The Making of a Disciple

Good morning, brothers and sisters. It's really a blessing, really special, to be with you all here this morning. I think it's been two years since we've been here, and it feels like our life has changed pretty dramatically in many ways. There's roots and there's foundations that definitely have not changed, but here, just a couple days ago, I was in Lafayette, Louisiana, and maybe some of you remember when I first came here, I talked about a friend that I had in college named Danny Landry.

And I did not I think maybe a year after I was here, I went up to visit him in Quebec City with Byron Wadle, and that was the last time that I saw him until two days ago. And I found his phone number and texted him a couple days ago, a couple days before I saw him. And he left me a voicemail in return and said something like, "This is probably not the Danny Landry that you roomed with in college. Hopefully, in this time, I've become a better man, and you'll find a different person than you knew before."

And yet, when I found him, there was something that was very much the same. He was one of the most polite people that I've met, always yes-sir and full of compassion and so on. But he had a true encounter with Jesus in 2018 and repented of things that involved getting rid of technology in his life. And it just blesses me to see how God works with people where there's a foundation and there's a sameness, there's a coming back to the real things. And when I first came here to Shippensburg Christian Fellowship, one of the foundational things that was, I would say, imparted to me by you all as brothers and sisters, as heaven-bound pilgrims, just the heart and desire to follow Jesus, to be a disciple, and probably more so than I'd ever heard in my life at that time, at 21 years old when I came here, was the call to actually, in real everyday life, to follow Jesus.

And I still I've heard that over and over, a refrain repeated in all the brothers and sisters that are heaven-bound pilgrims that I've met between then and today. And I hear that refrain today as well, and I just I want to go back to that, and I want to share Jesus' refrain that He says over and over to the people that He talks to in the New Testament, in the Gospels, is, "Follow Me." And then when we are left as His disciples with the great commission to go into all the world and to make disciples, so there's a being disciples and there's a making disciples that kind of bookends the words of Jesus, the call of Jesus.

And I'm titling this today, "The Making of a Disciple," and bear with me here while I get used to the whiteboard and the pens here. We don't have a whiteboard and pens, so it's been a long time since I've used it, and we'll see how this goes here, but I'm eager to write down an outline here.

And first off, though, I would like to just talk about the word disciple, just for some interesting, enjoyable things. I don't know how many of you like looking at the roots of a word or etymology, but the word disciple in Greek comes from a word that goes back further in languages, back further than Greek, and English and French and many European languages and even languages in India all go back kind of to probably one of the original languages at the Tower of Babel.

And it's called PIE, Proto-Indo-European. And it's kind of a made-up language that is imagined as this language that these all go back to, and I say probably that's right, back at the Tower of Babel. However, there is a word there, a root, called ment, like this.

And that root is found in a lot of different languages. We talk about it when we are using the word mental, or even it drops the N and has math, mathematics, and you might think of some more things. Just about everywhere you see the prefix or the root word ment, it's back to this word to learn.

And so looking at mathematics, in the old days, if you look in an old dictionary, mathematics was lessons. When you went and did your mathematics, you were doing your lessons, not just with numbers and adding and subtracting and so on. And in Greek, the word to learn is manthano, or manthano, and it's that same root word, ment, manthano, to learn. And then, as it is so often in Greek, the noun of what a person is who learns is based on the verb. So we oftentimes have nouns that we don't realize they might not even be based on a verb. Is tree based on a verb? I mean, you can use it as a verb, like when a coon is treed, but that's because it's in a tree.

But is the tree itself a verb? Maybe if we called it the one who leaves, or the one who makes leaves, it would be a noun that was based on a verb, right? Well, lots of Greek nouns are based on verbs. So the word for disciple is one who learns, mathetes. So you have to learn is manthano, and the one who learns is a mathetes.

This is the word that is most often translated disciple in the New Testament. And in the Old Testament, we can find this also because of the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation from before Christ of the Old Testament, and you can find the same word, mathetes, and manthano for disciple and making disciples and being a disciple, learning.

You can find in many places in the Old Testament that that same Greek word is used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Now, I explored down some of the other veins of this root word, ment, that bred these words and mathematics in English, and I'm not going to talk about what the other words are, but what color they give, interesting things that they give.

One other language, when it uses the word ment, means to care. Is to care related to learn? Another one is wide awake. In that language, when they use the root ment, it has to do with something being wide awake. How do you suppose being wide awake might be related to learning or being a disciple?

Another one is to look at. That seems pretty easy to understand. And a fourth one is to be awake or lively. And so it's interesting to me to see that this word that God chose to be used in the New Testament to describe what a disciple is has this color of being a learner, to care, to be wide awake, to look at things, to be awake and lively.

And when I was a child in the Willamette Valley in Oregon and we went to visit my grandma, there were so many interesting things to learn and to discover. And on the way there, we always drove past a town called Philomath, math, philo math.

And as I was studying this root word, I was thinking about all the interesting things that I learned and discovered and so on at my grandma's house with one who was just a lover of learning, a true disciple. And it made me think of this town, and I wondered what it meant, and I looked it up, and it's named after a college that was named for love of learning, like phileo, philo, math, love of learning.

So are you a Philomath? Are you a lover of learning? Are you a true disciple? And then I'd like to talk a little bit about the attitudes of a learner, just kind of listing off some words here to think about. When you learn, you grow.

And there's ways to grow. You can add, and some things you can absorb.

When you learn, you're able to admit that you're wrong, and you're able to change. That's a pretty strong character quality of learning. And then people who learn, they understand principles, order, structure, patterns, and then you know what story problems are, right?

The most fun part of math, where you actually get to take the principles and the structures and patterns of math and apply them to real life, and it makes it so fun and interesting, right? Story problems? Is that I'm not getting quite the response that well, but there is a discipline here with being a learner and being a disciple of taking patterns.

And think about being a disciple of Jesus and taking patterns and commands, teachings, and applying them to real life, like the story problems of being a follower of Jesus, the story problems of being a Christian. Learners are flexible. Learners are observant. Learners like to discover. Learners are characterized by humility and willingness. And I think probably this last several months here, this idea of willingness has really been on my heart. I like to learn, and I like to discover, but I get challenged by being willing, and I'm just not always as willing as I should be. And brothers and sisters, I think we need to learn to be willing. Sometimes we have to make changes in our life.

And there's things about the changes that we've made as a family in the last couple years here that I just was barely willing. It was pretty difficult for me. But there was a blessing that went along with being willing and learning that I would have totally missed if I would have been unwilling to lay certain things down.

And like we talked about earlier today in Sunday school, another attitude of a learner is being self-disciplined. And then learners exude a contagiousness that inspires others to learn. And it is amazing where you can be inspired, from what you can be inspired. And as I was preparing these notes here, I was remembering about a man, I think he's probably in his 30s, named Joel Strubar, and I met him in Wyoming, and I was with James, my son, going through the Fellowship Meal food line, and James was talking to him, and he was James said something to him about, "Is it your birthday?" And he said, "Yes, it's my birthday."

And it was just like this. And then I sat down across from Joel, and my wife did too, and the whole time he was just so excited. He couldn't talk about things that were very deep or maybe the type of conversation that I would normally have with many of you, but he had so much excitement and love of learning and just asking questions and being excited about his birthday even, just that today was his birthday, even more so than just about anybody else that I've asked or heard asked if it was their birthday.

Let's catch a little bit of that. So for an outline here,

the new disciple, the daily disciple, and the old disciple, where do you fall?

Let's turn to John 1, John chapter 1, and let's read some of the things that happened with the first disciples of Jesus. When they were new disciples, they had just been disciples of John, and I think they were actually fairly new disciples of John, and John had told them, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." And they were interested, and so they turned, and they went away from John, and they followed Jesus.

Let's start, let's see. Let's start in verse 29. The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him and saith, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. This is he of whom I said, 'After me cometh a man which is preferred before me,' for he was before me. And I knew him not, but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water." And John bear record saying, "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him, and I knew him not. But he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, 'Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.'" And I saw, and bear record that this is the Son of God.

This is the exciting language that these two men were hearing. And again, the next day after, John stood and two of his disciples, and looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, "Behold the Lamb of God. That's God's Lamb."

And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned and saw them following and saith unto them, "What seek ye?" They said unto him, "Rabbi," which is to say, being interpreted, "Master, where dwellest thou?" He saith unto them, "Come and see." And they came and saw where he dwelt and abode with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour.

This blesses me very much. Jesus turned to them. He saw them following, and he said, "What seek ye? What are you looking for?" And they said, "We want to know where you live. We want to see where you live. We want to see your bedroom."

And isn't that pretty common when little children go over to other little children's house that they haven't met before, and they look at each other for a little bit, and what the guest child says, "What do you want to do?

Can I see your bedroom?" There's something just childlike, like kingdom childlike about this exchange with Jesus and these two men, where he turns around and says, "What are you looking for?" And they say, "Where do you dwell? Where do you live?" And Jesus says, "Well, come on and see."

And then they went to the place where he was dwelling, and they came and saw where he dwelt and abode with him that day.

There's four key things that happened with these new disciples.

We have the new Master. You heard them say the first word out of their mouth, "Master, Rabbi, where dwellest thou?"

We have the first question.

We have the come and see.

And we have the abide. They abode with him that day. And I'd like to use this as a framework of some principles for being a disciple, whether you're a new disciple, whether you're aspiring to be a disciple, whether you have been a disciple for a long time and could use some reminder and encouragement of the principles of being just excited and contagious about learning to follow Jesus and learning to love him.

The disciple needs a new Master. There is no such thing as a self-made disciple.

It would be an oxymoron if there was such a thing as a self-made disciple to follow yourself or to learn from yourself. But we see in the Bible people who did that. There was a man that Jesus spoke of, maybe in a parable, and it says, "And he prayed thus with himself."

Brothers and sisters, think about almost how gross or obvious this seems to pray with yourself.

There was another man who said, "He thought within himself, 'I will say to my soul, Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.'" I think this man was praying thus with himself, just like the other man was too. He was praying to his soul. David said, he talked to his soul too. He said, "Bless the Lord my soul." This man said, "Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry."

And the disciples, these two original disciples of Jesus, the very first word out of their mouth was Master, Rabbi. And I believe that to be a disciple, we need to have a Master, and it needs to be the right Master. It needs to be Jesus.

The first question, "Master, where dwellest thou? Where are you staying? Where do you spend your time? Where can I find you when I need to find you?" And brothers and sisters, do you ask this first question, and do you continue to ask this first question of your Master, of Jesus, "Jesus, where are you staying? Where are you spending your time so that I can spend my time there too?

Where are you staying so I can stay right there too? Where can I find you so I can go to that place and really find you?

Are my ears ready to listen and go when Jesus says, when I ask that question, and He says, 'Come and see'? Am I ready to go and see where that place is? Have I come and seen? Do I know what that place looks like?"

Maybe there's that desire in my heart to ask that question, and maybe in a way I am asking that question, "Where dwellest thou?" But am I willing to go there?

Jesus said to His disciples later on, "Come away to a quiet place." And they went away to a quiet place, up into the mountain, out into the wilderness. Do we go away to a quiet place to be with Jesus? But Jesus also called them to go away to a not-quiet place, to go away to a place that was filled with needy people. And I guess what I'm trying to say here is that are we willing to go to the place where Jesus says, "Come and see," the dwelling place? Where dwellest thou if Jesus dwells in a quiet place?

If Jesus dwells in a place that is filled with needy people, that's loud and commotion?

Our new Master dwells in the midst of His people with His bride as the head of His body. Is that where we go and find ourselves? In the midst of His people with His body. And He also walks among the lost, the sinners, the weary, the heavy laden, the blind, and the captives.

So the next thing, Jesus answers them and says, "Come and see."

There is, in a coming to Jesus and seeing, a little bit like what happened to Peter when he saw Jesus. And he saw what happened with the fish when he was in the boat there, and he said, "I depart from me, for I am a sinner. I am an unworthy man." And he saw the reality of weeping and repenting and ridding himself. When he came and saw, there was that. There were other people who came and saw Jesus, and when they came and saw Jesus, they saw the reality of being healed from from sin, from disease, from many things.

The come and see, we need to be careful when we come and see and we respond to that, that we don't deny the reality, that if we're like Peter, it might be a coming and seeing that consists of saying, "I'm a sinful man.

That's what I'm seeing." And we might even be tempted to say, "Depart from me." But that's not what Jesus said to Peter. He didn't say, "Yep, get away, Peter."

So then they came and saw where He dwelt and abode with Him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. Do you like the word abide? If somebody, if your child or somebody who is not familiar with the word abide asked you, "Could you real quick, in like ten seconds, give a good definition of what it means to abide?"

I like to tackle the words that we use a lot, that we might not really grasp all the color and the depth to them. And I'm not saying that I do, but I have some little handles that I've thought about here.

When I came and lived with Lynn and Wilma here for four years, when I walked in the door of their house, it wasn't my family's house. But not very long, it was pretty much my family's house. They welcomed me into their family, and I had a bedroom in the basement down there, and I abode with them. And when they had days that they were sick, I caught the germs, and I got sick too. And so I had sick days with them. And when it was cleaning day, I probably didn't do as good with this as I should have, but I had some duties too that were part of cleaning day, so their cleaning day was my cleaning day.

And when it was time for meals, their food was my food. And then when there were construction projects, their projects were my projects. And then when there was fear, and there were sorrows, and there were unknown things, and there were heart attacks, and there were operations, and there were crying out to God, and there were just many unknowns, those were shared as well.

And then they had lots of visitors in their home. And because I was abiding there, their visitors were my visitors, regardless of whether I knew them before or didn't know, or whether they were tough visitors or really easy visitors.

That's abiding. That's what abiding is. Abiding is sharing life. And when you abide with people, you share their life. Your food is their food. Your visitors are their food. Your cleaning day, your sick day, and so on. And when you abide with Jesus, your life is tied up with Jesus. His visitors are your visitors. His food is your food.

This is what they were doing, literally. I mean, we talk about it and think about it a little bit more figuratively, but these two men were abiding with Jesus that day. I don't know what He did the rest of the afternoon. Probably they had some food, and it was His food and their food. Maybe they went and visited some neighbors, and the visitors were their visitors.

Let's just try to take this as simple as it is and learn what it means to go to Jesus with a fresh Master, a fresh take, a fresh inspiration to call Him Master and to be taught, and to ask Him right today, "Where dwellest thou, Jesus?"

And listen to Him say to us, "Come and see," and be okay with where that is, and go there, and abide there.

This is the new disciple. Moving on to the daily disciple. My dad told me about a pattern or a way of judging the danger of a situation in military and law enforcement type of situations, where you need a kind of a rapid way to judge what's going to happen. And what's is this dangerous? Is this normal? Is this what is it? And so you think about a baseline. Are you familiar with the term baseline? Baseline is like the things that indicate that something is normal. When you drive your car that you first bought yesterday, you don't have a baseline, and that rattle that you hear, it's hard to tell whether it's a rod knock or a fender screw loose.

Maybe it isn't. Maybe you can tell the difference. But when you have a new car, it's difficult the first few days, especially if it's a used car and you're just not quite sure if you got taken advantage of in the sale and so on. But after a while, you get a baseline. You know the noises. You know the rattles. You know what it does when it shifts. There's a baseline there.

And I believe that there is a baseline of being a disciple. There are normal things that happen when you're a disciple, and there are normal things that shouldn't happen. And I think there's probably a baseline with marriages, a baseline of a godly marriage. There's things that should always be, and there's things that should never be.

And so in the pattern, in this tool that the military and law enforcement use, it's called Left of Bang.

So you think about a timeline. Timeline goes this way always, right? Well, if that's the future. This is the past. Time always goes this way. And right here, we have an event called Bang. Something blows up. Something falls apart. Something bad happens.

And left of that is before. This is before something bad happens. Okay, that's all that means, Left of Bang, before something bad happens. And this could be a baseline right here, this line. And you can have things, an anomaly is something that is not right, something that's out of order, out of position, just something that's not right. And you can have a positive anomaly. A positive anomaly would be something is there that shouldn't be there.

Okay? Something that is there that shouldn't be there. A negative anomaly is something is not there that should be there. And adding up your positive and your negative anomalies, and you get to three in the military and law enforcement pattern, there's one thing that's there that shouldn't be there. I don't know what that backpack is there, but it's there and it shouldn't be there. And there's two other things that are missing that should be there. There's no guard there, and the door, the lower pane of the window is missing. Okay, so once you get to three in the pattern that they teach in the, and I don't know this, this is thirdhand for me, but in the pattern that they teach in law enforcement and military, once you get to three anomalies, it's just about ready to not be Left of Bang anymore.

Something bad's about to happen.

And what I would like to do, I'm not going to be dramatic or anything here, but what I would like to do is look at the possibility of there being a baseline of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

There are certain things that always should be there, and that there are certain things that always shouldn't be there, and that we can look at those things and say, "Do I know what it means to be a disciple? Do I know when there's things that are missing? Do I know when there's things that are there that shouldn't be there?"

If you're going to make disciples, and if you're truly going to be a disciple, we need to know what it means, what the baseline of discipleship is. Now there's probably a lot of different things that could be talked about. I'm going to try to keep it simple here.

What does normal everyday life look like for a disciple? And there's lots of things in the New Testament that talk about what always are, always should be. And I'm not going to say those things are equivalent. The things that always should be for a disciple, Jesus talks about things that are pretty much always present in discipleship that shouldn't be there.

And we'll address those as we go down through. And then we're going to talk about the cannot be. So under this point of the daily disciple, we have the always are and the cannot be.

In John 8:31, it says, "If you continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed." If you continue in my word, are you still getting the message? If you continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed.

This is a list of always ares. Going forward, Jesus called His disciples unto Him. Am I listening so that I know when and where? In Mark 6, it says, "His disciples followed Him." This is daily life. This is what it looks like. When Jesus calls, His disciples follow.

Then there's going back. In John 6:66, "Many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him." And some other versions say, "They went to the back," like to the back of the crowd maybe. They kind of hung around on the edges.

This is part of normal life in a disciple, and bear with me while I explain this a little bit. I am pretty sure that when Jesus talked about eating my flesh and drinking my blood, and that's the context of this John 6 reference here to the, that many of them went to the back.

I'm pretty sure. I don't have any way to guarantee this or to study it out, but I'm pretty sure that the 3,000 people that were converted and received the Holy Spirit and baptism at Pentecost, probably some of them were ones who had experiences while Jesus was speaking to them of going to the back and getting on the edges, and then coming around again and listening some more and getting scared off and going to the back. Part of the reality of being a disciple is there are times when righteous men fall seven times. They go to the back, and they get up, and they go forward. I'm not talking about altar calls. I'm talking about getting on the edge of things and not sure that you really want to, and then saying, "But the cost," and then saying, "But the eternity, but the worth," and going up and going to the front and getting all back in again.

You see it with Peter. You see him being all in and then going to the back and saying, "I don't even know that man." And then you see him coming back, "I'm going fishing." This is reality. This is part of what happens in the baseline of being a disciple.

If that's happening to you, and if that's happening to disciples around you, that's not something that's just ready right now to go bang. That's part of the normal life. And I say that as an encouragement. I don't want us to remain in this swinging up and down sort of thing, but there are times in the real life of a real disciple, in real Schippensburg, real Los Cruces, whatever, where we go to the back, and we need to be re-inspired and re-invigorated to jump in again.

Asking is part of the always are. There's many places, a couple examples in Mark. His disciples asked Him concerning the parable. His disciples asked Him privately, "Why? Why did you say that? Why does it work that way?" That's part of the real baseline of being a disciple. Disciples are asking questions of Jesus, asking questions of their brothers and sisters, asking, "What does this mean? Why does this happen?"

Listening, again in Mark, and His disciples were listening. And His disciples came unto Him, and He taught them. That means they were listening, obviously. If He taught them, they were listening. Another part of being a disciple, of the baseline of being a disciple, is not understanding.

In John 12:16, it says, when Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem at the triumphal entry, it says, "These things understood not His disciples at the first." There is a reality to being a disciple that there are things that we understand not at the first. And I know that one from a lot of experience. There have been so many things in my life that I understood not at the first. And I feel like the ratio is getting a little bit better, that there's some things that are not at this point at the first, but there's still so many things that are at the first. Brothers and sisters, if you find yourself understanding things not at the first, do not despair of being a disciple, because true disciples definitely don't always understand things at the first.

They press in. They still follow Jesus. They still obey His command to gather in the upper room and wait for the power from on high.

Loving is an always are. "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." This must always be. Rejoicing, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen.

And in Acts 13, it says, "The disciples were continually filled with joy and with the Holy Ghost." This is an always are, and we know this because Paul says, "Rejoice evermore." But this is just examples of disciples doing that.

On the other hand, on the flip side, sorrowing and sleeping. And this is part of what disciples did in the New Testament and what disciples do today. Jesus came to His disciples, and He found them sleeping for sorrow. Did they instantly become not disciples because they were sleeping and sorrowful?

No. And let us be careful not to lose heart if we are sorrowful and we find that Jesus came to us and found us sleeping because of sorrow. Let's not lose heart and just say, "I might as well give up because I just completely failed at being a disciple."

I sense just a little bit of that with Peter sometimes when you read about the whole thing there with the denial and what happened after that, and Jesus working with him when the fish were there for breakfast, and He said, "Feed my sheep. Feed my lambs."

There's something that was happening there that Peter needed to know not to give up, but to get up and go again. And because sorrowing and sleeping happened to real disciples, and they were still disciples in the New Testament, I think we can be pretty sure that that's going to be sometimes a part of what is the reality of our experience too. But brothers and sisters, joy comes in the morning, and we need to get up and go and still be, still be, what the ladies were the ones that ran ahead and told His disciples, "Go to Galilee and tell my disciples at the resurrection."

Strengthened, in Acts, Paul and others went around on a circuit around to the churches confirming the souls of the disciples. In Acts 18, strengthening all the disciples. Here we just have a list of things: going forward and going back, asking, listening, not understanding sometimes, loving, rejoicing, sorrowing and sleeping sometimes, and being strengthened and strengthening.

Now for the cannot be, let's look in Luke 14, starting in verse 25. "And there went great multitudes with Him, and He turned and said unto them, 'If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple, My disciple.

And whosoever doth not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.'" And then if we look at verse 33, "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple." These are the things that cannot be. These are the part of these anomalies here.

If you look, going back to this idea of the baseline and the anomalies, if you look at your life, and Paul says, "Examine yourself to see whether you're in the faith," and if you look at the life of people around you that you care about and that you are working with and being a disciple maker and walking together in discipleship, and you don't see a going forward and a sometimes going back and yet a still going forward, and you don't hear an asking, and you don't sense a listening, and you don't, they always understand. There's never a day when they don't understand at first and say, "I don't understand at first." There's a humility that goes along with that.

And you don't see the loving and the rejoicing. These are things that are missing, and something's going to go bang. Something's not going to work right. Something's not going to work out. Let's be careful, but let's be encouraged.

Then the cannot be, the things that are missing or the things that should be missing, that should never be there, this is loving something, anyone, more than Jesus.

"Hate not his father and mother and wife and children, brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. Doth not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple."

And I'd like to just think about that in a dailiness. It's hard to think about those things. It is really difficult for me to think about hating my wife. I mean, if you take the words literally, it says, "Whosoever he be that hateth not his wife cannot be My disciple." What does that mean? What do I do with it today?

There she is. What do I do with it?

Can we just be, can I just be really realistic and say, right now, today, is my wife more important to me than Jesus?

And that can be a hard thing, but that's a real thing. Is Jesus more important to me than my father, my mother, my wife, my children, my siblings? Is Jesus more important to me than my own life? Now let's get down to reality. Let's get down to the real rubber meeting the road. I think if I got that one dealt with, Jesus being more important to me than my own life, and that selfishness was conquered, then I think maybe I would learn and know what it means in God's way of looking at it to hate father, mother, wife, children, siblings, and so on.

Am I bearing my cross today, or am I figuring out ways to complain about it, to blame it on others? Somehow, this is not my cross. Somebody else is doing something to me, and therefore I don't need to bear it because this is not really my cross. This is somebody else's fault.

Am I trying to crawl out from under it? Is there a reality today of me bearing the cross and coming after Jesus?

What did Peter do when he denied Jesus? He said, "I do not know the man," and he cursed and swore. "I never knew him. I'm not with them. I don't even know that man." How about when you deny yourself? Do you say, "I do not know the man.

I'm not a part of that. I don't belong to that," when selfishness rises up there and says, "Hey, I think, Josh, you're with them, right? You're one of them that wants that thing out there or wants that comfort or that place of My thing.

I don't know you. I'm not a part of that. I don't belong with him.

Am I forsaking all that I have today?" Today, it's hard sometimes to look at things out there, what it looks like, but right now, do I have something that I'm not forsaking? Some thing that I'm clinging onto? And that is, brothers and sisters, where the rubber meets the road for me.

It's, I aspire to being a brother, a man of God that lays up treasure in heaven and doesn't lay up treasure on earth. But when the rubber meets the road, and it is a lattice that I'm going to cut and hang up for a flower to grow on, and it's crooked because I didn't do it, somebody else did it, and they didn't do it the way that I wanted it to be done, am I forsaking all that I have, or am I justifying myself? That's where the rubber meets the road for me, brothers and sisters.

This is strongly connected to what we were talking about this morning with contentedness, and in everything give thanks. Rejoice evermore.

Now, I have a few verses here, three things that are some directions for a disciple that fall under the daily disciple category here. And I'd like to just read these verses to you. We've been reading some stories at home called the Twila Stories. Are you, any of you familiar with the Twila Stories?

They describe in a storytelling fashion a young lady who is learning to follow Jesus. And it has a chorus, almost like a song does, where she, every time she didn't know what to do, she did what she always did when she didn't know what to do. She fell on her knees and prayed to the Lord and went next door and talked to her neighbor, the elder of the church. So there's just this little refrain like that. And now I got myself distracted, and I forgot where I was going to go here.

Well, let's turn to Matthew 11, and we'll check and see if it comes back to me here.

Matthew 11, chapter 11, verse 1.

"And it came to pass when Jesus had made an end of commanding His twelve disciples, He departed thence to teach and to preach in their cities." So what was He doing before He made an end of commanding His disciples? What was He doing?

He was actually commanding His disciples. Brothers and sisters, are you a disciple? In other words, are you willing to be commanded? Because part of what Jesus does to His disciples is He commands them. And sometimes the reality of being commanded escapes us, and we think about Jesus' teachings and His wonderful sayings and the things that they cause us to aspire to and to want to do, but when we get down to business, Jesus was commanding His disciples. And we too, if we are going to be disciples, need to be able to be commanded.

Are you able to be commanded? What does a command spur in your mind when you feel a command coming your way? Oh, this feels like a command. What kind of emotions, what kind of mind, what kind of will is stirring up when you feel a command coming your way?

Now let's look at Matthew 14. It gets even worse.

Matthew 14:22. "And straightway Jesus constrained His disciples to get into a ship and to go before Him unto the other side while He sent the multitudes away." Now I've got a little guy, Adam, my youngest child, that has demonstrated to me what it means to thoroughly not like to be constrained.

From the time he was in the womb, while he was still in the womb, he didn't like to be constrained, and you could tell. And when he came out, he was just, it was like everything had to be as far apart on his body as possible. When he slept, and if you would try to cuddle with him, just get it off. No blankets, no nothing. He slept without blankets, and he was not willing to be constrained. Not a disciple, not, and sometimes it just wasn't very fun.

You ought to be able to cuddle a baby. You ought to be able to wrap them in a blanket and hold them, but no.

Now, how do you and I do when Jesus constrains us to do something? Is that what we look like? Do we try to just get out there and push everything away and get that blanket off? And what I gather from this, if Jesus constrained His disciples, it's okay for Jesus to constrain His disciples, and if we are going to be His disciples, then someday we're going to get constrained somewhere, and we need to be okay with it too.

Little checkpoints here. Now, let's go to another one here, Mark 8:33.

"Jesus was telling them about His upcoming death, and when He had turned about and looked on His disciples, He rebuked Peter." So real disciples get rebuked.

What rises up inside of me? What rises up inside of you when you hear and feel a rebuke that is coming to you?

And this was okay, and this was right. Peter was one of His disciples, and in the course of being His disciple, Jesus rebuked him, and I'm not sure what all happened with Peter, but he got a rebuke, and he was still a disciple. He didn't run away. He didn't abandon Jesus and tell Him, "You can't do that to me." He digested the rebuke and grew from it. And I guess I'd just like to say, I'm still learning a lot on that one, but I would like to encourage each of you that part of being a disciple means that you will get rebuked along the way by Jesus, and you need to be okay with it and run with it and let it do its work.

Let's go to the old disciple.

I bet you could hardly wait for this one, huh?

This is Acts 21:16, and here it actually talks about old disciple.

"There went with us also certain of the disciples of Caesarea and brought with them one nascent of Cyprus, an old disciple, with whom we should lodge."

What do you suppose it means to be an old disciple? Are any of you here? Would you, any of you, consider yourself to be an old disciple? I hope so. I'm pretty sure there are several old disciples here. I think that word means from of old, like longstanding, someone who's been a disciple for a long time and continued on. Somebody who's still a disciple and who is still a disciple and the next time is still a disciple. And last year we had a man who really, a 79-year-old man, he was living in our camp trailer from April to September. His name was Art, and he was quite the character. He had a garden landscape design business called Garden Art, and his name was Art.

And that was real common for him to have fun little puns like that. And we really enjoyed him a lot because he was always seeking to learn to be a disciple, and he was always cultivating a group of men, about 12 men, because he thought that that was a good number for some reason to make disciples with. And he would spend time studying every day, and then he would discipline himself to take all of his notes down to one page, one side of one page, and then he would email it out to these men wherever they were and dialogue with them.