RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Making Disciples – 10
Sammy Tippit: The apostle Paul said he had entrusted certain truths, great truths, to Timothy. He told him, “Those things you’ve learned from me in the presence of many witnesses I want you to teach others also.” So there was this process of not only learning and growing but teaching others. We were previously talking about three types of relationships, and I want us to take a little time and go through those relationships one by one. Start with the first relationship.
Corey Webb: Okay.
1. Our relationships with mentors in our lives.
Sammy: Every one of us needs someone who is mentoring us.
Corey: Absolutely. We need someone who is ahead of us in our spiritual journey, someone who we can learn from, someone whose mistakes we can even learn from so we hopefully won’t have to go through some of those mistakes. We need people who are wiser than us in our journeys who we can spend time with and watch in their lives.
Sammy: When I was a new Christian, Tex (my wife) and I had just begun seeing each other. We were falling in love. I knew God had called me to do the work of an evangelist, so I wanted to do that. I said, “Lord, I don’t know how. I don’t know where to begin.” I had heard of a man by the name of Mike GilChrist. We were in Hammond, Louisiana, where I was going to school.
He was in Lake Charles, which was a three- or four-hour drive from where I was at that time. At midnight, my roommate and I were talking. I just loved to talk to him. We drove all night long. We got to his home at 4:00 in the morning. He didn’t know we were coming. We slept in the car in his driveway. When he got up that morning, there we were. He said, “What are y’all doing here?” We said, “We want to know how we can become evangelists.”
Mike, over the years, became a mentor to me. Now he didn’t tell me what to do in all of these things, but I could ask him whatever question I had. I could go to him. He was doing that work, and he was doing that ministry. Also, this whole truth we were talking about a little while ago about how you come to the end of yourself, your brook dries up and you only have God… He was the first person to share that with me.
Corey: Wow.
Sammy: He was the first person to tell me, “Sammy, you can’t do it. You’re trying, but you have to trust. It’s not trying, but it’s trusting.” He began to teach me that. He was a mentor to me. He was someone… Until he died, I looked to him for many years in that kind of relationship. I don’t know… Have you had someone or several people throughout your life? Is it one, or is it many?
Corey: Right. Well, for me it’s many. I have mentors who helped me in different areas of my life. Some don’t live near me. I travel to go see them at least once or twice a year. But there’s one mentor I had years ago when I was in my early 20s. He’s in heaven now. He took me underneath his wing and really…
Of course, I was too young to even really know what he was doing with me. Now I can see he was reproducing himself in me, but I was learning. He spent time with me. He took me with him when he went to go visit people or talk to people, and he had me do things he was doing. He brought me by his side. Then he asked me, “What questions do you have?”
I can remember even sitting in his living room one time. He said, “Ask me anything you want to ask me.” I said, “Well, Dr. Scott, if you had it all to do over again, what would you do differently?” He didn’t hesitate. He said, “I’d spend more time with my family.” Well, he was mentoring to me the value of spending time with family before I even had children.
Sammy: I think this is a really important point. We were talking in previous sessions about taking the Word of God in and how important that is. Then we talked about application. A mentor is someone who lives out and shows you how to apply the Word of God in your life. Would I be right in that?
Corey: Yes.
Sammy: So a mentor is someone who has kind of learned how to do that, who may be a step ahead of you in that and can show you. Okay. That’s the first relationship. What’s the second?
Corey: 2. Our deep friendships. Men need men. Women need women. We men need to have relationships with other brothers who will challenge us, love us, and confront us. When I entered into that type of… I like to call them garden friends because Jesus had Peter, James, and John with him in the Garden of Gethsemane. I like to call them garden friends.
When my friend Ken and I entered into that kind of deeper friendship, I felt like I needed to tell him (well, actually, to tell my wife, Bonnie)… We had only been married for about five years or maybe a little bit less time than that then. I said, “Bonnie, if I get to a place where I’m not treating you right or I’m messing up and blowing it, I want you to call my friend Ken and tell him anything you want to tell him.”
Now in the back of my mind, I was really kind of naïve and dumb in thinking, “Oh, she’s not going to call him,” but she did ask me, “Are you serious?” I said, “Yes I am.” I didn’t think anything of it. A few weeks went by. My friend Ken called me and said, “Hey, Corey! Let’s go get a coke.” I said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s go get a coke and hang out.”
I got in the car. He began to drive away. He said, “Bonnie called me today.” I said, “What?” My first reaction was pride and getting in the flesh, you know. “How could she do that?” But he said, “You know, Corey, she needed to call me.” By the end of that conversation, I was broken. I went home and told Bonnie, “Thank you so much for calling Ken today. I am so sorry.”
Sammy: I actually also had a friend named Ken who was like that when I pastored in Germany. He was a runner, and I was a runner. I think the greatest thing Ken did for me was encourage me. A lot of people have a hard time believing this, but I get discouraged easily. I need encouragement and someone who just believes in me, and Ken believed in me.
We would run together. As a matter of fact, I discovered really quickly that he was a runner while I was a jogger. There is a big difference between those two things. Anyway, I started saying, “Let’s memorize Scripture.” I’d give him Scripture he didn’t know but I knew. Anyway, he encouraged me so much. One last thing… Let’s wrap it up with the third type of relationship.
Corey: That third type happens when we take the things we are learning through time in the Word and time with our Creator and mentors, people who are farther along than us. Then we in turn pass that on to other people who are younger in the faith than we are.
3. Our relationships with people we’re mentoring. What I’ve found every time I’ve done that is that it has challenged me that much more. I see their hunger and their hot hearts, and it challenges me at the same time I’m giving away what we were created not just to receive and keep all for ourselves but to give away.
Sammy: Yeah. The nature of God is giving. He is a giving God. Most of the time, when we talk about a giving God, his nature, and our becoming more like him, we think of money. But it’s really our own lives. That’s what Paul was saying when he said, “I not only imparted to you the Word of God but the manner in which we lived,” to the church at Thessalonica. So we’re imparting the Word, but we’re imparting our own lives, giving away our own lives to other people. It is an incredible thing.
In fact, John wrote and said, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.” One of the greatest joys you’ll ever have in your Christian life is to help someone else to grow, get on the track, and begin to walk with God, and just help them along with some of the things you have learned. There are three relationships. Just really quickly, summarize those three again for us. Give us a statement on each one of them.
Corey: All right. We need people who are farther along in the Christian journey than us who we can learn from and ask to pour into us. We need to ask them questions. We need mentors, people who will pour into us, in our lives.
Sammy: Okay, that’s the first one.
Corey: Then men need men and women need women. We need some other brothers and sisters, as we said, who we can have that kind of deep friendship with, who can hold us accountable, challenge us, and grow with us. Then we need to be taking the things we’ve learned and pouring those into other people at the same time.
Sammy: So the whole of making disciples is first of all being a disciple and being discipled yourself so you’re growing in God’s grace. Then it’s having people who you’re walking with through this whole process. Then, finally, it’s your sharing and helping someone else to grow in their faith and their walk with God.
Corey: Absolutely.
Sammy: “…make disciples of all nations…”