RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Making Disciples – 12
Sammy Tippit: We’ve been talking about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and then how to disciple others. Jesus said to go into all of the world and make disciples of the nations. One of the great things I’ve learned and I think you will learn is that God wants to work in you so he can work through you. He wants to use your life.

Corey, we’ve been talking about this for several sessions now, and I think it’s important that we be very clear on what it is to make disciples and what it is we’re trying to impart to people. We talked about being mentors, leaders with people following behind us, but there are two basic things I’ve found that Paul said we need to impart.
One is the Scripture, the Word of God. That’s what we’re teaching. Then, secondly, the other is how to apply that Scripture, how to live it out, how to make it a reality in our lives. Let’s take both of those things and talk about them. We’ve talked about the importance of the Word of God, but when we’re in leadership, how do we impart Scripture to others to help others get in the Word of God? How do we help them to do that?
Corey Webb: Right. Well, we can’t impart it unless we’ve ingested it first. It has to be ingested. A saying I like to use to describe that is that as we read it through, we pray it in, we live it out, and only then can we pass it on.
Sammy: Oh, that’s great. That’s great. Say those again. Let’s go through those again.
Corey: Okay. We read it through, we pray it in, we live it out, and then we have the ability to pass it on. But we can’t pass on something we haven’t yet lived out ourselves.
Sammy: Yeah. You know, you said something in the last session we had. You talked about authenticity. I think that’s what you’re talking about right now. In other words, you’re talking about making this authentic. In other words, we’re not trying to just make religious people; we’re trying to make authentic followers of Christ.
Corey: Right.
Sammy: We have to go back to what it is to be a follower. It’s a learner, someone who’s learning of Jesus. We’re trying to make authentic learners of Jesus. We take it in. What was the second thing?
Corey: We read it through, we pray it in, we live it out, and then we pass it on.
Sammy: Okay. So taking it in… I needed some kind of systematic way to take it in. Reading through was one thing we talked about. Meditating… We talked about accountability last time. Is there a way we can have accountability in doing that to where we help people to memorize the Word and read the Word? Is that something is difficult to do? How do we do that?
Corey: Well, you know, that comes out in friendships. It comes out as you connect with your friends, as you have the relationships with those who are in the trenches with you, as you’re relating to different passages and just talking about life stories. You’re doing that with someone else, and that’s going to help you grow.
Sammy: Okay, so there are these informal relationships where we’re showing people and helping people as we go through it. I also think there are times, especially in the life of the church, when we need to have those formal relationships. By saying we’re formal, I mean we’re intentional. I’ll tell you what happened. We’ll get into this in a little more detail in our next session.
When I was a pastor in Germany, I heard a man named Max Barnett who talked about making disciples. He worked with students. He challenged pastors to get up and say, “Any men who want to learn to walk with God, I’ll meet with you at a certain time and teach you what I know,” so I did that. That’s when our church exploded.
Men said, “Hey, this guy is going to help me,” so we had that formal relationship. We met every week on Thursday mornings and memorized Scripture. We all quoted our Scripture to each other. We talked about how you read the Bible in your quiet time and went through that. I found that to be a helpful thing, not just an informal but a formal relationship.
Corey: Right. We have a responsibility to feed the hungry, and we don’t know who’s hungry unless we ask. Then when we ask, we have that time of teaching and instruction with them, and then they get a chance to glean and grow.
Sammy: Now this is a point I think we may need to follow into and go into a little bit, because there are people who want to grow, but we don’t know who they are. So in some way, we need to find out, and if we find someone who’s really hungry coming to us and saying, “Help me,” we need to say, “Hey, why don’t we start meeting together? Let’s get together once a week just to pray together or meet together.”
So there are people God will bring into our lives with whom we’ll see, “Hey, these people are really hungry. They’re looking for something.” When those people come, we need to be ready to help them and maybe enter into a more formal relationship with them. I think that in the church, there are probably a lot of people like that. In fact, when I was the pastor of a church there in Germany and I made that announcement on that Sunday morning, I was surprised at who came.
It was not the deacons. It was not the elders. It was not the leaders of the church. The people who came were the people who were on the periphery, the people who just kind of came on Sunday and sat in the back. Those were the ones who were at church because they just wanted to find out, “Hey, how do I do this? How do I grow?” There are a lot of those people.  We would be surprised at how many there are. We need to look for them. Okay. We have people. We begin to teach the Word, maybe in some kind of formalized meeting once a week or whatever it might be. But then, imparting our lives to them… How do we do that? How do we take the Word and impart? I’ll tell you one thing, and then you respond to this.
Corey: Okay.
Sammy: When I was a pastor there in Germany, we started a softball team. Now that doesn’t sound spiritual, does it? But you know what? Those guys from Sunday who were very competitive wanted to know, “Okay, how is Pastor Sammy going to react when something happens that goes against his way?”
They needed to see how I was going to live on that softball field, not just what I was teaching them there on Thursday mornings. “Okay, how does this work out over here? How does it work out with my wife? How does it work out with my kids?” It’s living life with them and showing them how that works out.
Corey: Right. Teachable moments happen when we do life with other people, when we spend life with them. Oftentimes people can say, “Well, we had people over to Bible study at our house, but it didn’t really happen until we got in the kitchen afterward and started eating,” because when we’re doing life, people have the freedom to stop and ask a question.
Sammy: Part of doing life is that when we fail… In other words, we talked about transparency in the last session. When we fail, we have to show transparency, saying, “You know, I’ve blown it, man. I messed up. Would you forgive me? I know I’m mentoring you. I’m trying to be an example for you.” We’re honest. It’s not this holier-than-thou type of deal. It’s, again, going back to humility. That’s part of what we mentor. That’s part of what we’re trying to show life is all about.
Corey: Yes. One of the greatest gifts we can impart to others we are mentoring or helping grow is simply to admit, “I blow it and make mistakes. Hey, can you forgive me?” When they see us in our humanness and then we have to ask for forgiveness… They see we’ve gone down wrong roads, we’ve made mistakes, but praise God for the rebound and the fresh start.
Sammy: Yeah. This is all imparting the Word of God, which we’ve talked about, and the root of what we’re doing is a humble heart. Then we impart our very own lives. When we do that, we will be making disciples. God has called us to make disciples who, by the way, will make disciples. That’s what I want us to talk about as we go forward with this: making disciples who will make disciples who will make disciples. Make disciples of all of the nations.