Making disciples is not separate from preaching the Gospel – they are one and the same process. The evidence from Matthew and Mark’s Great Commission accounts reveals that genuine discipleship occurs through deep, sustained exposure to Gospel truth rather than through a shallow initial conversion followed by different teaching. When churches focus on teaching the Gospel thoroughly and repeatedly, rather than seeing it merely as an entry point, their converts are far more likely to remain strong in their faith. This understanding shaped the early Church’s approach and remains the Biblical pattern for creating lasting disciples.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] I don’t know what possession you have, which is your prized possession. Have you ever had something very, very special that you would not want to lose? Something that you keep even though you’re sold off everything else. Well, when living overseas in the United States, when I got a beautiful 400 cubic inch Pontiac Catalina, sold by an old lady of only 30,000 miles and it was a good price and it became my possession I really loved. Driving around in it and when you flatten your foot to take off on the up ramp onto the highway, there was nothing better than this big motor in it. I would take some of the other students from Delaware Seminary and we’d go around different places. One stage we got chased by a lady who was some sort of man lady. I don’t know why, but she kept chasing our car and I had to throw it around corners really fast to get her.

[00:01:11] She was a pretty good driver actually to keep up for as long as she did, but we got away. Anyway, nonetheless, that car only had a limited time with me. I won’t tell you just yet how the end came, but I had that car and it came to the end of my study time in that seminary. The procedure that you needed to follow was to go to the post office part of it and clear your pigeonhole and do the final things that you have to do. I went down and inside my pigeonhole there was a letter that gave me a scholarship, a scholarship to a conference that would last for six weeks in Kentucky. Now, I need to tell you that I’d run out of money and had refused to sell my Pontiac and didn’t have any money for the final semester of food where you pay money to probably go to the cafeteria. I was not eating very well and some people put tins of soup outside the door of my door.

[00:02:26] I don’t know how they knew. I guess they guessed when they didn’t see me at the real times, but I wouldn’t sell that Pontiac. I went down to clear out my pigeonhole and here was an offer to go to Kentucky Bowling Green, I think was the name of the place, for a six-week conference and that represented six weeks of meals. So I naturally was going to go. Anyway, the problem was I didn’t have any money to pay for the, they call it gas, but the petrol. And 400 cubic inches is not exactly a, you know, spin-threshold vehicle. But another student met me as I was about to leave and walk back to where my stuffs were I’d have to pack up. And he said, Jim, I understand that you’ve got a scholarship now, how did he know? A scholarship to Kentucky.

[00:03:27] And he said, they’ve given me one too, but can I ride with you? If you do, let me come in the car. He says, I’ll pay for all the gas. Well, I couldn’t say no. That’s the only way I was going to get there. Well, I went to that thing. It was the first introductory conference a newly formed organization was having. And they invited speakers from all over the North Americas to come. And it would go for six weeks. It was a real pleasure to be there and to be taught.

[00:04:03] But the fellow who ran it had been working for Campus Crusades for Christ, which was the old name for what you now would call something more new like, yeah, that one, Power to Change. And at Campus Crusades for Christ, he had been the fellow in charge of the high school branch thereof. Most of the work was done at college level, that is university level. But he was in charge of the high school branch and had done a good success with many teenagers in high school level coming to Christ. The only thing that troubled him was that as many got converted, they also backslid away, given the pressures of worldly society, and it really upset him that they’d come to Christ but didn’t stand. And so he felt the Lord moved him to set up another organisation which wasn’t so much for converting people and preaching the Gospel, it was for discipleship. And he called it Worldwide Discipleship Association, and this was their introductory conference

[00:05:13] to get people interested. Now, when he gave his first talk which opened up the thing, it gave me a problem. And the problem was that he was articulating a certain belief that discipleship and evangelism are two different things. I did know that the seminary I was at taught that. I’d been in places where they would teach, if the first thing you want to do, if you’re going to do evangelism, is know that it’s not discipleship. Now, why I had a problem was that I had the opposite belief, and I can understand how people would have their different belief differing from mine, but he taught it from Acts and chapter 14. We’ll put it up on the screen, and the later half of it, verse 21 I’m following. And basically what he was giving us was a sample of the missionary activity of Paul, and particularly as the chief things that Paul sought to do was to preach the Gospel

[00:06:22] and also to make disciples. And in verse 21, this is Acts 14, it says, When they had preached the Gospel to that city, and had made many disciples, they returned to another place, and other places, and so forth. Now, the way he explained it, he did so from the King James Bible, which is often very accurate, but also sometimes wrong, which also lent for me that maybe I’ll still write, even though this fellow seemed to be a bit of an expert. But the King James Bible had it in a way that you would understand what’s being said here is that Paul’s missionary methodology had two things that he would do. One was to Gospelise folk, and he explained to us, the man speaking, that this would be done during the day, and that they’d be down the market place, and they’d be heralding the Gospel. But also a second activity, that was to run discipleship groups. And he imagined

[00:07:29] that the discipleship groups probably were what we do a lot today, and that is to have places of home Bible studies, or getting together with small groups where they do do special little booklets which are designed for discipleship. Put your hand up if you’ve done any little booklets, which is a part of a discipleship series. A goodly number, not all of you. But this idea that you get preached the Gospel to get people converted, and then you give them discipleship to make them go on. And that was, he said, was this first saying. The only trouble is, that’s actually all quite wrong, which I will now show you. It does go on to say other things that Paul did as far as his missionary method of discipling people, which are all very good. But this initial one, that there’s two things that you do, rather than one being talked about, I had to find out the truth. And I went back

[00:08:39] to my room, I got out all my books that I had with me, and to look up and to see where do you get the idea that preaching the Gospel is one thing and making disciples another thing. There must be some evidence because the seminary used to teach that if you did courses. And I’d always scratch my heads as to how they would, how they did. Well, to investigate that, I looked up the places, first of all, that give us the Great Commission. And you will know, most of you, I think, if I say, what’s the Great Commission? You’d say, Matthew, the final little bit in chapter 28, is it? Where Jesus has the disciples meet with him at the top of a mountain he’d arranged previously, this is after his resurrection, for them to meet him there. And when he meets with them he gives them the command to go, you therefore, into all the world, and make disciples of all nations. The word make disciples,

[00:09:47] is the same word that’s here in verse 21. When they had preached the Gospel of that city and made many disciples. When you look through the rest of Matthew 28, you can see that indeed Jesus’ command in the Great Commission of the Year in Matthew is certainly one that’s not looking for just to trigger a response and get someone on the list of converts. Because it says, baptising them, teaching them, and the grammar of that particular spot is to have a command verb and then some participles, they’re half verbs, usually ing words, teaching, baptising, which told what that meant. And so the make disciples is done by the teaching, baptising, whatever. Now that would fit in to either of the two interpretations under discussion here in Acts 14 verse 21. Because it does say, when they had preached the gospel, and if you look it up in the Greek, it is having gospelised them, and the verb is to

[00:11:03] gospelise, having gospelised them. And then it’s the second clause, if you like, and made many disciples. And the grammar of it is that you could take it either way. You could take it to be that they gospelise them, but they also did whatever one does to make disciples, depending on what you bring to the passages to which you think you do to make disciples. How do we test this out? When I’m sitting in the room, you can just picture me there not knowing what I’m going to do, and I go and listen further, because this is the beginning of a six week conference. And I’m not going to escape from having lots of discussions about how you make disciples. And as I’m sitting there and thinking, I go, well, there is another gospel that does give us the Great Commission. It’s Mark. And much of the same thing’s a remark where it’s got the idea of gospelising and it’s got the idea of baptising. It’s got the idea

[00:12:06] of teaching in it. It even has an extra little idea there about having signs following. That’s So I turned over to Mark’s Gospel, and at the end of that he doesn’t say make disciples, it says go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. But what’s of interest is that the actual grammar structures of the Matthew and the Mark match each other in having one main verb and other partosipial clauses surrounding it that tell you what’s meant by it. In the case of Matthew, the main verb is make disciples. The teaching and the other things are in the partosipial forms that give you the know-how it is to be done. In Mark, the main verb that takes the same place as Matthew had make disciples is preach the Gospel to every creature. Preach the Gospel. Since I come from a background in my university work of physics and mathematics, two subjects

[00:13:23] I like best, easiest ones. You learn about what’s called simultaneous equations. Simultaneous equations is when there’s a bit of uncertainty as the variables and what they’re going to mean. But how you get two of those equations and use the information from both to help you resolve the unknown parts. Put your hand up if you know what a simultaneous equation is. Quite a good lot of you, leave your hand up if you liked doing them. I did, I liked that sort of stuff and mathematics and physics, I think physics was my best subject. There’s two equations. One’s Matthew, make disciples is the main verb, and the same form of having it in a command form in Mark, the main verb is preach the Gospel. And since I believed in all of the scriptures and all the New Testament Gospels being inspired, all the whole New Testament, there’s two statements that you’ve got to put together

[00:14:31] to get the truth out of. And it clearly was teaching me that the way that you make a disciple is to Gospelize people. And that the fellow there had it wrong. Now actually he was very good in his high school work in Campus Crusades for Christ, but he’d just been absolutely shell-shocked at the number of the teenagers who’d made commitments who then fell away. I think he had a daughter that might have been one of them. And it moved him to want to somehow do something about the fact that we can have a lot of Gospelizing and people registering responses, and yet they don’t last. Now, this was the start of my forming in my mind what amounts to a theological understanding to explain this whole issue. It became actually the heart of the system of theology that I developed. And that system of theology is that discipleship is done, listen, by Gospelizing people at depth. It’s the Gospel that triggers

[00:15:46] their response in the first place, but if you just get someone and teach them to make a response and then leave them, if you give a shallow Gospel, if you get them in the door with sufficient Gospel for them to nod their heads, but you don’t give them the full story, then you won’t get what this text is trying to say. They kept on Gospelizing until they had made many disciples. And it is the Gospel delivered at depth and given time that is how we follow up. I discovered in the Billy Graham organisation, who came to our country three enormous times, and maybe some little ones as well, including Leighton Ford who came here to Brisbane, I discovered in their organisation that they had done a survey in 1968 about the people who responded to the very fabulous and impactful 1959 Graham Crusades, which was held in all our capital cities. The largest number of people in the MCG ever

[00:17:08] recorded for a good time, I don’t know whether it’s been beaten since, but was the Billy Graham final meeting in the MCG. Whole grass was covered with people as well as the ones in the stands. And they seldom get those numbers up even for the biggest of matches today. I think they might have matched at once, but that’s because God really did a work then. And my dad, being principal of a college in different Bible colleges around Australia, often used to ask the students thereafter, how many of you here are students at Bible college training to be missionaries, training to be pastors, are here because you made a response to the Gospel in 1959 at those Crusades. And usually, I think the numbers are not the same today, but usually at least half the students would put their hands up. That was a very special time where many people got turned into disciples, so much so that

[00:18:09] they volunteer for missions and volunteer for ministry, meaning they have a call to those things and they’ve gone for training, for the greater number being people who made that first decision at the Billy Graham Crusade. And it was the insurgency of the Gospel on those occasions where God did a very deep work in our country, so much so that revival chaser or understander, writer up about her, Stuart Piggin, who was a historian in universities in Australia, secular universities, but he was an evangelical Christian. He ended up as an evangelical Christian and he studied about revivals and what would be the nearest to revivals in Australia. And he came to, in quiz, my dad, who’d been around at the right time for those 59 Crusades, and to find out more information because it’s the nearest thing in his estimation that we’ve ever had a revival, that 1959 set of Crusades. There

[00:19:22] are little sparks of revival that happen, but the feature that was so clear to him was the Gospel that brings about that movement of the Spirit. When it’s done in power, when it’s done in depth, when the Christian church gets together to put Gospelising as its chief activity, it’s the Gospel taken by missionaries which is their first task. And interestingly, if you examine the history of Christian missions, there’s something that you’ll find out about Christian missions which is alarming, and that is they nearly always start off, not always, but nearly always start off as the outbreak of evangelistic fervour to take the Gospel to the lost. But they don’t stay that way and they often get watered down to do less than that. Sometimes very good things that they do, but they lose their edge. The same thing happens to theological colleges. I happen to know, having studied about them,

[00:20:32] but because of my father, that there’s repeated attempts that evangelicals get to train pastors in order to know the Gospel, and those institutions of theology keep getting watered down with less and less subjects teaching the Gospel, and more and more teaching other things, many of them good things, often administrative methods, or often it might be other things that we should do as Christians, which we certainly should do. And some of the very best of organisations which began for the purpose of Gospelising the world today don’t take the Gospel as much, or they think that by helping people build wells, something we certainly should help. I’m not knocking any of that. I’m just saying that if that’s all we do, we’ve lost. Our understanding of the primacy of the Gospel is the thing that turns people into disciples. Now, I got convinced from Matthew and Luke, and Matthew and Mark,

[00:21:45] I suppose, who have the Great Commission, Matthew and Mark, and learnt simultaneous equations. And so coming back to this spot in the Book of Acts, when they, and it’s got that form that doesn’t decide the issue, when they, having preached the Gospel to that city and having made many disciples, is put into those, it’s completed work done, that is better interpreted it’s the Gospel that makes people disciples. Then Paul and his company return to these other cities to go back and strengthen the souls of the disciples. That word strengthening is a fascinating word. It’s actually in the Greek the word sterizo. I’m fascinated by the word sterizo because it sounds like you’ve made different strong, you know, which isn’t a bad thought. And so I went looking up in the Scriptures for other places where it says about Christians strengthening people. My reason being, because I’ve seen from this

[00:23:00] verse in Acts, that you need the Gospel not only to convert them in the first place but you need the Gospel sewn at depth in order to strengthen them. So I went looking for the word strengthening. And I want to tell you that it’s very interesting when you look at Paul’s letters, we’ve been looking at Paul’s, the description of what he did in the Book of Acts, but why not look at his letters? What’s the chief letter of Paul? Let’s see what people think tonight. What’s the biggest and best or most wonderful or strongest or often read letter that Paul wrote? Tell me one please. Romans, that man is right. The Book of Romans. Well go to Romans please in chapter 1. And here we have Paul speaking as he writes the beginning of the Book of Romans. And he says he’s interested in them to get some spiritual gift from him and he wants to visit them. For I long to see you that I may impart to

[00:24:04] you some spiritual gift to strengthen you. And yep, that’s the word. That is that we may mutually be encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. So he’s not talking here about the Gospel at least, he’s talking about him coming and I picture him as laying hands on them and them getting more spiritual gifts. Now some people are not as think that’s being too charismatic. I don’t think it’s the simple meaning of it. He wants to give them gifts. And when you have a fellowship of the church that has the Holy Spirit moving and gifts emerge, it does something to the fellowship. Okay you can criticise me if you’re lying and say it’s you being too charismatic, but it is the easiest translation. We may mutually be encouraged with each other’s faith, yours and mine. I don’t want you to be unaware brothers that I’ve often intended to come to you, but thus have been prevented. In order

[00:25:03] that I may reap some harvest among you, he wants to Gospelise amongst them, as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am utter under obligation to the Greeks and the barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So I’m eager to preach the Gospel to you also who are in Rome. Now I could explain that and say he just wanted to have some good evangelistic crusades with them, but the converts have already heard the Gospel. But when you follow through the book of Romans, what do you find? I was saying about how Heidi got going through the book of Romans with a verse from here and there and she made what was called the Roman Road and she printed them off and had them made shiny and gave them out to the young people. Now this is 15, 14 years back when we were first here. I’ve been here 18 years and the idea was that you pinned it up in the inside of your toilet door. So when people

[00:26:16] came to our house and had to go to the loo, as they closed the door and sat down, they were confronted with the Roman Road. That’s a good idea. It’s actually a good place to learn some Bible verses if they’re right there in front of you. And that’s what we did in the first instance in the youth work in this church, was we Gospelised the youth, even the ones who were already Christians, and got them to learn from the book of Romans the Gospel. And the reason is because Paul wrote this book of Romans for the purpose of strengthening them. Let’s check on that. Let’s go to the end of the book of Romans in chapter 16. I think it is. Yes, chapter 16. Thank you. Now this is Paul summing up having gone through the book of Romans and you can check it for yourself. Just read it through and see how he’s making the Gospel clear and he’s applying it to us as Christians

[00:27:25] as well as people getting converted. And here’s how he sums up at the end, the final chapter. Now to him who’s able to strengthen you according to my Gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ. According to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations according to the command of the eternal God to bring about the obedience of faith. Not just get people saved enough to get into heaven, but to bring about the obedience of faith. Now what’s really interesting here is that where it talks about to strengthen you according to my Gospel, the trouble is this business of going and searching the Scriptures. One verse leads you to an idea but there’s also things in it you’ve got to research a bit further. My task then was to look up what does it mean when it says according to, little

[00:28:42] Greek word kata, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret. It’s a Gospel mystery. The Gospel reveals the mystery. But anyway, it’s according to the revelation of that mystery when people get a revelation of what God has done in Christ. What is the word according to? I found it has two applications that both are used in the Scriptures. One is when a line of prophets had come to Israel, how they judged the latest was that he prophesied in a way that kept the truth of the line of prophets already come. His new prophecy was still according to all the previous prophets that had come. That’s one use of the word according to. Another use of it is by means of, and you can take it either way here, now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my Gospel. This is in line with what you’ve already heard in my Gospel. But as also you

[00:30:00] can take it to mean, now to him who is able to strengthen you by means of my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ. Both would be legitimate understandings of the phrase according to. According to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, all the Old Testament times, there were things written in the Old Testament prophecies that really were fulfilled in Jesus later. Not that they understood it much then, because it hadn’t clicked. There hadn’t been that spiritual understanding. And the Apostle Paul himself had been a student of all the Jewish things that they believed from the Old Testament, and yet he persecuted Christ and Christians. He persecuted those because he’d never had a revelation of the mystery. It happened to him the day on the camel’s back. I see him falling off the camel. I don’t really know he fell off. But the light shone from heaven

[00:31:07] and Jesus spoke to him. But it has now been disclosed. That’s why the new covenant of the New Testament trumps the Old Testament. The Old Testament was true and good, but it has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writing has been made known to all nations. According to the command of the eternal God, the New Testament Era was when God says now I’m going to reveal how I work to make people my people, to bring about the obedience of faith. I don’t know whether I put the little verse in the book of Acts about the great many of the priests were obedience to the faith, but that’s what it actually says. When the Gospel got around by the mouths of the apostles, a lot of the priests accepted the truth as the revelation came to them and became obedient to the faith. This faith is the articulation of how one having faith in what the Gospel proclaims is how you get in

[00:32:16] the door with God. But not only get in the door with God, it’s what makes you strong. I discovered the Billy Graham organisation had had a survey done of the people who’d responded in some of their earlier crusades and the details were collected and they were sent out to the pastors. That happens even today when Will Graham, grandson of Billy, has meetings down the Gold Coast. If some of our people responded when there were, it comes through to the pastor of their church. To me, I heard. And we had some of our people who’d been in charge of this trip who saw to it that those ones were followed through. What they did was they did a survey of the previous crusades to find which churches got their converts to stick, to stand, to last. And they discovered that there were some very amazing churches for whom their converts seem to last much better than others, so they did

[00:33:25] an inquiry and went and asked the Billy Graham people, what did your pastor do? How is it your church has got 90% sticking as Christians when other churches might have 60% or something? They found one bloke who when he got his list of people to follow up, this is a pastor from the church and some of his folk that he’d taken to the Crusades had made decisions and come to Christ. He got them together and he made himself a great big brochure. There are these little brochures people use to help you to witness. Four spiritual laws is one that was regularly used back a few decades. And the four spiritual laws are just a way to show someone a little pamphlet about the gospel. But what he did is got great big pieces of cardboard and he made what was an enormous four spiritual laws and he got his people together the ones that had been sent to him to follow up, and he got them together and

[00:34:31] he went through turning the big pages of the four spiritual laws and he did it every week. I don’t know the exact details on how long he did it, but he just drilled the gospel into them and each of those steps of the four spiritual laws for all have sinned and fallen sure of the glory of God that goes on. He got them to learn those verses and he got the Gospel dug deep into them and his converts are still there when the Billy Graham team investigated by and large. It’s evidence for what I’m talking about that the way that you make disciples is that you Gospelize them at depth. I took that understanding with me to that church in Sydney at Rybe and we were discipling people on this very stuff I’m telling you I’m giving you something you can probably tell I’ve rehearsed a thousand times. But we did it one on one. We got people who wanted to go on with Christ to be discipled. Michelle

[00:35:37] and I would have different sets of people but I had a little booklet which every person I met once a week I had a couple of pages for them and I put the things we talked about down so I wouldn’t repeat them too many times I came on further and we discipled the church and we ended up not letting there be as best as we could you can’t always got to be careful what you don’t allow. We tried hard not to have anybody in any leadership position or in any teaching position that we had not discipled and in the discipling we took them through the Gospel at depth and that most recent trip I had as you’ve heard me say was where we discovered 40 folk had come together not people who’d been to the church so much as they’d been there in our time which is a fair time back and they were there to say that the teaching or the discipling had changed them and I was dangled by the weekend some of them there’s one bloke this is what you now lecture

[00:36:51] at Moreland College there’s others who’ve been missionaries there’s ones who’ve been active in the church but all of them were keen to say that it was the Gospel at depth that made them into a fellowship that now that was we left that church and we were there from 87 to 92 we left in 92 but ever since then they’ve kept the fellowship of that group and some of them were living just outside of City North of it and had big property access to lots of places for people so they invited to have it all of their original fellowship come for that one day and Michelle and I were wondering what would be like going back to her old church and when they’d had lots of other regimes after hours I hadn’t I was nervous I thought I’d be irrelevant really with more recent people having been their pastor and but instead they told us that the teaching and the gospel was why they were still serving the Lord what I’m telling you works in practice

[00:38:00] that what turns a person into a disciple is when the understanding of the gospel is taken deeper and gets an increasing grip on you it’s not like there’s two messages one to get you in the door and another one to be some deeper life message if you listen to deeper life messages the ones that work are actually just people that plying the gospel more deeply Isaac conventions used to be built on this very principle I’m telling you that people went there to have a deeper thing done but what was done was to show them the gospel but if people think that there’s another message, not the gospel, they are not doing it according to the scriptures. And my evidence is the book of Romans and the history of what Paul did in the book of Acts. It is what gives people who go on for Christ. I’m asking you tonight, have you been taken through whether you’ve done it yourself, because you can do this yourself, or whether you’ve had someone

[00:39:15] lead you through a discipling process. What used to happen when people met with us one by one is that we would one teach about the gospel, but we’d also ask them how they’re responding to that. And we actually did a survey of what were the major issues people really wanted to talk about on top of the sheer understanding of the gospel. There were things like how to speak to others about Christ, how to get over besetting sins, how to have a deeper fellowship with people. And the issue is, and we made a list of them, I can’t remember the whole list now, but I’d have it written down somewhere, but things that people kept saying, they particularly wanted to know how you can raise the flag for Christ, but not look like you’re negative. How to have a witness without being someone who’s get yourself offside. There is a sense in which if you hang on to the gospel, you will suffer persecution. The Bible says that,

[00:40:26] but it’s a skill that you have to learn. I sure needed to. I used to give people both barrels of the gospel and then they wouldn’t let me into any of their inner circles. When I first went teaching, I made that bad mistake and I had to learn. Sometimes you need to work on your relationship first and then feed across the gospel to the degree that you’ve gotten into a relationship of respect. They’re things I had to learn. And they’re things people want to be aided by. My guess is that many of you would say, if I could get to be helped in this knowing the depth of the gospel and how to have it apply in my life, you’d say, yep, I’ll be in it. Because all of us have a desire. In fact, the book of Romans was written for that person as the end of it talking about now to him who can strengthen you by means of or according to my gospel. Paul finishing his letter to the Romans in that way. That’s why the book of Romans can have a Romans road that runs through it. So I’m

[00:41:42] wanting us to not lose that idea of there being discipling and that the purpose of our church is to concentrate more on disciples than just getting converts. It’s the same message that gets the converts. I know because I’m one from a milligram crusade. And I know from having been involved in evangelism, it was our role in Tasmania. I was their state evangelist for Baptists to go from church to church. I discovered very quickly, it didn’t just depend on me, it depended on the church as to whether or not they’d make gospelization of high priority. There were churches that have done wonderful programs that would let me in the little cracks have a little talk here and a little talk there, and there are other churches who said clear the decks and make these three, four months that they got me to be there, to be totally designed to have the presentation of the the Gospel and the follow-up there, follow-up. And those ones are an awful lot of people

[00:42:50] who were touched. And my aim in this church has always been that we do the same thing by my being here, what I did in Ryad, and what is the purpose of the whole development of our programme in the church. Please join me in that. But the only way you can truly join me is read that book of Romans, read Matthew, Great Commission at the end of it, and mark Great Commission at the end of it and see whether you can’t see the truth. There are some little differences between Matthew and Mark, but the major point, and even in the grammar that’s used as to which is the main verb and which is the participle, proves the point that the way that you make disciples is that you gospelise them. But you don’t do it just with a quick message and then move on to something else. You take, as in Matthew’s case, 28 chapters’ worth. In Jesus’ case, he taught them at depth because it’s the

[00:44:01] gospel delivered at depth like our gospels do. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you can’t help but notice it. If you read with that question, mark in your mind. I mean, you could deliver the gospel so much more concisely than all those chapters long, but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John didn’t. Nor did Jesus in his teaching, which is a major part of what’s in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It’s about Jesus and his teaching. But it’s the gospel known at depth that turns you into a disciple, helps you stay a disciple and helps there to be the work of God done. Let’s have a moment of prayer. Father, I thank you for the opportunity to rehearse, something that has been drilled into me from things that have happened in the past. I thank you for the encouragement of going back to that fellowship of people, 40 of them that came to the Saturday. And Lord shared how they had been turned into disciples by the gospel. And Father, I pray that you’ll help us to see that happen again here in our church in Jesus’ name. Amen.