What does it really mean to follow Jesus? It’s essential that we are rooted and grounded in God’s love and that we understand His grace – the heart and soul of the gospel – but what about the daily struggle to live as a faithful disciple of Jesus? What about the real world of disappointments, trials, unrealised expectations and the dark times when God seems so far away? When Jesus stood by the lake that day and said, “Follow me”… where was He going? Well, we know now that He was going to Calvary!
If being a disciple of Jesus means participating in His life and embracing His ministry and the reality that He experienced, then there will be many challenges for those of us who desire to take His call to discipleship seriously. We can continue to sit in the stands and be a spectator, saying all the right things; mixing with those in the game and even wearing the same uniform; believing we are actually involved in the real stuff; or we can be honest enough to admit that we are still in spiritual nappies, drinking spiritual milk and we have yet to taste the real meat of discipleship.
We may have followed Jesus to the Mount of Transfiguration; we may have followed Him as He healed the sick and raised the dead and cast out demons and rode triumphant into Jerusalem. But have we followed Him into Gethsemane yet? Have we shared His heartache as Judas kissed him on the cheek that night? Have we known His pain as His best friend disowned him in His hour of greatest need? Have we followed Him to that cold windy hill of death?
The discipleship road has many turns, potholes, speed humps and obstacles. There are tests at every bend and often we go through these tests many times over in our earthly journey. The question is this: are we prepared to embrace that journey with determination and conviction – ready to face anything that comes our way – and confident that whatever lies ahead on that road is under the total control of our Sovereign Lord?
Are we prepared to grow up spiritually, to mature in Christ, to digest the real meat of discipleship and not keep re-heating the same old milk? I want us to be brutally honest with ourselves today and let the Spirit of God examine our hearts and our lives and be prepared to admit that on the road of discipleship we may have a long way to go in our understanding of what it means to truly follow Jesus. So, as we prepare for this study in discipleship over the coming weeks, let’s begin with a pretty confronting, but really important passage from Hebrews.
Hebrews 5:11-6:3 “We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. Therefore, let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so.”
Before I continue, let me warn you. It is not possible to preach about true discipleship and following Jesus without exposing the huge chasm between genuine discipleship and what most of us have experienced and observed in our lifetime. So that means there will be many face-slapping observations and exhortations in this sermon and this whole series. So, brace yourself. But let me say three things.
Firstly, I stand side by side with you as those confronting truths challenge us all. Every genuine preacher has already been confronted by God through every word in their sermon before they share that pain with others! Secondly, I will never target individuals or local issues and so you never have to wonder, “Is he talking about her, or what happened last week or that problem in my Church.” The answer is no, but the Holy Spirit may have real issues and people in mind. Thirdly, you need to remember that my sermons are now reaching thousands of people each week in many different countries and so I am preaching to the whole church and it is up to the hearers and the Holy Spirit to work out what applies to whom. In colloquial terms, ‘If the cap fits, wear it‘ … and let God change you; if it doesn’t, let that statement sail past you to someone else. So, let’s all relax, open our hearts and minds to God and take on board whatever God intends.
So, from our Hebrews passage, we have to understand that it is entirely possible for us to stay a child forever, in spiritual terms. We can come to church, get involved in programmes and ministries and yet never really grow at all. I want us to examine the modern church – not just our own fellowship – but the whole church as we know it today. I believe we need to face the possibility that too many of those who sit in worship centres every week, have not tasted the real meat of discipleship.
One example of our spiritual childhood that comes to mind is our prayers – they never seem to change for many of us. You would think that if a person was growing in their relationship with the Lord, they would pray differently from when they first embraced the gift of Salvation in Christ. But often that is not the case. Another evidence of our immaturity is the division in the church. Paul told the Corinthians that they’re clinging to Peter, Apollos and himself was a sign of their spiritual immaturity. The Corinthians weren’t fighting each other. They were just aligning themselves to different preachers. At least they stayed in the same congregation. In our day we don’t do that very well. We belong to different groups and meet in different buildings and speak against each other.
Instead of getting better … many of Christ’s followers are getting worse. For so many people today it seems so easy for them to walk out of one fellowship into another and take all their baggage and critical spirit and unresolved problems with them. They are often welcomed with open arms at the new place where no one holds them accountable for their actions. Then if the new crowd doesn’t do church the way they like it, they just move again, or they might even start their own version of church. The Body of Christ has never been so fragmented – a sure sign of our spiritual infancy.
Another evidence of immaturity is our obsession with getting and our resistance to giving. Too often we are just like little children, constantly wanting the Lord to help us, do this for us, give us that, make us well, make us happy, give us money – some people never stop begging. Like children, we do not know how to value the things we have. So often we ask for the wrong things. Isn’t it interesting how many Christians are always more intrigued with the gifts of the Spirit than with the fruit of the Spirit? If someone with a healing ministry comes to town, the church is never so packed. Children love the spectacular – but only the mature are interested in being training in the school of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. If you offer a little child a $100 note or a bag of lollies – he’ll probably take the bag of lollies.
We are the same way when it comes to materialism. We always go for the nice home, the new car, the big bank account, rather than spiritual things, because we don’t have a mature value system. We even try to use God to get these things. It’s not enough to seek after material prosperity ourselves, we try to coax God into helping us get it! At times we can be a lot like selfish little children. Another evidence of our spiritual immaturity is the lack of workers in the church. We have people who have been Christians for decades and still have no active ministry and have never even tried to lead a person to Christ. Their grand achievement may have been to invite someone to a meeting. If the person comes – they have done their duty – it’s up to the Pastor now to preach the gospel, lead the person to Christ, baptise them and care for them from then on.
Every Sunday in many churches all over the world the gospel is preached. People respond and we put them in a newcomer’s group to learn about the church, baptism and other fundamentals. But where do they go from there? By the time they finish that introduction to Christianity, we are off starting another newcomer’s group, leaving them with no mentor to guide them into maturity. No wonder the church loses more than it keeps. No wonder the results of our big campaigns seem to shrink. The new believers – to put it bluntly – get bored with church as it has become in so many places today. The people are often told that they must grow and mature in Christ, but how can they if they are never fed anything but milk? Milk is good for a while; milk is all we can handle at first; but sooner or later if we don’t get some solid food, we shrivel up and become malnourished and weak.
Everyone is to blame for this – Pastors, Theological Colleges and the people in churches who seem happy to drink milk all their lives. We can all become complacent and apathetic and so we shouldn’t try to point the finger at anyone. We can all become victims of the structure in which we have been brought up. We cannot flee from that structure; it is woven into us, but we can make ourselves stop and think about what we are doing. If we don’t stop our ceaseless round of activities and ask God whether He is actually in any of those activities, then we are guilty of contributing to the immaturity of the church today.
I spend a lot of time researching what God is doing across the church in our nation and around the world and I have to say that I have been shocked to see how little meat there is in the teaching and preaching. The vast majority of people across most denominations are being fed the ‘elementary things’ referred to our Hebrews passage. This teaching is essential and foundational. That’s why it is so important; that’s why we need to make sure everyone has been exposed to it. But it must then be built upon. It is rich, wholesome milk, full of spiritual nutrients, but the meat comes when we move on into the real world around us and start to live it and grow in it.
To use another analogy, you cannot live on a foundation, no matter how strong it is or how flashy it looks. You have to build the house! When a builder pours a concrete slab, he waits for the slab to cure and reach sufficient strength and then he constructs the intended building on that slab. How pointless would it be for him to knock off when the slab is laid and move to the next job? For too many Christians around the world, that is their stark reality. They were given a great foundation, but the real building project never really got started. The Apostle Paul understood this dilemma. He told the Corinthian believers that he couldn’t give them solid food since they were still babies needing milk. This was a church that had all the spiritual gifts in operation; this was a church that we would say today was alive and full of the Spirit! But here Paul says they were still in spiritual nappies and so he couldn’t give them the real meat of the gospel. He was talking about the immorality in the church; strife among believers; marriage problems; food sacrificed to idols; insubordination; abuses of the Lord’s Supper; spiritual gifts; the resurrection of the dead and how to take an offering. Nothing but milk, Paul said.
However, he did give us a little peek at the solid food in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16. Then the next verse (3:1) goes back to addressing babes in Christ. So, what is Paul talking about in chapter 2? He tells in another place about his personal trip to the central offices of the universe where he “heard inexpressible words, which a man is not permitted to speak.“ Who knows what God shared with Paul then? He never included that in the New Testament. The Epistles, we must remember, are corrections. We don’t have the mainstream of the Apostolic teaching – only the corrections. We don’t have all that Paul taught when he was actually in Corinth, Antioch, Troas, Thessalonica and the other cities.
What is the book of Romans about? It is a basic, yet detailed outline of the gospel – man’s need for a saviour and our abundance in Christ. What about Hebrews? Well, the writer himself, as we read earlier, said that he had to water it down so as to not choke the spiritual babies. Doesn’t that disturb you a little to know that the Book of Romans and the book of Hebrews; the heavy books of the New Testament; the books they leave until third year in Theological College because they are so meaty; doesn’t it unsettle you to learn that they too are just spiritual milk?
So much of what we do and what is preached today is not designed to mature and perfect the body of Christ. God’s mandate to those who lead and teach is clear. It is laid out for us by the Apostle Paul:
Ephesians 4:11-13 “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”
My job is to equip the saints, to bring them to maturity. I was never taught that in church or in Bible College. I had been taught how to entertain people and how to attract people to my church, not how to perfect them. The vast majority of the activities of the church across the world today, especially the mega churches, are designed to entertain, to maintain and to keep people involved. We desperately need a rebirth of this apostolic ministry. The writer of Hebrews knew this frustration when he said, “Though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles.” (5:12). He was obviously expecting something better – that many of the laymen would eventually become teachers.
Ephesians 4 doesn’t say that the apostles, prophets and pastors are to do the work of service. It says they are to equip the saints to do that. An architect does not build buildings; he plans how others should do it. If the architect had to follow through and lay the bricks and construct the building – he may only get to build a few buildings in his whole career. As it is, however, he can effectively build several at once. We need church leaders who can draw up God’s blueprints and equip the believers to put the building together. This is discipleship. This is equipping people to truly follow Jesus. The overall goal, Paul says, is to “attain to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” God wants everyone to grow and minister just as Jesus did and that’s why the Holy Spirit has come.
When Jesus said, “Follow me …” He meant ALL the way. He was (and is) saying to us all: “Come with Me through all the ups and downs of life and ministry; learn from Me; laugh with Me; cry with Me; experience My broken heart over the lost; taste My suffering, My rejection, My death and come with Me as we rise triumphant again.”
It’s not all bads news though. I sincerely believe the Lord has been slowly taking more and more of His people down this discipleship road. I believe there has been more real spiritual growth in some parts of the church over recent years than in many decades beforehand. We aren’t seeing it in swelling numbers and flashy demonstrations of power. We see it in our own suffering and struggles as we try to find God in the fog of unrealised expectations and disappointments. We see it in the growth and maturing of those believers who spend time in the valley, not striving to climb the mountain, but letting God do what He desires to do in them when things are not going well.
All of my teaching over many years has been aimed at moving people from on from the elementary things – the diet of milk – and helping them to get their teeth into the meat of God’s Word and the true depth of the gospel. I want us to know what it means to really follow Jesus – all the way and wherever He leads us. I want us to understand that we will never share His glory if we never share His pain. Through this teaching series, my prayer is that we will commit to the discipleship journey seriously and press on together to embrace whatever God has planned for us. I pray that we will have the courage to finally put away our bottles and bibs and get out our steak knives and ask the Lord to show us the way as we follow Him with total abandonment and faith as He leads us through the highs and lows of life in this broken world and shows us how to more fully embrace His Kingdom, for His glory.