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Volume 13 Week 31 August 5, 2007

So What Is a Disciple?

The Marks of a Disciple, Just the Way that Jesus Himself Made Them!

One of our members shared a devotion this week based on Acts 9:36: “In Joppa, there was a disciple named Tabitha (which, when translated, is Dorcas), who was always doing good and helping the poor.” It’s one of those passages you might read through real quickly to get on with the point of the story, but if you slow down and consider it, wow!

The devotional writer shared that this is the only woman identified by name in the New Testament who is called “a disciple.” Wouldn’t you like it if people were talking about you 2,000 years from now, and calling you, “a disciple”?

A classmate from seminary gave me his card this summer. Under his name it reads, “Child of God, Disciple of Jesus, Husband, Father, Pastor.” That’s pretty good. Child of God. Disciple of Jesus. That’s who we are.

So what exactly is a disciple, anyway? I think most of us have a general idea. “A disciple is a follower of Jesus,” or something like that. When we read the stories of the great saints who have gone before us, people like Dorcas and the other first disciples of Jesus, we might wonder, “Am I that kind of a follower of Jesus?”

Does discipleship mean leaving home and family and going on great missionary adventures of faith, like the Apostles of the Lord? Does it mean dying some sort of fiery, beastly death, as the martyrs did? Maybe Dorcas is a more typical example. We’re told simply that she was “always doing good and helping the poor,” but there must be more to it than that.

Making Disciples!

When Jesus commissioned the disciples to “Go and make disciples…” (Matthew 28:19) He laid out the process. Jesus said that disciples are made, first of all, by “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Only God can make a disciple. It’s only by the outpouring of His grace in the call of the Holy Spirit that conversion and the forgiveness of sins can be granted. Baptism makes disciples.

But Jesus continued, “… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Someone once called the two little words, “to obey” the Great Omission. Teaching is one thing, but teaching to obey is quite something else, isn’t it?

Before He was betrayed, in His last evening of instruction with the twelve, Jesus described a disciple like this: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples” (John 15:7-8). So the world will know what a disciple looks like by the fruit that is produced.

That’s a relief! Not every disciple can bear the fruit of laying down their life, as did the martyrs. If we were all called to give our lives for the gospel, who would remain to continue to bear other fruit? Who would there be to continue “doing good and helping the poor”? Every disciple bears a little bit different fruit. Even among the twelve Apostles, there was a diversity of gifts and callings and mission fields.

But Jesus does give some of the essentials of discipleship. They are baptized into His grace, and they learn and grow in understanding the will of God and obediently following where He is leading. The first disciples all had those things in common.

First Disciples!

So maybe the best place to begin is with those first disciples of Jesus. What things, exactly, did He teach them to do and to obey?

If you look through the time that Jesus spent with His disciples, I think you can see that everything He did was intended to shape and mold them into disciples, followers of the Master. It all began very simply. One by one He called them to come with Him, to be with Him, and to be together with one another. There are a few examples of Jesus sending the disciples out, but for the most part, He just gathered them together.

Later, St. Paul would call this gathering together “the body of Christ.” I doubt the disciples recognized it at first, in fact they often showed that they didn’t get along that well, but being was the first step in discipleship. Disciples are connected to other disciples.

By being together, the disciples had common experiences of the work of the Lord Jesus in their lives. They were all in the boat together, crying out for mercy, when Jesus rescued them from the wind and the waves. They each took up some of the fish and the bread, and then came back together to count the twelve baskets full of leftovers after feeding the 5,000. They drank together from the wine at the wedding and witnessed the raising of Lazarus, together. For the rest of their lives they had things to talk about and share, and through those shared experiences, God was at work in them.

Jesus certainly did more than just gather the disciples together. He taught them the basic skills of discipleship. In Matthew 5 we read how Jesus saw the crowds gathering, but called his disciples to go up on the mountaintop with Him, and there He taught them the Sermon on the Mount. Disciples are people of the word. Last weekend we read in the gospel lesson how the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. By His example and by His instruction, Jesus made it clear; a disciple is a person of prayer.

On their last night together, in an unforgettable lesson that Jesus called, “an example” (John 13:15) for all disciples, He washed their feet, and made acts of service done in love in response to God’s love for us a mark of a disciple for all time. And a disciple gives. Earlier that same night Jesus had told them, “The one who loves his life will lose it, but the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25). The first disciples were givers. In the earliest days of the church, Peter and John modeled this when they met a beggar in the temple when Peter said, “Silver and gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk” (Acts 3:6).

The story of Jesus’ time with those first disciples comes to an end on the day of His Ascension into heaven. The disciples’ response to the Ascension tells us something else about disciples of Jesus: they worship and adore Him. Luke 24:52 tells us that after He was taken up into heaven, “They worshipped Him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.” A disciple lives a life of continual thanks and praise for the great things they have seen and received from God.

And the story continues after the Lord’s departure. The companion book to the Gospel according to St. Luke is “The Book of Acts.” More precisely, it’s “The Book of the Acts of the Apostles.” If you read it carefully, however, you discover that it is truly the story of the worldwide spread of the gospel, an accomplishment far beyond the capacity of a group of fishermen and tentmakers. It’s really “The Book of the Acts of Jesus Christ through the Outpouring of His Holy Spirit into the Lives of People like You and Me, the Apostles.”

And when we live as disciples of Jesus, the story continues to unfold. God bless your adventure of following Jesus.