

And that's a big mistake.

So what do we do? How do we think about these groups, particularly this lowest level, this group of the three that Jesus models there? I want to credit John Wesley for this. Many of you in Boston heard me talk about this a couple of weeks ago in one of our midweeks. Wesley was one of the pioneers of going back to the biblical model and thinking about how to implement what Jesus taught in a careful and systematic way. This is the reason why the Methodist grew so profoundly.

I shared with the group back in Boston that there were two peers, George Whitfield and John Wesley. And Whitfield, by many accounts, was the more talented preacher or was the more successful evangelist. But near the end of his life, he credits Wesley. And there's a great dialogue where Whitfield basically says, "My efforts," and he says, "are a rope of sand." He says, "They're not going to lead to anything." But Wesley, who invested in discipleship and these rings and bands and his whole network, what he has created will endure. It's a fascinating dialogue there that, if you're interested, you can ask me about. So what do we do? I believe that we can look at scripture here and say that there is a clear paradigm we have from Jesus himself to have the core unit, the tightest unit of discipleship be occurring in these groups of four.

So Jesus plus three is four, rather. So why this model? Some people have gone in favor of the one-on-one model. That's not actually a biblical model for discipleship. Nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But you lose something in that. You lose the dynamism of the group. There's a certain energy that happens when you can get a few people together. One-on-one sessions can become, frankly, more like counseling sessions than they can be about discipling. As I mentioned, there's not biblical precedence for it. Like I said, I'm not saying it's wrong. But it's not as attractive. It doesn't have the merits of this Jesus model of the core unit there. In fact, if you go and think about, can you really have 12 very close friends that you're sharing your life with on a weekly basis?

It's very hard to do that. Most of us can. I mean, most of us, three is doable. Even that might be challenging. This is a widely appreciated phenomenon in the secular world, in the business world, study groups. If you're a student now, you don't have study groups of 12 people. I've been fascinated by the Navy SEALs. I've been doing reading and studying about this group, these very elite people who work in the military. And similarly, their core groups are these groups of approximately three people. There's a lot of ways you can see this, many different evidences for it from the secular world and from the Bible. So if you hit six, I think you should actually multiply into two.

The right number is between three and five. So my challenge to you is to work with your church, work with your leaders, and have every person seek to be working in this kind of context. Now, it is important that in these groups, we find open, hungry people. We don't want to be doing something for the sake of numbers. We know that Jesus's call to discipleship was a very costly one. Jesus made these calls of discipleship. And often, people would say things like, "Well, I got to go back and bury my dad," or, "Well, I have to go back and take care of this." And he said, "Go. You're not going to be with me."

The single most important attribute, I believe, in finding a person this is humility. Discipleship, at its core, is about correcting and teaching and speaking into one another's lives. And if you don't have a teachable spirit, discipleship doesn't work. It can't happen. We have to be people who are humble and teachable and willing to learn from one another. One of the things that I actually do this from time to time in my own prayer life, I think a lot about the analogy that Jesus gave of us being like sheep. And so I get on my hands and my knees, get on all fours, and I go, "Bah, bah," like a sheep to remind myself that I'm a sheep because we're sheep.

And we can never get so full of ourselves that we forget that basic need. So what do you do in these meetings? I think there's basically four components there should be. The first is prayer. I think it's a great thing to come together. There is a handful of people here. We've been praying together for about two years, twice a week from Tuesday and Thursday, 6:30 to 7:30 or so. And we have bonded so much through that. And Tim is one of the people. I see him nodding. And some of the other people are not even in the same state. But it's been tremendous to see how much this bonds us together. We share hearts. We know what's going on in our lives.

It's usually about five or six people. It's been tremendous. The next component is accountability. We actually have adapted John Wesley's questions for our purposes. And I'll read you some of the questions. Like I said, most of these come from Wesley. But imagine being asked this every week. And how would you receive this? What would this do to your spiritual life to have three trusted brothers and sisters, brothers or sisters - we do single gender, men with men and women with women, brothers or sisters, depending on your gender - ask these kinds of questions? Here's a few. Am I self-absorbed, self-pitying, or self-justifying?

Have I grumbled or complained? I like this question. Wesley had a way of writing things. Does the Bible live in me? Imagine somebody asking that on a weekly basis. Does the Bible live in me? Here's another one. When did I last speak to someone about my faith? What's your answer to that? Somebody asks you today. What's your answer?

This is not from Wesley, but we've put this in. Have you looked at anything the past week which you would not with the church watching with you?

Have you led a life of self-denial? Jesus said, "Anybody who wants to follow him must deny himself and follow him." The Moravians would ask the question, which I love. They would ask one another, "What do you see in me that is marring the image of Christ?" Isn't that a great question to ask people who know you well and can work with you and say, "Be open with me. What do you see in me that is marring the image of Christ?"

Discipleship begins with something small, something unassuming. As I said, when we learn things, we ought to put it down to paper. We ought to put it down on that piece of paper that's our answer paper, not keep it in some other realm.

I mentioned the next element in this. There's three elements: first is prayer, second is accountability, the third actually, there's three elements: prayer, accountability, and the last one is the Word. So the Word is something that I think we still haven't even scratched the surface of how important this is. I was so glad that KFW has consistently put these memory passages up there. And a lot of people I know have the reaction like, "Oh, that's for children. Children memorize versus adults don't do that."

It's a huge mistake, colossal mistake. It's one of the worst mistakes that you can make. One of the things which I love about Jesus's parables, particularly the parable of the sower, is that he teaches us that our fruitfulness depends on our hospitality to the Word.

Such a simple concept, isn't it? Our fruitfulness depends on our hospitality to the Word. If we allow the Word of God to take residence in our heart, divine life and power spring forth.

Can you memorize regularly? What a great way to do that in the context of a small group of people. Again, it's hard to do in a big group. It doesn't really work. But with a small group, pick a verse, pick a passage, pick a book, pick what works for you.

I work a fair bit with college students, medical students, graduate students. And this is something that I tell people again and again, that there's something about the Word of God. This comes from Jesus. It's described as being something that grows. Biological things, they grow multiplicatively. They grow exponentially. Yeast. Yeast is a single-celled organism, yeast or leaven. And it goes from one to two to four to eight to sixteen, just like we did. The analogy of the kingdom that Jesus gives there is very much a multiplicative one.

If this is the type of metaphor that's used for the Word, being like a seed, something biologic, something organic, there's something that we can harvest as a result of this, which let's call the compounding interest effect. So if you can get the Word of God into your life early, you get a much greater return with time because that interest will compound. One of the things that I'm so grateful that my parents had me do this. From when we were three years old, my parents would have us memorize whole chapters of the Bible, usually one to two. And they would have us get up in front of the church and recite it. Three years old, they would sit with us for hours and hours.

They would just go over it again and again and again and just drill into our brains, "Okay. Now, you're going to get up on Sunday. You're going to say it in front of everybody." And I am so glad for that because I know that that compounded in so many different ways.

There are many metaphors for the Word in scripture.

One of my favorite metaphors, one of my favorite pictures of the Word, which I hope this excites you for the purpose of your discipling multiplicative groups, comes from Ephesians 6, where the armor of God is portrayed. And what article, what weapon is the Word of God likened to? The sword. The sword. That's right.

So I'm going to read to you a small quote that once this hit my brain, it changed the way that I thought about the Word. It says this, "Suppose that someone attacked you on a dark street and started wrestling with you.

If he were to pull a knife, the whole battle would suddenly be centered on one thing, control of the knife. All of a sudden, you'd forget about punching him in the nose. You'd be grabbing for his wrist and trying to knock that knife out of his hand. For you realize that it is the deciding factor in this battle."

Do you see this picture? Yeah.

The devil knows that the Christian who's armed with the Word has a sword. And he will do his best, his very best, to wrench it out of your hand. Yes. This is one of the great values of these groups to encourage. You got to get into the Word, memorize, study. I'm a person who inhales books and sermons. I can't get enough of the Word. I'm always in them. From a very young age, from when I was 16, I committed myself to get the Word deep into me because this is the picture that I want us to understand. This is what's decisive in the battle.

There's an author who I'm going to wrap up here in the next five minutes. There's an author whose name is Galilee. And he challenges us to ask simply two questions. Do we, do you, have a comprehensive plan for making disciples? That's question number one. Question number two is, is it working?

Very simple. So I asked you that. Do you, does your church, do you have a comprehensive plan for making disciples? That's my first one. If you don't, there's a problem. You need to have that. And I've laid out here what Jesus's way of doing that. And if you do and it's not working, well, it's time to go back and revisit it and make some adjustments.

I want to close just with a couple of meditations on the joy of multiplication. There's something about multiplying that you can't grasp the beauty and the joy of it. Not everyone here is called to be a parent. Not everyone here will be a parent.

Many of us are called to singleness. Many of us can have children. All of us, however, are called to have spiritual children. Every single person who calls himself or herself a Christian is supposed to do that. Because of this relationship between biological begetting, biological offspring, and spiritual begetting, I think that we can learn a lot from the joys of parenting and liken that to the joys of discipling.

There's a verse that I like, my wife and I both like, from one of the epistles of John where he says, "I have no greater joy than what?

To hear that my children are walking in the truth." For John, this is exactly the thought that I gave you from that Thessalonians verse, right, where in Thessalonians, Paul says, "What's our joy? What's our hope? What's our crown of reducing?" It's you. It's people. It's the people that he's writing the letter to. This is the exact same thought that John is giving in his own words. He's saying, "There's no greater joy that I have than to hear of my children." I believe he's talking about spiritual children here, are walking in the truth.

Now, anybody who has children knows that it's hard work. It's messy. Everything is sticky in the house. And you have no idea why.

But you find places in your heart that you didn't even know existed before you had children. Isn't this true? Yes.

The other day, we were sitting around after one of our church meetings. And our two-year-old came up to me. His name's John, little guy whose speech is still forming. And he came up to me and asked for a lollipop. And I thought, "I'm not going to give you a lollipop. That's a sugary treat in the middle of the day." He said, "No." And he said, "But I wanted to give it to I want to give it to Zoya." Zoya's a little girl in our group. I think she's sure how old she is, maybe four years old, three or four. And I thought, "This must be a ploy.

A two-year-old can't ask for a lollipop so that he wants to give it to a little girl." So I thought, "You know what? This is a great little test. I'm going to give it. I'm going to follow him secretly and just see what he does." And so I gave him the lollipop. And I secretly followed him into the horny's house. And he went in there. And he went into the little room, didn't know I was there. And he burst open the door. And he ran into the room. And he's screaming, "Zoya!" And he gave her this lollipop. And she was just smiling and happy. It was such a great scene. That scene was the best scene of my whole month.

What greater joy do we have to see our children walking in the truth?

My plea is that we consider the aims of Jesus. And we take this seriously. The time will come. We will all hear. Pencils down. Stand up. I don't want this to end up in theory. I don't want this to end up in some kind of scratch paper. I want this to end up in people.

Let us close in prayer. And we'll turn the meeting back over to Brother Dale.

Father in heaven, thank you for the model that you have given us in Jesus, who is the genius of all geniuses, who understands how powerful multiplication is, and who has shown us the way of life. I pray that we would invest ourselves in concert with our church, in concert with our mood weeks, into a small group of three to five people. I pray that every person here would feel this burden to live as Jesus lived, to be part of these discipling relationships as he called us to. God, we have not even scratched the surface of the multiplicative power that exists in these principles.