Discipleship and World Missions (1961)
Part three of a four-part series from Urbana 61by Lawrence Love
“Discipleship identifies us with a Person. It involves us in a program. And it ensures us a power by means of which this program may be fulfilled, carried out through our lives and testimony.”
I am sure you are already aware that this speaker is very simple, very direct. I'm like my friend Dr. Frank Torrey. I once asked the Lord to make me simple, and I think sometimes He has overdone it. But, I have discovered some things in my long association with college and university students here, there, and yon, and in my own home. You see, I have a son who has been going to school it seems to me forever. He graduated from college a little more than three years ago. He is now in his third year at theological seminary, and he tells me he is going to England to continue his studies next fall. I have a daughter who is a sophomore in one of our colleges that has been mentioned here several times. So, I'm rather intimately involved with college and university students and even with graduate students. I've discovered in that association that you don't mind old folks being simple. I knew an awful lot when I was your age. The amazing thing to me is how much I have apparently forgotten, because I am not nearly so smart now as I was twenty-five years ago. And I have sought during these days, deliberately, under the guidance of God, to share with you some very simple and basic truths that I believe you will discover to be relevant to every one of us.
I said to you in the beginning that I would not preach at you, and I haven't. I have sought to share with you some things that the Lord has been seeking to teach me through the years - things that I find I need to learn all over again almost every day of my life. As we have considered this theme, we have found that the demands of discipleship are implicit in the fact of man's redemption, in the light of the price that was paid and the purpose that God had in mind when He paid it. We have discovered that discipleship is imperative in the face of man's ruin. The need of the hour demands that we be the very best we can be, by the grace of God. Then we saw that discipleship necessitates commitment to Christ in the total sense, confidence in Christ, and cooperation with Christ, involving the response of our wills to His claims upon our lives in the light of Calvary.
Now this morning, as we continue with our theme, we want to consider three other very basic facts. First, discipleship identifies us with a Person. Secondly, it involves us in a program. Thirdly, it ensures us a power by means of which this program may be fulfilled, carried out through our lives and testimony.
We are reading a somewhat lengthy Scripture passage this morning; and I would remind you that the most important part of any service is not what the preacher says about the Word of God, but what God says through His Word to our hearts. So, we are reading from the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 8, beginning with verse 27.
And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets. And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.
Let us look to the Lord in prayer. "Our loving Father, we openly acknowledge our utter and complete dependence upon Thee and ask Thee by Thy loving, only wise, holy, and eternal Spirit to speak to our minds, hearts, and wills through Thy Word of truth. May Thy voice come to us so unmistakably clear that each of us will be enabled to hear. And may we be encouraged to respond to Thee in all Thou dost say to us. Our expectation for these moments is from Thee and Thee alone. By Thy Spirit move and glorify Thyself we pray, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
Identification with Christ
At the very beginning, I want to reaffirm a vital truth, not because you do not know that this is the conviction of my heart, but because I wish to underscore what I believe to be a renewed emphasis among thinking evangelicals all across our country and throughout the world. This truth is that God's purpose in redemption is the transformation of sinners into saints, reclaimed by the grace of God and renewed by His mighty power, until in their lives they reflect the life and person of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is God's desire and intent that men should become disciples of Jesus Christ. This is obvious in the commission our Lord gave His disciples as recorded in Matthew 28.
Remember the Lord said, "All authority is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age." Our Lord commissioned His disciples to go and "disciple." Not only to proclaim the gospel, but to teach those who responded to it that they were responsible to obey Him in all things that He had commanded. The disciples were to make disciples. They were to bring men under the discipline of Jesus Christ.
This is God's aim and objective for every believer. To be less than a disciple, less than totally committed to the will of God in Jesus Christ, is to be utterly insincere. It is to miss the mark. If your faith in Christ is mixed with reservations, quibblings, and rebellings - now I do not mean that there is never a temptation to these things, nor at times a succumbing to the temptation - but if willfully, knowingly, you allow a spirit of rebellion to remain within your heart and are content to have it there, then you have no right to say that you are a Christian in the Bible sense of the term. For Jesus Christ came to restore to the fallen sons of Adam both the desire and the capacity to do the will of God. Where is heaven? Heaven is where the will of God is done. Where is hell? Hell is where there is rebellion against the sovereignty of the Son of God, the Lord of glory.
So discipleship is not a new idea. Nor is it an optional something a believer may or may not consider as he or she matures in the Christian faith. Discipleship is the essential mark and expression of Christian faith as presented in the Word of God. To be a disciple is to be identified with a person, and that Person is Jesus Christ. You can be identified with a church without being identified with Jesus Christ. I do not believe the reverse of that can be true. If you are identified with Jesus Christ, the Person of the Son of God, then you will be identified with His Church. You will not forsake "the assembling of yourselves" with others of "like precious faith."
But, you can be identified with a church without being identified with the Person of Jesus Christ. You can be identified with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship without being truly identified with the Person of the Son of God. You can be identified with a mission board and with missionary activity, and can give your life to some form of Christian service, without being truly identified with the Person of the Son of God. Sometimes we substitute activity and outward obedience for that true identification with the Person of the Son of God that is not simply theological, but actual.
Let me ask you: Is it apparent to all who know you that you are a follower of the Son of God? Is your response to the claims of Jesus Christ such as to identify you in the minds of others with the Son of the living God? What does it mean to confess Jesus Christ before men? Does it mean to come forward in a public meeting? To sign a decision card? To become identified with a Christian fellowship? All of these may be involved and may be a very valid part of your experience. But to confess Jesus Christ before men is to own His claims upon your life, to acknowledge His sovereignty, wherever you are, in whatever activity you may be pursuing. It is to give Jesus Christ the preeminence in every area of your life, in every relationship, in every realm of your activity and interest. Such open confession of the Lordship of Christ is the desperate need of the hour.
It is easy for you to acknowledge God here in this particular convention, when you put on the name badge (which often falls off almost as soon as you put it on!) You are identified here. You wear a badge that bears your name and the seal of Inter-Varsity; it shows that you belong here where Christian people are convened around the Person of Jesus Christ. It is easy here to identify yourself with other Christians and in some measure with Jesus Christ. But, let me ask you: When you return to your respective campuses, will the essential thrust of your life be such as to identify you there as a follower of the Lamb? Are you ashamed of Jesus Christ? Or are you grateful deep within your heart, and proud, to own Him as your Sovereign and your Lord?
To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be identified with Him in such a way as to be regarded as His follower. That does not mean that you have to buttonhole everyone you meet and ask him if he is saved. However, there is a time and place for that, too. Don't despise it. It does not mean that we have to break into every conversation and start witnessing. But it does mean that we are to be prepared at any and all times and in all circumstances to declare ourselves, regardless of what it costs.
To be a disciple identifies us with a Person. Jesus Christ becomes the center not only of our affections, but of our attentions, our interests. He is manifestly the Lord of our lives. Are you a disciple? Discipleship identifies us with a Person and causes us to confess Him before men by our allegiance to Him. I love the way the Apostle Paul put it. He said, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." And then he went on to say, "Henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." In a sense he was saying, "Stay out of my way. Don't seek to hinder me or distract me or divert me. I have marked upon me the brand of Jesus Christ; the claims of the Cross have been asserted here upon my life. I have responded to them, and the only thing that matters is my allegiance to the Son of God." We sang this morning, "Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand"; "I take, O cross, thy shadow, for my abiding place." Does that mean that the Cross is simply a shelter in the time of storm, a refuge from the results of our misdeeds, a hiding place from the judgments of God? Oh no! It means that we take our stand at Calvary and identify ourselves in terms of the Cross with the Son of God.
Involvement in World Evangelization
Then, to be a disciple involves us in a program. May I say this as flatly and bluntly as I know how: If you are a disciple, you are a missionary. It isn't a question of whether, but of how and when and where. Whether or not you should be a missionary, God has not left for you to determine. Whether or not you will to do His will, He has left up to you. But you cannot be a disciple of Jesus Christ without being involved in that which concerns His heart and has concerned it for all eternity. God has only one program for the Church of Jesus Christ. We have a thousand and one programs, but God has just one. It is so utterly simple and obvious in the New Testament that somehow we seem to have overlooked it through the centuries.
What is God's program for His Church? What did our Lord Jesus say to His disciples as recorded in Luke 24, when He not only opened the Scriptures, but opened their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures. He revealed to them this basic fact, that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. This was the program outlined for the Church by the Head of the Church, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Anything in your life or mine that is not submissive to, subordinate to, and related to that program, however good it may seem to be in itself, is irrelevant in the eyes of God. If you are a disciple, you are involved in the program of Jesus Christ. And that program is world evangelization. It is sharing with all men everywhere the word of reconciliation, the glorious news that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. This word of reconciliation has been committed unto us as a sacred trust from God, to be shared with all men everywhere.
Let me remind you that there are more people in the world today who have never heard the gospel than were in the world when our Lord gave this program to His Church. I noticed an impressive article the other day, in The Saturday Evening Post, written by a Roman Catholic theologian, Professor O'Brien of Notre Dame. He says that "there are more than eight hundred million Christians in the world." I would not take issue with him for a moment if by Christian he means nominally related in some remote way to the Church. But, I want to say to you this morning, if eight hundred million people in this world were Christians, disciples of the Son of God, involved in the program of world evangelization, we would have the job done overnight. It is obvious to any thinking person that unless something is done that isn't being done; the job isn't going to get done. And the one thing that apparently is not being done is that we are not becoming totally involved in the program that Jesus Christ gave to His Church. It is incidental to most of us.
If you are a disciple of the Son of God, the one thing that matters to you is the one thing that matters to Him. And what is that? That the gospel should be preached among all nations. That every man on earth should hear the good tidings of great joy which were intended to be to all people: that God has a Son; that for us this Son came and suffered and died; that He rose again from the dead; that He brought life and immortality to light through the gospel; that "whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life." This is our mission. This is the concern of the heart of God in which God invested the blood of His Son. If you and I are disciples, we will be dedicated to this program. We will be involved in it in a total sense.
Let me ask you: Are you a missionary? You say, "Well, I'm not through with my training." You don't train to be a missionary. You become a follower of Jesus Christ, and then you are a missionary. When you come under the discipline of the Son of God, when you are dedicated to that which occupies His interest and concern, you are already a missionary. Your very life has about it a fragrance-the fragrance, yes, of death, but also the fragrance of the risen life of the Son of God. And you become salt with savor; you become light that shines. Your life has meaning, Significance. There is something about your life that radiates the very Being of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Why did God change the Apostle Paul? That He might reveal His Son, Jesus Christ, in Paul. Paul's one solemn desire, his one magnificent obsession, was that Christ might be made to appear magnificent in his mortal body. Are you a missionary? Is your daily walk with Christ reflecting the indwelling life and power of the Son of God? Are you affecting the society with which you come in contact? My beloved young friends, it is utterly impossible for anyone to remain indifferent and unconcerned in the presence of a dedicated disciple of Jesus Christ.
If you are a disciple, you are already a missionary. Where God will yet have you go and what He will one day have you do is to be left in His hands. But it is not a question of if. It is how. To be a disciple is to be totally involved in missionary enterprise. And the one thing that should occupy your attention and mine above all else is this: How may I best fit into that program under God? I have often said to my young people when I was pastoring, “God has a place for you, if He has you for the place.” And He'll put you in it. Just make sure that He has you, that you are a disciple.
Appropriation of Power
Third, to be a disciple is to be assured of power-God's power that is ours to appropriate. Several times during this convention reference has been made - and rightly so in context - to the weakness and frailty, the known and unknown failures and sins, of the Church of Jesus Christ and the missionaries that have gone forth into the world. The implication has been that, in spite of all of these things, God has still used them to establish a universal Church. But lest someone misunderstand, I want to assure you that God has made provision whereby we may be holy men of God, holy women of God. God has made provision in Jesus Christ through the power of His eternal Spirit whereby our weakness has become strength - not ours but His. God did not intend that we should live alone forever. God did not intend that we should go on sinning and failing and stumbling and faltering.
The work of God that has really counted in the world through past generations has been accomplished through men and women who have been totally committed, who have been made holy by the grace of God, who have possessed power from on high. Yes, they were frail earthen vessels, but into those frail vessels God poured the infinite treasure of His own life and power, and out from their lives rivers of living waters have flowed.
The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Power isn't a matter of intellectual ability or training or even dedication. It is a matter of God Himself taking these earthen vessels, filling them with His life, and flowing through them in all His mighty power, accomplishing His work in the world through us.
I like such phrases in the New Testament as these: "more than conquerors through him that loved us"; "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me"; "Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us." To be a disciple of Jesus Christ, to be identified with the Person of the Son of God and involved in His program, is to be assured of power. No man goes to war at his own expense. All that God leads us to undertake, He Himself will underwrite financially and spiritually. God is simply waiting to be believed. That is all. If I have learned anything in my Christian life, it is this - that growth in grace is growth in dependence upon God. We don't grow up; we grow in.
Without Him we can do how much? Nothing. "Oh, but just a minute. Surely that couldn't be the case. Aren't there some things we can do on our own?" I thought there were when I finished theological seminary. It takes a wonderful memory, I guess, to go that far back, but I do remember it. I had learned that with a little hard work and a little attention, and by learning a little something of what the professors expected of me in my papers and on examinations, I could get along all right and come out fairly well academically. So, having made reasonably good grades, and having received my diploma and thereby been approved, as it were, I thought I was equipped.
But it wasn't very long before I began to learn that I was equipped for failure. Because, you see, I was trusting in my training, gifts, personality. I can remember how people would shake me by the hand, at the close of Sunday morning service, and say, "Ah, that was a wonderful sermon this morning." And I agreed with them. I thought it was rather good myself. But it lacked that touch of the supernatural that would have resulted in changed lives, in sons and daughters of the living God being brought into being, in laborers being thrust forth into the fields. Popular, but powerless!
Then God very wonderfully taught me this: I could do absolutely nothing without Him, but there was nothing I could not do with Him. It isn't by trying; it's by trusting. It isn't through struggling; it's in resting. It isn't through attainment; it's through appropriation. God never thrusts you forth to do a job without promising that He Himself will be involved with you in it. And if God be for us, who can be against us! Surely, in ourselves we are utterly weak; we are frail; we are unworthy. But we do not go forth in our own strength. We go under the banner of Jesus Christ, whose grace is sufficient, whose strength is made perfect in weakness. Of the early Church these words were said: "These that have turned the world upside down are come hither." The early Christians weren't very impressive numerically or intellectually or socially; but they turned the world upside down!
The Son of God said, "Ye shall receive power." Power! For what purpose? That we might have an ecstatic experience? That we might enjoy ourselves along the way? Oh no. There is joy in obedience. The disciples were always filled with joy when they were filled with the Holy Ghost. And the holy heart is the happy heart. The dedicated life is the life that knows the delights of the Lord. In His presence there is fullness of joy; at His right hand there are pleasures forevermore. But why was the power promised? In order that we might be enabled to do a job. In order that as we are involved in the program, we may have the means by which the work of God can be accomplished in the world.
It isn't that we need more preachers; we need more men filled with the Holy Ghost. It isn't just that we need more missionaries, though we do desperately; we need missionaries who are filled with the Holy Ghost. It isn't that we need more members in the InterVarsity group on the campus, but we need more who are filled with the power of Jesus Christ. The job can be done. The power is available if only the people will respond and become disciples of the Son of God.
Let me ask you again this morning: Are you a disciple? Is your flag flying at the top of the mast? Are you openly and without shame identified with the Person of the Son of God? When the opportunity comes, are you always willing by the grace of God to stand up and be counted, to go forth unto Him without the camp bearing His reproach? To be a disciple is to be identified with the Person of the Son of God. It is to be a follower, to be under the discipline and control of Jesus Christ. Are you a disciple? To be a disciple of Jesus is to be involved in the program of furthering the gospel to the ends of the earth.
Are you a disciple? To be a disciple is to possess, by virtue of His indwelling presence, the power to live triumphantly, witness effectively, and further the gospel by the grace of God. I want to leave you on this note of encouragement this morning: There is no want of willingness, no lack of ability on the part of Almighty God to fulfill every promise He has ever made to His Church - every promise of power, victory, and triumph. He is simply waiting for disciples through whom He may fulfill His Word. Are you prepared to be a disciple by the grace of God?
Let us pray.
Our loving Father, we beseech Thee that Thou wilt keep us, Lord, our God, keep us from just playing church. Somehow we feel it is better to be a frank, open sinner than a colorless, hesitating nonentity, identified with the rank and file of believers but not with Jesus Christ. O God, confront every heart, we pray, with Thyself, with Thy claims upon us in the light of Calvary. May there be on the part of every truly believing child of Thine a total response, that we may be able to say when we leave this place, "Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow Thee"; that in Him we may become more than conquerors; that the weapons of our warfare, which are not carnal but are mighty under Thee to the pulling down of strongholds, may be effectively used in our hands for Thy glory. Our God, we would ask Thee to accomplish all that is in Thine heart to do, in our hearts and through us, for the glory of Christ. Amen.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register