Ephesians 2:1-10, Psalm 40:2-3, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Luke 15:20, John 1:5
I (Josh) know a young man named Mark who was on the brink of self-destruction. He partied away his first semester of junior college and was later kicked out of school. He was devastated by his loss an...
Colossians 1:28, Romans 12:2, Acts 11:26, Luke 9:23, John 17:3, Matthew 28:19-20
Jesus didn’t tell his friends, “Go into all the world and make Christians.” But he did tell them to go into the world and make disciples. In fact, the Bible uses the word disciple 269 times. As Dallas...
1 Corinthians 3:2, Hebrews 5:12-14, Luke 10:25-26, Deuteronomy 6:7, James 1:22
[M]y husband, Nick, tells a story of when he was a teenager riding his bike with his friends, and his chain came off his bike. Nick took the bike to his dad, who said, “I'll fix it, you watch”. Hi...
If the Prof is 10 min late... I was in my freshman year in college, and Statistics was the final class before Thanksgiving break. When the professor was ten minutes late, I and several others got up ...
Gracious God, we admit that though You have sent each of us out with the task of raising disciples, we often neglect that task. We remain content, stagnant, in our Christian calling, while we regularl...
Non-discipleship is the elephant in the church; it is not the many moral failures, financial abuses, or amazing general similarity between Christians and non-Christians. These are only the effects of ...
Ultimately, each church will be evaluated by only one thing—its disciples. Your church is only as good as her disciples. It does not matter how good your praise, preaching, programs or property are; i...
While teaching on Jesus’ sending out of the disciples in Matthew 10, pastor John Ortberg uses the analogy of sports teams to describe the absurdity of Jesus’ description of the disciples as “sheep.” b...
Introduction Hard Sayings These hard sayings of Jesus come at the end of a section spanning two chapters (Luke 13:10-14:35). In it, Jesus’s actions and teachings are set in parallel structure: hea...
Introduction Hard Sayings These hard sayings of Jesus come at the end of a section spanning two chapters (Luke 13:10-14:35). In it, Jesus’s actions and teachings are set in parallel structure: hea...
Matthew 9:35-10, Deuteronomy 6:6-8, 1 Corinthians 3:7, Acts 1:null
Here Comes the Crowd Though he was challenging and divisive, Jesus always could draw a crowd. Some came because he had miraculously healed the lame or fed thousands. Others were there for the scandal...
Matthew 9:35-10:8, Deuteronomy 6:6-8, 1 Corinthians 3:7, Acts 1:null
Preaching Commentary Here Comes the Crowd Though he was challenging and divisive, Jesus always could draw a crowd. Some came because he had miraculously healed the lame or fed thousands. Others wer...
Luke 6:17-26, Matthew 5:1-12, Luke 4:33, Luke 16:19-31, Psalm 9:10, Psalm 12:6, Isaiah 41:17, Zephaniah 3:12, Luke 4:18, James 4:8-10, Luke 5:11, 28, Luke 14:25-33, 1 Peter 4:14, Jeremiah 17:5-10, Jeremiah 6:13
The context The beatitudes are one of the most well-known aspects of Jesus teaching. As in the more familiar account in Matthew (5:1-12), Luke presents these words as Jesus’ first public teaching; hi...
Luke 6:17-26, Matthew 5:1-12, Luke 4:33, Luke 16:19-31, Psalm 9:10, Psalm 12:6, Isaiah 41:17, Zephaniah 3:12, Luke 4:18, James 4:8-10, Luke 5:11, 28, Luke 14:25-33, 1 Peter 4:14, Jeremiah 6:13
Preaching Commentary The context The beatitudes are one of the most well-known aspects of Jesus teaching. As in the more familiar account in Matthew (5:1-12), Luke presents these words as Jesus’ fi...
The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as “Christians” will become disciples—students, apprentices,...
Far too many of us assume that discipleship is merely the transfer of information leading to behavior modification. But discipleship, at heart, involves transformation at the deepest levels of our und...
Matthew 28:16-20, 2 Timothy 2:1-2, Luke 9:23-24, Mark 8:34, John 13:34-35, Colossians 1:28-29, 1 Corinthians 11:1, 1 Corinthians 4:14-16, 1 Thessalonians 1:6-7, Hebrews 6:11-12
One of the fastest ways to learn a language is by immersion . This term can mean a few different things, but the basic idea in all of them is that you are exposed to that language in your social inte...
John 1:29-42, Revelation 17:14, Isaiah 52:13-15, Isaiah 53:, Ephesians 6:12
Summary of the Text Our lectionary text can be fairly easily broken into two major sections, with verses 29-34 concerned with John the Baptist testifying to Jesus’ ministry and verses 35-42 dealing w...
Discipleship is transformation, not information overload or behavioral modification. When transformation occurs, there is an increasing hunger for more knowledge of Jesus and His Word, but the primary...
Acts 4:13, 2 Timothy 2:2, Proverbs 27:17, Matthew 28:20, John 15:4, Luke 6:40, Mark 3:14
The act of “being with” someone requires patience and sacrifice. It means putting the other person’s wants and needs above our own and being willing to invest as much time as it takes to make the pers...
Colossians 3:16, Philippians 2:5-7, John 13:34-35, Matthew 11:29, Mark 8:34-35, Luke 9:23
Editor’s Note: The following illustration came from one of my own (Stu’s) sermons, as I was trying to help the congregation make a paradigm shift from the church as a building, to the people of God: ...
We’re all tempted to come to Jesus for what we want from him, rather than coming to him for mentoring, training and teaching about what he wants our lives to look like.
Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind o...
The passion of my life has been to find the answer to this question: How do we become like Christ? I have come to believe that the problem is not that we do not want to change, nor is the problem that...
The Servant Leader The servant leader is the hero of this text. And the example, par excellence, is the Apostle Paul. He has never shied away from holding himself up as a person to be imitated, as...
According to renowned Greek scholar Spiros Zodhiates, the Greek word from which we get our English word disciple means “not only to learn, but to become attached to one’s teacher and to become his fol...
Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the ‘second mile,’ turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just...