Following Jesus: Introduction

Purpose

“How will following Jesus help me pursue my passions?”
“How will following Jesus help me fix the problems in the world that break my heart?”

“What is a disciple and how will I know when I’ve made one?”
“How do I make a disciple?”
“How long does it take to make a disciple?”
“What’s the connection between life groups and making disciples?”

Follow this link for answers to these questions and for information about these key aspects of our training:

Purpose, Goals, Habits, Ministries, and Assignments.

Note For Teachers

Those who are preparing to teach this material should checkout our Teaching Page:

Following Jesus: Teaching

Following Jesus: What does it mean and why should I do it?

We begin this introduction with a central question that many people can’t answer correctly. Sadly, this applies to many who consider themselves to be Christians! When you’ve finished the following 7 lessons you will be able to answer this question properly.

You’ll also be able to answer the following questions:

How It Begins: Good News!

People are not born following Jesus. Rather, each person goes through a process by which he/she encounters the good news about the Kingdom of God and salvation through Jesus and becomes a follower. You can’t disciple someone until he/she has become a follower of Jesus:

 Evangelism>Conversion>Discipleship
 leading to Jesus committing to Jesus training to be like Jesus

 

This discipleship curriculum will help you understand how to follow Jesus. Our evangelism curriculum will help you understand how to win people to Christ. You will introduce your disciples to our evangelism curriculum at a later point in this training (e.g. Matthew 10 & Matthew 28). In the mean time, if you’re not already familiar with it, take a sneak peek and try it out for yourself, so that you will be prepared to teach it at the appropriate time:

Sneak peek for trainers:  Good News!

For now however, let’s move on to: God’s agenda.

Lesson 1: God Has An Agenda!

God has an agenda and his agenda has implications for you! You’ll learn more about God’s agenda as you progress through this training, but Jesus himself expresses this agenda in the following passage:

  Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.  When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.  Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,  and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”  – Matthew 28:16-20 (NIV)

Jesus understood that he had been given authority over everything in heaven and earth.

The Apostle Paul further develops this agenda in the following passage:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will —to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment — to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. – Ephesians 1:3-10 (NIV)

Here the phrase “all things” includes everyone and that means you: God’s agenda is to bring everything in heaven and earth under the authority of Jesus and his intention is to use us (that includes you) to do it. Because God’s Kingdom is non-coercive, we don’t impose or force God’s rule on others! Instead, we expand God’s Kingdom by proclaiming his reign and sacrificially serving others! We accomplish our mission through the power of God’s Word and his Spirit rather than through physical force or political power.

Checkout the following:

Topics to explore in discussion:

Additional resources to check out:

Training assignment (do this yourself, and use it to help train someone else):

Habits

As we consider what we’ve learned about God’s agenda we now turn to the place where we expect people to enthusiastically pursue it – the Church!

Lesson 2: Believer, Born Again, Brother, Christian, Disciple, Follower, Saint, Saved – What’s the Difference?

Note – This is a long lesson! You may want to break it up into 1 – 3 sessions.

As we’ve said, we naturally expect the church to be a place where people wholeheartedly pursue God’s agenda. Sadly, there are many people who attend church regularly but either don’t understand that God wants to bring everything under Jesus’ control or don’t understand how to cooperate with him in doing this. To understand why, we need to take a deeper look at who attends church.

You have, most likely, heard various terms used to describe people who feel some sort of connection to church. We will now take a look at these terms!

The Bible uses many terms to describe those who follow Jesus: believer, born again, brother, Christian, disciple, saint, saved:

The following link will display several of these terms as they appear in Acts – Revelation (i.e. how they are used by the Church):

Bible verses containing:  “believer”, “brother”, “Christian”, “disciple”, “follower”, “saint”, “saved”

The following videos will give you a better sense of Jesus and the Gospel:

Those who belong to Jesus (i.e. “Christians”) hear his voice and follow him, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
John 10:22-30; John 14:15-31; John 16:5-16

Only those who follow Jesus in a public, verifiable way are Christians. Merely going to church or claiming to follow Jesus is not enough!
Matthew 7:21-29; Matthew 21:28-32; Acts 5:1-11

In Acts 2:1-40 we read about the initial outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church and Peter’s subsequent spirit-led sermon. Notice the key elements in the final portion of Peter’s message (Acts 2:36-40):

Notice that the people have been struck by Peter’s message. This is the work that the Holy Spirit does when the gospel, the message that the Kingdom of God is here (i.e. God is becoming King) is proclaimed. The gospel message has power to save people (Romans 1:16-17), but we cannot predict when and in whom that power will actually result in someone’s conversion to following Jesus.

In order to begin following Jesus, the people must repent. This word, translated into English as repent, means to “change your mind”. In some church circles, people are taught to repent by consciously listing everything they’ve done wrong in the past – all their sins. This is not what the word means however. In this context, repent means to change your allegiance from your former leader to your new leader. Peter is instructing his listeners to embrace Jesus as their King and Lord and follow him for the rest of their lives.

Repentance in the Bible is never mere words – it always results in genuine change. We can find a good example of this in the behavior of Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector, after he encounters Jesus in Luke 19:1-10. Note this sequence:

Those who heard him responded – demonstrating their repentance: They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. – Acts 2:42
Here we can see that following Jesus includes:

The rest of the chapter (Acts 2:42-47) shows them worshipping together, sharing what they had like family, and experiencing God’s supernatural power.

It has been our experience that there are a lot of people who regularly attend church and who mean well, but who have never been taught how to actually follow Jesus. This training is for them!

Topics to explore in discussion:

Additional resources to check out:

Training assignment (do this yourself, and use it to help train someone else):

Habits

Now you know that the Bible uses many terms (believer, born again, Christian, disciple, saint, saved) to describe the experience of following Jesus and pursuing God’s agenda. Although you may have heard these terms used in vague or conflicting ways by others, they have a clear biblical meaning that we will stick to throughout this curriculum.

Lesson 3: What Kind of Christian Will You Be?

Now that we understand that the Biblical meaning of the terms that describe followers of Jesus, we need to take a deeper look at the term Christian, This is because the people who use this Biblical term often mean different things by it.

Relationship vs. Rules

There are two contrasting ways of dealing with God that we have to consider. We can deal with him via rules or we can actually engage in a relationship with him.

Rules

Most people seem to think of God primarily as someone who can only be dealt with via rules. Some of them hope to please him by “following the rules”. Others hope simply to “keep God off their backs” (effectively avoiding a relationship) by following the rules (in much the same way that we avoid a relationship with the IRS by following the tax rules). The Bible makes it clear that this approach is doomed – Galatians 3 – 4.

Relationship

God’s desire for a relationship with us is a constant theme throughout scripture. He could easily have cancelled the “humanity project” after our foreparents Adam and Eve first disobeyed him in the Garden of Eden, but instead he provided for them. He ultimately provided for all of us by sending Jesus, the one perfect man ever to walk the earth, to suffer and die for us. As a part of that relationship we see:

Churchless People

George Barna has defined this group as those who have not attended a Christian church service (other than a special event such as a wedding or a funeral), at any time during the past six months.

Cultural Christian

At Life Church we use the term “Cultural Christians” to describe people who think of themselves as Christians primarily because they grew up in a church environment. Being in church gives them that “warm fuzzy feeling” and they assume that they are carrying out God’s will for their lives simply by spending time in a traditional church environment. They are often more committed to their church tradition than they are to what the Bible teaches and what the Holy Spirit is actually saying now.

Insurance Christian

We use the term “Insurance Christians” to describe “Cultural Christians” who are motivated to engage in religious activity primarily because they don’t want to go to hell. They often take the “rule based” approach to God that we discussed above.

Consumer Christian

We use the term Consumer Christian to describe people who engage the Christian faith primarily as consumers of spiritual resources. They evaluate ministries and make decisions about ministry participation based on how the ministry serves them. They pursue ministries that offer a “high quality” experience (e.g. the best Bible teaching, the most powerful singing, the most exciting youth ministry, the best marriage or singles ministry). Consumer Christians will often visit multiple churches, Bible studies, and conferences in their never-ending pursuit of more spiritual support.

Unfortunately, Consumer Christians completely overlook the fact that Jesus taught us to receive by giving. They somehow never get around to sharing the gospel and making disciples because they are too busy receiving to actually spend time giving. For them, Christianity is like a shopping mall, a supermarket, or a restaurant – places where attractively packaged products are arranged on shelves for our procurement and/or delivered to us by smiling staff members.

Consumer Christians also overlook the fact that Jesus taught his followers to live and function together as members of an extended family. Jesus’ disciples continued this way after his resurrection and ascension. Ten days after Jesus ascended to the Father, on the day of Pentecost, the three thousand people who responded to Peter’s sermon soon became part of that extended family (Acts 2:42-47). These believers settled down in groups to which they devoted their time so that they could be well known and accountable. Consumer Christians, on the other hand, spread their time among a number of ministries and aren’t really able to be well known and accountable to any one group. This does not develop the depth of relationship that God intends for his children.

Churchless Christians

These are people who otherwise fit into the “Churchless People” category above, but who consider themselves to be followers of Jesus. The number of people in this category is growing.

Disciple

A disciple is someone who follows a teacher in order to be like him/her. Christians who are disciples actively study Jesus’ words and history in order to be like him and to do the things that he did. Disciples actually expand God’s Kingdom by taking the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to the people in their spheres of influence. For them, Christianity is not a shopping mall, supermarket, or restaurant – it’s more like a farm where they work with other disciples to grow the crops. The food in a shopping mall, supermarket, or restaurant is already dead and usually preprocessed if not ready to eat. On a farm the food is alive and growing. Disciples actively grow fruit for Jesus. They actively give birth to and raise new disciples!

Check out the following videos:

Topics to explore in discussion:

Additional resources to check out:

Training assignment (do this yourself, and use it to help train someone else):

Habits

By now you should understand that becoming a disciple is the right way to approach the Christian life. The main purpose of this training is to help you become a disciple and learn to form new Christians into disciples.

You now understand that a Christian is someone who belongs to Christ and who therefore follows Jesus, and pursues God’s agenda. Each of the other terms we’ve examined (believer, born again, saint, saved) describes this experience from a different perspective. When we view Christianity from the perspective of how we actually follow Jesus, we find the term disciple to be particularly useful.

Lesson 4: Become a Disciple – Start From Scratch

Now that we’ve considered some of the mistaken approaches to Christianity I want to try to set the stage for a more fruitful approach. Following Jesus as a disciple is clearly the approach to Christianity that is most consistent with what the New Testament teaches. There’s something more that we also need to see however. Consider the question of how the early church trained new believers. To do this, we have to approach the New Testament, not as 21st century evangelicals (or pentecostals, etc.), but rather as 1st century Jews would.

Consider the state of mind of the Apostles after Jesus’ resurrection:

  1. They had spent the last 3 – 3.5 years of their lives with the most amazing human being that they had ever met!
  2. For 40 days after rising from the grave, Jesus opened up the scriptures to them and then he ascended to heaven after instructing them to wait in Jerusalem to receive power from on high (Acts 1:1-11).
  3. On the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Baptizes the 120 gathered disciples and Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, preaches a sermon that results in 3000 men (not counting women and children) becoming followers of Jesus and getting baptized (Acts 2).
  4. We then learn that the new followers of Jesus devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer (Acts 2:42-47).

Consider what Luke means when he writes “The Apostles’ teaching”. What would the Apostles have taught these new believers?

For the Apostles, Jesus is the foundation! It is most likely that the first instruction they gave the new believers consisted of stories about Jesus. The following passages should help explain why this would be the case:

Everything else in the New Testament is based on the life story of Jesus. The epistles were written to solve problems within congregations of people who had already been taught the stories about Jesus’ life. These stories were eventually collected, organized, and corrected by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into the four Gospels that appear in our New Testament today. This means that new believers today should be immediately and carefully taught at least one of the four gospels. Here at Life Church we have chosen to use the Gospel of Matthew.

If we’re genuinely going to follow Jesus however, it’s not enough for us to have worked our way through a gospel at the beginning of our walk with Jesus. We actually have to make Jesus’ life story a regular part of our day-to-day life. Consider the following passage:

John 6:25-71

Here Jesus declares:

“I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” – John 6:35 (NIV)

and

  Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” – John 6:53-58 (NIV)

Eating His Flesh

Since eating is something we generally do every day, this passage implies that we need to feed on Jesus daily. How can we do this? By carefully reading through and reflecting on the life of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. We need to do this both individually and in community with others.

Drinking HIs Blood

What about drinking Jesus’ blood? To understand this passage, consider the following passage from the life story of Jesus’ ancestor David:

  During harvest time, three of the thirty chief warriors came down to David at the cave of Adullam,  while a band of Philistines was encamped in the Valley of Rephaim.  At that time David was in the stronghold,  and the Philistine garrison was at Bethlehem.  David longed for water and said, “Oh, that someone would get me a drink of water from the well near the gate of Bethlehem!” So the three mighty warriors broke through the Philistine lines, drew water from the well near the gate of Bethlehem and carried it back to David. But he refused to drink it; instead, he poured  it out before the LORD.

“Far be it from me, LORD, to do this!” he said. “Is it not the blood  of men who went at the risk of their lives?” And David would not drink it. 

Such were the exploits of the three mighty warriors.– 2 Samuel 23:13-17 (NIV)

This is one of the only biblical passages in which the idea of drinking another person’s blood appears. David considered the water that was brought to him to be “the blood of men who went at the risk of their lives”. He refused to benefit from their risk and sacrifice. When Jesus asks us to drink his blood, I believe he is showing us that we must be intentional about benefitting from his sacrifice.

Putting the Two Together

Taken together, this dual reference to eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood means that we need to feed on Jesus daily. His life story needs to stay fresh in our minds.

Naturally the Holy Spirit plays an important role in this:

  “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” – John 14:25-27 (NIV)

Notice that the Holy Spirit reminds the disciples of everything Jesus said to them. It therefore follows that he will remind us of the things that Jesus has said to us, but we must give him something to work with! We have to make reading and reflecting on the gospels part of our lifestyle.

Check out the following videos:

Focus On The Message, the first component of our Following Jesus Discipleship Curriculum will get you started working your way carefully through the Gospel of Matthew with the assistance of a more mature follower of Jesus to help disciple you. At its completion you will also develop a plan for continuing to work your way through the gospels on an ongoing basis.

Topics to explore in discussion:

Additional resources to check out:

Training assignment (do this yourself, and use it to help train someone else):

Habits

You now know that to be a Christian in the biblical sense is to be a disciple. A disciple follows Jesus with the goal of becoming like Jesus.

Lesson 5: Be a Disciple – Be Like Jesus

Now consider what life is like for those new believers who never actually sit under what we’ve discovered to be the bulk of the Apostles’ teaching.

As you work your way through the Gospel of Matthew (and through he rest of the Bible), your goal will be to achieve spiritual maturity or, more specifically, maturity in Christ. At Life Church we use the following working definition for spiritual maturity:

Spiritual maturity is the ability to reproduce in others the life of Christ that has been fully formed in you.

Consider the following words of Jesus:

 He also told them this parable: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit?  The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.”
Luke 6:39-40 (NIV)

The following passages emphasize the importance of spiritual maturity:

Based on our working definition above, there are two key components to spiritual maturity:

  1. Allowing the life of Christ to be fully formed in you.
  2. Reproducing that life of Christ in others.

We must become like Jesus! Here are some passages that reflect this truth:

We can only become like Jesus if we feed on the stories of his life presented in the four gospels. There is no substitute for this! Unfortunately, many churches today prioritize activities other than feeding on Jesus’ story. Believers who attend these churches may excel at quoting doctrinal points, worshipping enthusiastically, making “positive confessions”, claiming God’s promises, etc. but they aren’t actually becoming more and more like Jesus. If this describes your situation, we encourage you to start over from scratch. Starting from scratch is exactly what this training will help you do.

How long should discipleship training take?

Jesus spent about 3 – 3.5 years in his earthly ministry training disciples. The Apostle Paul spent about 3 years in Ephesus, after which he was able to say that he had declared to them the “whole will of God” – Acts 20:25-31. At Life Church, our goal is to train you to make disciples (who will themselves make disciples) in about 3 – 4 years.

We realize however that there will be different categories of people starting from scratch:

For those of you from churches that emphasize claiming God’s promises, please note that the promises that Jesus makes for provision are made to people who are determined to become like him – disciples. Before you start trying to appropriate his promises, spend time reading and absorbing the life of Jesus as presented in the gospel record. Before you get to “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7-12), you have to read through Matthew 1:1 – 7:7.

Check out the following videos:

Topics to explore in discussion:

Additional resources to check out:

Training assignment (do this yourself, and use it to help train someone else):

Habits

We have now achieved the key goal of this Introduction to our Following Jesus curriculum: Demonstrating that the goal of the Christian life, discipleship, following Jesus is to become like Jesus!

If you’ve accepted what we’ve presented so far, you will now hopefully understand that becoming a Christian means embracing an entirely new lifestyle. The process of embracing a new lifestyle has been well studied even apart from Christianity and I’d like to share with you two different, yet related models of change.

We have now arrived at the main goal of this Introduction to our Following Jesus curriculum. Whether or not you have been taught this in any of your past church experiences, your goal as a Christian is to become like Jesus! The following two lessons describe some of the stages people pass through on their way to embracing following Jesus or any new understanding in their lives.

Lesson 6: Transtheoretical Model: Stages of Change

Checkout the Transtheoretical Model: Stages of Change here:

Following Jesus: Teaching Page

Feel free to skip this when you initially train a disciple. You can return to it when your disciple begins training a disciple of his or her own.

Topics to explore in discussion:

Additional resources to check out:

Training assignment (do this yourself, and use it to help train someone else):

Habits

Lesson 7: Levels of Transformation

Checkout the Levels of Transformation model here:

Following Jesus: Teaching Page

Feel free to skip this when you initially train a disciple. You can return to it when your disciple begins training a disciple of his or her own.

Topics to explore in discussion:

Additional resources to check out:

Training assignment (do this yourself, and use it to help train someone else):

Habits

Now You Know

At this point you can make the following statements:

What’s Next? Discipleship Components: The Seven “F”s

In this class you will grow spiritually by:

  1. Identifying others who are hungry for growth and who don’t have access to this training.
  2. Guiding them towards spiritual maturity by teaching them this material and training them to train others.

At this point you can go back to our Following Jesus Page to see the overview of the 7 components or you can following the link at the bottom of the page to move directly to the 1st component.

Putting Them Together

These phases have a significant amount of overlap, so they are not completely consecutive. That notwithstanding, each phase builds on the one that precedes it. As your disciple progresses through these phases, you will help him/her to:

  1. Develop godly habits
  2. Turn godly habits into skills.
  3. Turn godly habits and skills into his/her ministry.

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Advance to Following Jesus: Focus On The Message