Making disciples is not a two-step process of evangelism followed by teaching; rather, it is a single, powerful act of delivering and teaching the Gospel. The true biblical method for making a disciple is to ‘gospelise’ them, for the Gospel itself possesses the power of God to both convert a person and turn them into a learner of Christ. The very same message that brings salvation is also the message that strengthens believers, builds them up in the faith, and equips them to endure, demonstrating that the Gospel is the beginning, middle, and end of our journey with Him. When you have led someone to Christ, do not leave them to struggle on in their own strength, but teach them with encouragement to understand that they have not only received forgiveness and a conversion experience but also are the recipients of the Holy Spirit whom they need to learn to walk with for the power to live the Christian life. Salvation is from faith to faith. We needed faith to trust in Christ for our reconciliation with God and we then need to continue in faith that his Holy Spirit will help us live the Christian life.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] The passages we’re looking at tonight, I regularly bring the church back to again and again because there’s something very significant in them that makes an enormous difference. Thank you, that’s good. Something enormously powerful to understand and yet in so many different places, Christianity and the teaching centres, for example, where I went to study overseas in Dallas Theological Seminary, they had these facts totally wrong, according to me at least. You’ve got a whole big institution who will say the opposite. And what it’s all about is about making disciples and there couldn’t be anything more important that we should get straight according to the Bible and not have the wrong picture of, which is helping us to miss the major thrust of what the Bible is trying to say.

[00:00:59] Now we’ll start with the first one, which is the Great Commission, I do believe. All right. Now, here, now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. Jesus came, said to them, all authority, heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Now, the particular wording there that is at the seat of what we’re here talking is the verb to make disciples. And anybody here have a King James Bible, don’t be ashamed of that. I often bring one. King James is a bit old-fashioned. Would you like to read how it’s worded, that bit there, that on the screen in our ESV is make disciples? With a big voice. It also says go therefore and make disciples. Is that a King James?

[00:01:57] A new King James. Oh, sorry, you tricked us. The old King James, I’ll tell you what it does say. It says go therefore and teach all nations. And we should not disrespect the translation so to have it, because the actual word for disciple is a learner. And to turn someone into a disciple involves the idea of them becoming a learner. In fact, if you put this verb not in the active form, the active form is when they do something. When here, in this case, Paul is doing something like making disciples. If you put it in the passive sense, it is someone’s making a disciple of you. All right? And if someone makes a disciple of you, that sometimes would be worded in a modern translation, you are recruited as a disciple or you become a disciple, make a disciple. From your point of view, it’s being done to you.

[00:03:03] But from the person with the action, like Paul in this case, you’re doing it to other people. And the way that you do it, in the word disciple, the word disciple just means a learner. And so the idea of someone volunteering to be a pupil is the idea of you say, I am prepared to learn. And that’s exactly what Jesus recruited his 12 for, to follow him that he might teach them. So the old King James idea is not wrong. It’s just that it’s in the, as much as they knew about the word, there were so few examples of this word make disciples to be found in literature, they didn’t know quite how to interpret it. So they just took it by its derivation, which means how the little parts are made up. And they literally mean to become a learner.

[00:03:54] And so they, King James, the old one this is, not yours, translated it, go into all the world, teach all nations. And the teaching part is what people picked up for quite some generations after King James was created. That included all the people, the conservatively theological people at Dallas Seminary. It’s quite a conservative place. That’s why I went there. But they carried the idea that was how the King James presented it, that the call of the Bible to make disciples is a call to go teaching people. Because you’re turning them into a learner. And obviously you’ve got to teach them something if you turn them into a learner. That’s a part of it. Can you see it’s not wrong? It’s just that the actual meaning of the word is more dramatic and more action-filled

[00:04:46] because it means to do something that causes them to become a learner. and their translation in the Old King James has obscured actually the method that the Bible has in mind. Now how do you know that method? By putting it alongside, we’re going to be going backwards and forwards between these passages, but we’re going to go to Acts, I think it is, chapter 14. Yeah, there you have it, yes. In Acts 14, if you were to take this passage of Acts 14 and what Paul actually does, you could link bit by bit up with the Great Commission. The Great Commission says, going. This is showing Paul on one of the missionary journeys and it’s actually a description of one step in it where he goes to a new place. And the next day he went on with Barnabas to Derby. Or Derby or whatever, however you say that, Joey. Derby.

[00:05:50] So Paul is doing, this is a little step in his going. He’s going on to the next city. So the going, give it a tick from the Great Commission, going into all the world or going into all the world. But in the Great Commission it says, make disciples. So how did Paul do it? Well, when he had, here it is, preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples. Now, what that’s actually saying is that he went on gospelising until he had a big clunch of disciples. If you were to read this in the original King James, here is where some people have got it a bit wrong and some of them are people who have been very keen, committed folks to missions and one fellow who is in charge of the group that is the word of power. What’s the word today for the power to change? Power to change keeps changing its mind

[00:06:55] so it doesn’t get misunderstood. But I wish they’d stay with the old campus crusades for Christ because I like the word crusades. A lot of other people think it sounds like you’re battering people to change their minds. But Campus Crusades for Christ was formed by a man who wanted to motivate students who’d become Christians at university to give at least two years of their life to stay on the campus and gospelise the other campers who were there and bring them to Christ. And this organisation has been powerful around the world. And Campus Crusades for Christ. And anyway, the meaning of the word preach the gospel is what the word actually means that is the word we’ve got under discussion. All right, it’s a word that, if you want me to say it in the Greek, because I’m feeling wonky, I better look up the thing

[00:07:57] so I don’t give you the wrong word. But, excuse me, Mr. Bible. At the back I wrote down a few things, all right. And I thought I wrote the Greek word, but never mind. It is the word to gospelise. It is the word to communicate the gospel. It’s the word that tells us how you make disciples is that you do just as the version that is the New King James says. You preach the gospel. Because the method that you make them a disciple is not so much the mental way that you communicated it, so you might write teach, write, you know, read teach. It’s not so matter the question of how you communicated it. It is what it is that you communicate. It’s a very specific message which is called the gospel. You could have written it, gospelise. When they had gospelised everybody there in the city and had made many disciples.

[00:09:09] Now, when I finished up at Dallas Seminary and I discovered there was this little conference that they had immediately in the seminary about the difference between evangelism and discipleship, and I was very interested about that and the first thing the man said who was teaching it, he was a distinguished Bible teacher of their style, he said the first thing you’ve got to do to get this correct is to separate out and don’t confuse the two. What two? One is evangelism, he said, and the other is discipleship because they’re completely different. I had a big trouble with that because I knew that the word that was here in the Greek meant both were being achieved by gospelising the audience. The idea that used to be quite prevalent in Christian circles and now Baptist churches are just the same

[00:10:01] is that you have a good crusade and you have the sweetest singers and you have the best of music and the rah-rah-rah time of enjoying it and then you have a high-powered message where a fast-speaking fellow gets across and gives a call and sometimes it’s very emotional and gets the people to come down the front and they’ve been converted but now you better make them a disciple and the discipleship’s what you do afterwards by teaching and getting them and helping them to understand and through the process of education turn them into a disciple and that’s what most conservative places I’ve been involved in doing it myself they meant, they say you gospelise them to get them to be a convert and then you teach them to turn them into a real disciple.

[00:10:49] Because if you just get them down the front of the meeting and say a prayer, well, they won’t really live that out too much. You’d better get some teaching mechanism to turn them into a disciple. Now, how that came across for this passage, because at the end of that time when I was just leaving from finishing up at Dallas, I was going to go somewhere else afterwards and someone gave me a scholarship. I went down to clear out my, where you get your mail, what do you call that, the pigeonhole, you know, you have at the place. And there was this offer of a scholarship for six weeks in Kentucky, and because it’s just after everybody’s graduated and you have a bit of a holiday, I said, oh, good, six weeks that I had food because I’d run out of money and couldn’t get a pay for a meal ticket

[00:11:37] and I was living hand to foot sort of thing, or hand to mouth is the saying. and to be offered for six weeks and Americans are very good how they do the feeding when you go to a conference so I thought good I can get as long as I can get there and I still have my 400 cubic inch Pontiac but no money apparently why I had no money but anyway then another student said to me Jimmy says I’ve been given a scholarship to this conference and I’m going home for the holiday and I’ll go on after the conference to that but I hear you’re going too can I ride with you how did he know I had a conference I don’t know how he knew it was in my pigeon hole apparently he got one too and he said I’ll pay for the gas if you let me ride with you to the conference so we went had a fantastic time but the balock who opened up the conference

[00:12:34] he was a fellow who had been in charge of the teenage section of Campus Crusade for Christ in America across all their high schools and whatever And he was a fellow who was an effective man in that work, but it felt led of God because so many of the kids that he talked with would make a decision and then backslide, especially when they got to college. College is university over there. And when they got to college, then the peer pressure and the behaviour and the morals and all the rest at universities, they all became, well, not all, many of them became backsliders. So he saw a tremendous need to start up an extra branch of Campus Crusade for Christ, which would be to work on discipleship. And this seminar for six weeks was his opening up the new organisation called, to do with the name Discipleship,

[00:13:27] Worldwide Discipleship Association it was called. This was the beginning thing and they had all some of the top American speakers to come and speak during the six weeks. All heroes of the faith that I had been wanting to go to America to listen to. And, you know, people like the bloke in California who’d made a really big church and he was very big on interpreting the Bible and I’ll get his name in a minute. Anyway, those sorts of speakers really had me wanting to go. So when I got there, but the leader of this organisation said, turn to this passage. And he said, I want to tell you why I started up Worldwide Discipleship Association. And he read the passage and he got here to this verse 21, it’s on the screen. When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples,

[00:14:19] he read that to be, and he told us that if you’re going to have true evangelism and discipleship, you need two parts to your action. One’s the evangelism and the other is the discipleship. So I read this. He told us, I’m not reporting his exact language, but to the effect he said that you have the gospelising during the day and then you gather up your converts and you have small meetings at night in which you teach them how to be a disciple. Put your hand up if that sounds like a model you’re fairly familiar with. Yeah, and that’s often. You hear it done so many times. But I just come from, you know, doing my master’s degree in theology and a part of it is of the language and the language people reported that there’d be more work done on this particular word to make disciples or to preach the gospel

[00:15:18] whichever the way you think it means. And when they first had the King James being translated they didn’t have too many examples and the way that you work out what a word means for another language is you find all the spots where it’s used go by the context they’re in to see what it was meant to mean and that’s how you know what the word means. But there was only two or three in the Bible and there weren’t hardly very many others discovered in the literature they had at hand and so that’s why they did the best they could and said going into all the world teach all nations rather than going into all the world preach the gospel to all nations. They had teach all nations because that much they could see because the very word that involved disciple is the word that also means learner.

[00:16:02] and if you’ve got to turn someone into a learner well obviously you’re doing it by teaching him something so it wasn’t totally wrong the old King James but it just didn’t have the benefit of that many instances that you could look up and by the context work out exactly what it means in its use but time had passed since then so when it came time for there to be a new King James which you have, very good, I like the new King James one of my Greek lecturers at Dallas was one of the people who were translators in that group and he gave us a story of how the choices you make between the different Greek texts and which ones carry the most weight but they discovered so many more places where this word is used in letters people that wrote and in the literature around that was available

[00:16:53] that they could see its more exact meaning and it didn’t mean just about learning it meant gospelise get across the message of the gospel and in fact verse 21 isn’t telling you of two activities of Paul it’s telling you of how long he gospelized until he had made many disciples that’s actually what it said well the man gave his explanation from the old King James I went back to my room and I looked up all the references and I said oh he’s missed the true meaning of it the meaning is far more dramatic and powerful and effective and far more devastatingly change your attitude it’s telling you how you make disciples more than that it’s telling you not just your human part in it it’s telling you the power of the message that you bring that you give it’s the gospel

[00:17:46] and the gospel has the power of God to salvation nothing else and if you gospelize people depending on how they respond it’s not an automatic thing you drop in the medicine and they get better I wish I knew that medicine at the moment that I wouldn’t be sitting here but I was feeling very wantly back there but I’m getting excited now and that’s making me feel better that’s good but if you preach the gospel there’s an effect that happens people get turned into disciples and if you don’t preach the gospel but you give a shallow message Jesus is lovely true enough I don’t despise telling people how wonderful he is but if you simply tell them become a Christian or say the prayer like this American evangelist Billy Sunday he was a pretty good evangelist in terms he did have a gift and things happened he was an ex-boxer

[00:18:44] but he used to preach like he was boxing to the crowd he had a saying about saying the prayer if you can get them to say the prayer you’ve got a convert now the truth of the matter is and anybody who’s been in charge of counselling which has been my lot in many different places including the Gold Coast Crusade where over a thousand young people go every year between Christmas and the New Year and they may be in charge of the counselling and I want to tell you you can get a person to say the prayer but you don’t always get a convert you get someone wanting to be but there’s some reason why it hasn’t happened and the reason could well be they didn’t actually take on board the gospel. They took on board the pressure for their decision. They put on board part of it but maybe the repentance part got dropped off

[00:19:37] or the fact that Jesus would be the way that you’re forgiven by his having borne your punishment. You don’t have to become a Christian by volunteering to be an extra goody-goody person. And I had my own personal testimony to tell me that because I thought I was a Christian per favour of all the Sunday school work I did and they used to have prizes to be earned in West Australia where this happened in all the Baptist churches and I was top of the state. I don’t mind bragging. Two years in a row, little boy of seven, eight, nine, having all the big crowd of people who came to see me get my hands shaken for winning the prize. So if you asked me if I was a Christian and I’d tell you, yeah, yeah, I really know all about it. I’m ashamed of that somehow these days but then I had other things because I’d had polio

[00:20:30] and the students of Dad’s College had prayed and I’d been healed. So I really had a strong idea of being special. Really, it was the students who should have been so happy with God’s answer to their prayers and it was when the gospel of how we don’t have any hope of ever attaining a righteousness that will get us in the door with God, when that was taught, preached by Billy Graham, and he had some early speakers, his team who came at first but they all had the good message and my dad had to go being in charge of the counselling then and our family would sit there with me all night because I had to be present until the message came night after night and something was getting through to me that I wasn’t a Christian at all because I’d never done any business with Jesus.

[00:21:24] I’d never come to him, trusted his forgiveness because he died for me. As much as that Sunday school learning must have included the right things, I’m not criticising that. I’m just saying that it takes a deep spiritual revelation to suddenly see yourself as a sinner, helpless before a holy God and then to hear how Jesus is the only salvation possible for you because he took your sins and offers you a forgiveness that you could never earn. I won’t go on talking more about that moment but the final message was when I responded to the truth of the gospel and became that day the age of nine a disciple. The message turned me into one when I responded to it and you can read through the gospels, you can read through the book of Acts, it’s so plainly obvious, the thing that makes you a Christian is not you,

[00:22:31] it is what Christ did and your acceptance by faith and repentance and faith, not earning an inch but the gospel turns you into a disciple and that’s what verse 21 is saying. When they had preached the gospel to that city and made many disciples, how long did they preach it? Until they had quite a handful. Then he went on to the next place and did the same thing. Now how do you do the old-fashioned meaning of the word disciple which is the learning part afterwards, how do you, well you’ve got to strengthen them. Look at verse 22. He went back to these other places, Lystra and Iconium, Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples. Now that was the next part that I had to work out. Okay, you get them to be, to become a disciple by gospelising them but how do you strengthen them? This was also a revelation

[00:23:32] because I went to all the different parts of the Bible and the best place to go because I was studying at one stage Paul’s method of discipleship. Let’s see how Paul does. Well one, the biggest piece of evidence you’ve got are these little snippets in the book of Acts but then the gospel of Luke, not the gospel, well I call it, no, no, no, sorry. The book of Romans, the book of Romans is Paul’s method of writing to people who needed to be strengthened. He says so. In his lead up in the beginning of the book of Romans, he wanted to give them some spiritual help that would strengthen them and the word strengthen, it’s a little Greek word, we won’t bother what the word is but that’s what Paul was after to do and right at the end of the book of Romans he says, now to him who’s able to,

[00:24:25] and then uses the same word for strengthening, I won’t try and say it, now who’s able to strengthen you, Do you know what the very next phrase is in that verse in Romans near the end? I won’t turn you there, but you can look up later if you doubt me. How did he propose in writing the book of Romans to strengthen them? Anybody want to take a guess from what I’ve been saying so far? What does he say at the end of the book of Romans that he’s going to trust for them to be strengthened? Go to the top of the class. You had the right idea. Whoever it was that said spirit, that’s pretty well right on. It’s the Holy Spirit because the gospel, when first announced by the church in the day of Pentecost by Peter, was repent and believe and you shall receive the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

[00:25:21] So the gift of the Holy Spirit is a part of what happens at your conversion and certainly the Holy Spirit in your life is going to be a major part of strengthening. but the actual wording there in the Greek at the end of the book of Romans it is using a little word called kata in the Greek and this word kata can have meaning of fitting in with what’s already been said and it can mean as the means of doing it so it means both in line with everything else that’s been said to get strengthened but also by the very moment of your doing it it’s a double whammy word kata so it gets translated either as according to or gets translated by means of so the two meaning of the word for strengthening how it’s done is followed by the word karta which means either in line with all the other prophecies

[00:26:12] or in the case of Paul, his gospel he’s just given them in the book of Romans or it can mean by the very means of that message so how you get strengthened is that you gospelize people The same message that got them converted is the message that turns them into strong disciples. That’s how you strengthen them. Now, the Billy Graham people on those crusades, I’ve had a lot to do with them and I praise God for the influence and the opportunities. But when they came to Australia and they had in 1959, that was the year that I, as a little boy, became a Christian, they’ve been back at certain times and they’ve come back about three or different occasions to go on and part of what they did when they come back is to do a bit of a survey of all the churches where folk had responded

[00:27:04] in the first or the most recent time they were here and then they check up on the churches that had some of the responses had been referred on to. As it happened, my returning to Australia, I ended up in Sydney with another time of the Billy Graham crusade in Sydney and Daryl’s brother who’s been a friend of mine up here in Brisbane he was at a church Carringbar Baptist Church and he’d become the deacon in charge of evangelism and they’d been taking people two, three weeks of Billy Graham’s preaching you couldn’t get a more powerful message to put people under some of them have become Christians and joined in the church a good number of the folk they took were very interested but nothing had happened yet and when Daryl’s brother Glenn met with all the other deacons and the pastor they said what should we do

[00:27:58] the three weeks of Billy Graham is finished and all these people have got a bit of interest but we haven’t quite you know skinned the cat or I don’t know how they worded it but they haven’t quite pulled in the net so Glenn said well we should have our crusade and continue the evangelism as a local thing and then they said who will we get and because he was my friend he dropped my name in it and so I ended up staying on not I’ve been around there because Wheaton College had sent me an internship from them but now I stayed and for four months we had a crusade where there’s an awful lot of people coming to the Lord and that time largely because of the work of taking him to Billy Graham’s crusade the seed was planted but there were people coming

[00:28:47] to Christ and they kept on going so they kept on I kept on being invited or I was invited for as long as I was working that’s where I met Michelle she was the youth group’s greatest ally because she was known at the high school her last year high school and was very well known she kept bringing young people to the church and more than that she set up a bible study in the lunch times and she used to take my messages from Sunday and give her versions thereof it to a little group of friends that she got a year 12 persons and many of them got back to the church and became Christians but how you strengthen someone who’s become a Christian is by the dynamic of the message taught at depth you want another piece of proof about this I reckon I could be a lawyer and win the case every time

[00:29:44] because there’s so much evidence for what I’m telling you tonight you know the proof is in your hands Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have you ever asked yourself if these are called gospels how come there’s 20 odd chapters or 16 chapters or whatever is the case why does it take them 16 chapters to preach the gospel it’s because Jesus was using his own method the gospel is not only to turn you into a Christian it’s to strengthen you and if you want people to go on for Christ and I love the way our church does this is it gospelizes them as a part of the deal I participate in that in the Sunday services it doesn’t matter what the sermon’s on a little bit of the gospel teaching gets in there too because what I’m doing is not only catching a few folk who may never have been converted you always get a few people like that

[00:30:44] in churches who’ve taken themselves to be Christians when they because they went to church and they thought they were good people and they loved the stories of Jesus but they just assumed something had never happened I know because I was one it never broken in on me that I had to come to Jesus as a sinner that needed forgiveness. I heard about him being a wonderful saviour and all, but the application to me coming and confessing that I needed that forgiveness, it never dawned. I want to tell you, in this church, without naming people, but there have been folk who actually, if they sat down and said, when did you really get in the door, they’d tell you it was in church. They probably thought they were. In the other denominations, you’d be staggered how many of the people who go to a Christian Protestant

[00:31:38] denomination have never really had it brought home to them that they need to come to Christ. In Tasmania, where Michelle and I work, there were ministers from all the different denominations I got called to come and preach, and one on the West Coast, not a Baptist church, but he was keen to have it happen, and then when the meeting was over, he took me back to his place, and they’d made up a bed for me in the hall, sort of thing, not many rooms to use, but the man wouldn’t let me get to sleep. I was tired. And he went to go on talking and talking and talking, and we were sitting in the kitchen, and I was being kind and drinking cups of teas, until at last he let out. He wasn’t sure of himself. Because it had never been put across to him that he needed to get converted. He needed to be born again.

[00:32:36] He needed to be gospelized into the kingdom. The response to the gospel is what makes you, and I had a joy of pointing it out to the minister of the church. And similarly, there are people who have gotten in the door, and they sort of know something’s happened, but they’re a bit up and down. How can they get stronger? Or teach them through the book of Romans, or find another good book that will do the same task, and you’ll see someone get stronger and stronger. We had in the church in Sydney young people who became leaders. They became leaders because they were good at leading, and there was one young man. He was really good at playing AFL, which made me think he was good. And he used to teach me. We had a soccer team. I didn’t really know how to play soccer, but he would give me advice.

[00:33:36] Here’s what you’ve got to do, and there’s certain little tricks that you have to learn in these sports. And he was a wonderful leader. And I knew he was a Christian, but he wasn’t a very deep one. But one day at the Sunday evening message, I gave a call for people to come and make a response. And he came forward. And I was a bit perplexed, because he was my example. Christian youth, that’s one of the leaders that I’d lifted up. So I said to his name, why’d you come forward? You know what he answered? The book of Romans has got me. The teaching of the gospel had taken something deeper into him. He’s presently a pastor in Sydney. I don’t know. He’s not a Baptist pastor. I think he’s had a more faithful… Well, I shouldn’t say that. He’s in a church that sticks to the gospel. And this message that Paul preached,

[00:34:39] it one, converted people, but two, that conversion turned them into disciples. Three is how, verse 22, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith through all the ups and downs. And saying that through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God. Now, someone give me another phrasing of what that’s about, that through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God. what’s another way to word that? What’s that about? What type of teaching is that? Saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. I’m curious to know, I know some of you probably know but you’re not the type to speak out too much. What does it mean through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God? What’s all that about? What type of teaching would you call that?

[00:35:38] say again trials well yes you’ve got to hit the nail on the head that people who become Christians aren’t going to find it easy there’ll be trials but in particular whole societies can have trials so this type of teaching is included in what you would call I know he would know or does he yeah teaching on the end times it’s called eschatological teaching teaching about the fact that Jesus is coming and when he comes there’ll be all sorts of events happening tell me about our church do we have much eschatological teaching Darrell I reckon I’d be interested in your opinion yeah that’s why I said Darrell because their group’s been doing the book of Revelation and that’s actually what the book of Revelation is and it’s difficult to do because there’s a lot of mysterious parts that you can’t really say what to say

[00:36:53] but nonetheless to have emphasis on the second return of Christ that’s called the eschaton the word eschaton means last thing and eschatology is the study of the last things and it’s a rather you better understand this it’s a fairly major part of the New Testament not only the book of Revelation but Matthew 24 that long chapter where the disciples at the top of the Man of Olives asked Jesus you know what’s going to happen and he responded and told them all sorts of things that’s part of the teaching or 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 what does 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 do anybody know that without having to think of it yeah Christ’s coming and I’m not sure whether that’s the verse that says the thief and the light but it is his coming suddenly bringing with him the Christians who died in Christ and have been in heaven

[00:37:50] and without their bodies they not yet had a resurrection body but when Christ comes the dead in Christ that’s their their spirits are coming back with Jesus but their bodies are six feet under and they’re going to rise in a resurrection body at that moment to then be lifted up and meet Christ in the air that’s 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 I’ve met people in fact some of my theological friends at the college where I taught Malian College that ended up being called didn’t believe in this event and I remember one bloke and he is a very good teacher and he had a capable man but his theories didn’t include anything other than we all get lifted at once and go to heaven and so he didn’t like 1 Thessalonians 4 and he made a joke about it you know in the staff room and he was sort of aiming at me for believing the simple stuff and

[00:38:48] he made the comment he said you know how did he word it he worded it that a lot of people get caught up in some of these ideas and I was one like anyway and I made the the point I was trying to turn it into a joke I says there are a lot of theologians who don’t understand it either that was him how can you have 1 Thessalonians 4 that make a pretty black and white that Jesus is going to return and one of the passers is returning is to cause the dead in Christ to rise first and we Book of Corinthians tells us we’re also going to have our resurrection bodies and we’re going to be lifted up together to meet him in the air but there are some theologians who say that’s too difficult to understand we should stick to the more positive statements of the Bible like in John which simply sums up and says some going up will go to God

[00:39:43] and some going up will go to judgment. I don’t think they’re those statements of the Bible conflict at all. One is just detailed and the other is a general statement of the different destinies. But to teach people some eschatological training is what makes you a strong Christian. To be ignorant of it is to leave you being washed around with lots of different ideas. And that’s what this is saying here. It’s saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. The idea of Jesus ruling on earth is a special phase of that kingdom of God. And before we get into that and feel all happy with Jesus there’s going to be lots of difficulties. And finally the verse 23 which we’ve only got a part on our screen. But it says, When they had appointed, thank you, elders for them in every church.

[00:40:43] And the idea of the elders is people who care for the disciples to do just what’s been talked about. With prayer and fasting they committed them and I’ve never worked out who the them are. It’s either the converts or it’s the elders. Committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed. Must be the disciples I guess. So trusting them to the work of the church. And that’s how true discipleship is done. Through the message only but applied to their conversion and applied to their teaching and their strengthening. Let’s have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father I thank you for the strength that you gave me to say all this when I was feeling wonky and I give you praise for the truth of it. And I know this passage and this teaching about discipleship is very, very powerful. And I pray that you’ll allow it

[00:41:41] to get a grip on us. Help us Father to be people who could say like that young man did that day why did he respond but he already was a Christian. And he said the book of Romans has got me. Lord would you get us like that? Would you get a grip on us and strengthen us by the power of the word of God. By the power of the very message that converts people in the first place. Getting such a grip that we won’t be able to stop talking about it. We won’t be able to resist the opportunity to gospelise when the door is opened. Father may that be our story we ask in Jesus name. Amen.