3.  How does disciple-making happen?

How does disciple-making happen? Mysteriously I suppose, but essentially through talking. You can see the pattern in Jesus’ ministry – he was always talking. Even his miracles of healing involved discussion, explanation, rebuke.

Jesus taught his disciples to talk, to proclaim, to announce a great event. He gave them the words for it, he spoke about the Kingdom of God being on their doorstep. He taught them how to make sense of the promises in the Old Testament. He taught them what the key ideas were, and what was the basis of their life as disciples.

And he left them to it – to talk about him. And talk they did, and write. And as they spoke many who heard them believed what they had to say. And they turned to Jesus in repentance and trusted his death for their forgiveness. And then they joined the disciples and learnt how to be disciples themselves.

Even a highly educated and eloquent man like Apollos was discipled by Priscilla and Aquila so that he understood better what to talk about. And then he really spoke. Arguing and debating and proving from the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.

The pattern of Jesus and his disciples is very clear. Discipleship begins by hearing. Making disciples begins by talking. Most of us are quite good at talking although we usually talk more easily about some things than others. The kind of talking we are talking about here involves talking about Jesus. And about the scriptures.

And in the face of severe censorship. One of the minor trends in world Christianity is the increase in secret believers. These people are generally identified as former members of other religions whose lives would be in danger if their community knew they were Christians. So they live secret lives in which maybe only one or two others know they are Christians.

But there appear to be many secret believers in western countries where there is no threat at all to their life.  What there is, is hostile antagonism, intimidation and ridicule so that Christians are frightened to talk about Jesus. It is as though to talk about him is to commit a huge social sin: to bring into public what should be kept as a private matter.

But that is exactly what being a disciple involves. Bringing into the public sphere the wonderful story about Jesus. It involves shining a bright and disturbing light into the dark world that prefers lies and fantasies to truth.

But it is not done by disciples on their own. They are not left to their own strength and devices. They get help – or are they the help?

4. Help for disciple-making

Disciple-making involves telling the wonderful story about Jesus in public and in private.  But who is responsible for this? The excellent answer is, not us.

This is God’s responsibility, but we are his agents, servants, messengers, explainers, persuaders, witnesses. We are his help. He is the great evangelist who comes himself into the public life of his world and into the secret places of the hearts of humans to whisper and shout and shine his own light.

He does this because he is Spirit and it is the Holy Spirit sent from the Father who brings the Father’s message. But he does this through human speech and words, spoken and written by humans. We human messengers and the Holy Spirit work together in the great task of making disciples.

That is one reason Jesus told his first disciples to wait until they had been clothed with power from on high. It was no use them rushing off on their own to tell the great message about Jesus – they would have got nowhere – unless it was prison.

Instead they had to wait until the divine messenger came upon them and filled them so they could speak for him. And when the Spirit came, speak they did. In fact Luke’s version of the story makes clear that the major impact of the coming of the Spirit was to help them speak - which makes sense since the Bible portrays the Spirit of God as a speaking Spirit.

What was true for the first disciples has been true for all the disciples since. Our work as messengers, agents, explainers and persuaders has to be done under the power and direction of the Holy Spirit, since the Spirit is the primary evangelist. We are the help.

But we are helpers at the front-line. Amazingly God has decided to use ordinary humans as his main spokespeople. Ordinary people who speak for him. Just as the Father chose to send the Son as an ordinary human, so he has sent ordinary humans as speakers on his behalf. Because he wants to express the message in ordinary human speech so ordinary humans will obey it.

And he has sent out all his people, not just some of them. He is engaged in saturation evangelism. Sending every kind of disciple so as to reach every kind of fellow human. And what if some are not very good speakers, or not very bright, or too frightened, or too ignorant? It doesn’t seem to matter to the Father because those are the kinds of people he wants as disciples of Jesus, the same as the ones he asks to pass on his message. But what is his message?