Intown Community Church Sermons
Follow Me: Being a “Normal” Disciple
Today we are looking at a passage that for some of you might be incredibly familiar, and any time, myself personally, I grew up in the church. Any time I encounter a passage that I'm very familiar with, sometimes there's beauty there, sometimes there's also a danger there of going, I already know what this thing's about, and I check off my mind, click off my mind. I would encourage all of us to be able to hear what is being read this morning afresh and anew. This morning's scripture reading is from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 28 verses 18 through 20. Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them, and when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age." This is the word of the Lord. So we are, as I've said, in a series looking at discipling, being a disciple, making disciples, those go hand in hand together. I'm Steve Yates. I'm one of the pastors here. Last week our senior pastor Jimmy Egan, who by the way, quick update, had surgery on Thursday to repair the defect in his heart that we all discovered in a very scary manner together a few weeks ago. He's doing well. Surgery went very, very well. He and Tricia send their greetings and are very grateful for your prayers, for continued rest and recovery and healing from that. But Jimmy told us last week that being a disciple, that word, kind of has this, I don't know, esoteric, strange meaning sometimes. It's not something we use a lot in our culture today. It's simply a word that means learner. That's all it is. It means being a learner. Jimmy's correct. It is being a learner. But I think there is a danger. And he highlighted this as well last week, but it's something I want to bring to our minds again today. There's a danger in that. And the danger is that in our culture today, being a learner is easy. Let me illustrate this for you. I am in a strange generation. I think every generation of people say they're a strange generation because they always can remember overlaps from previous generations and then encounters with things that newer generations just take to be normal. I get that, but you know, I remember times before smartphones and I remember what a dial tone of the internet sounds like. And so I have some claims to fame on kind of middle ground things. One of the things I still remember that some of you remember and some of you have no clue about because this change so quickly is what an encyclopedia is. See, some of you laugh, some of you laugh. Because for many of you, an encyclopedia is synonymous with a wiki media or any other online database or series body of information. And this is good. We are in a day and age where despite struggles and fears about whether we can trust things online or not, we do have this beautiful access to things that we never would have had access to before. Now rewind many, many, many moons ago. In 2002, the last edition, the last volume of the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which for many people was seen as sort of the authoritative encyclopedia for the English language was printed. This set of encyclopedias was a set of matching books for those of you who don't know. There were 32 of them in this final edition and those 32 books together had 62,000 articles in them. Now to put this into perspective, the English version of Wikipedia today has 64 million articles in it. Again, not going into whether or not you should trust all of these articles or not and the nature of online editing and whatnot. But nonetheless, it is a big deal simply to think about the fact that in 2002, this 32 volume set was still seen by all of my teachers as the first thing I would go to when doing a research paper. It was the first thing I would encounter if I was considering wanting to know something. It was still acceptably geeky for me as a young child to get an older edition of the encyclopedia and sit in my bed with a flashlight at night and read the encyclopedia. These were good things. Today, if the Wikipedia itself, again, only one of many different databases of information were a printed set, it would have over 30,000 volumes in it. And why do I say all of that? I say all that simply to highlight attention. And it's attention we're going to encounter as we keep going in this series about being a disciple. Because on one hand, we want to make sure that we don't make being a disciple sound like some, again, esoteric, strange, religious, culty thing that is only for a few people and is set apart and is different and is extra. We don't want to do that because Jesus is calling all of us to be disciples. At the same time, in a day and age where information is so easily accessible and the idea of all of us being a learner is just duh. Yes, it's there. I pull up my phone every morning and I learn something. I have access to something. It can feel cheap, easy, that there's nothing to it. In Jesus' day, being a learner was very different. Being a learner was relational. Very, very, very few people had written documents. Even though many young men could read because they would have gone to school for a short amount of time in their early childhood, they nonetheless would not have a lot of access to books. Young women, I'm sorry, did not have any of this access. But even so, regardless, neither one of them would be able to go and find, you know, the 32 volume scroll of X or Y or Z and learn something. Learning was relational in nature. And so this meant you learned from your parents. You learned from your community. You learned from society. You had conversations. You watched people do things. This is why you likely would have woken up in the morning if you were a kid. And if you are one of the kids in here, can you imagine doing exactly the same thing that your mom or dad did? Well, that's what most kids did. Now, part of that was just because it was what society did. But part of it, too, was that this was the best education you were going to get. That you got to wake up every morning and see your dad do the same thing that his dad did, that his dad did, that his dad did. This meant that if you were going to be a learner of something deep or something different, like what's the meaning of life? What's eternal life? Is there anything more than this? If you were going to learn that, you were likely going to have to seek out an individual or a community that was going to take you in basically as an apprentice. You were going to follow them. You were going to learn from them. You were going to watch this person or these people. And you were going to question in your own mind, do they have the thing that I have now just given up part of my life to see if they have that thing? On one hand, being a disciple is not for strange, monkish people who are not regular real people. At the same time, regular real people in Jesus' day had to engage in real relationship and there was real cost. I give you all of that because I want us to be able to feel today the tension of some of that cost, the tension of the choice to follow Jesus as a disciple. And how Jesus enters into some of that choice and how some of that choice is reflected in the life of and the actions of the disciples, the 12, now 11, following Jesus' death and resurrection, closest followers of Jesus. I want us to see this tension and I want us to learn from it together. Just a little bit of background, so Jesus dies. He is in the grave for three days and then we as Christians believe that he rose again from the dead. Not hypothetically rose again from the dead, not in some spiritual exemplar sense. No, we actually think he bodily rose again from the dead. I understand that that is not normal and that is not even though it might be a culturally accepted idea because we have cultural ideas like Easter, the Christian celebration of Jesus' resurrection. We don't necessarily always have that as an actuality in our brains, but as Christians, we actually believe there was a time in which he was not alive and then there was a time in which the heart beats again. Blood goes to the brain again, the organs come back. After those three days, the book of Acts actually tells us there are 40 more days where Jesus is on the earth. And those days are filled with his encounters with different disciples and we see this as he walks along a road called Emmaus with some believers. We see him encounter the disciples. We see him talk to different individuals. We see him go fishing. We see him cook. We see him eat. He is a real person. This is not ghost Jesus we're talking about. And yet every biblical writer will actually emphasize something different for a point. And in the book of Matthew, we read almost nothing about these 40 days. It's not because they're important. We see how important they are in the rest of the gospel writers. But Matthew jumps immediately from the empty tomb and a group of women discovering this empty tomb. Jesus meeting this group of women and telling them to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee. And then we fast forward 40 days to the actual meeting. And this 40 day fast forwarding is because as important as everything that happened on in the 40 days is, this is the moment. This is the time. Jesus is about to ascend back into heaven. And he has some final words for his disciples. He has some final thoughts. He has a charge. And this is why this passage for all of Christianity has been known as sort of the ultimate zinger, the thing, the moment, the climax of Jesus' story. This is the great commission. If that's the case, I want to highlight something this morning. The 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him. But some doubted. First of all, if you want to write a bestseller about how awesome someone is, probably not actually a good idea to tell people that a portion of the crowd who are going to be the head leaders of his movement afterwards, well, they kind of had some uncertainty. They weren't all there. Doesn't give a boat of confidence. But I'll be honest, I think it's incredibly important. Here's why I think it's incredibly important. We have something that all of us are sometimes beholden to. Psychologists actually call it, it is the first tenant of what's called cognitive behavioral therapy. It's called all or nothing thinking. We make things into binaries. Yes or no, right or wrong, this or that. And we do this with discipleship. We do this with being a disciple. And that imports a lot of brokenness into the idea that we are followers of Jesus. Because if it's all in or all out, if you're all a disciple or you're all not a disciple, then how about these guys? How many of them are disciples and how many of them are not? I would tell you that we import three really broken things into our Christian identity. If we believe that the idea of being a disciple is this all in all out thing that doubting has no place in. The first one of this is just flat out the all out all in thing. That we, if we experience any kind of doubt, are very apt to say, oh, I must not really believe then. I must not actually be a Christian. I experience this a lot with teenagers. There's a sense, of course, when you're a teenager, there's a sense in every age, but especially during the teenage years, a lot is changing. You are learning a lot. You are experiencing a lot. You are moving through many different parts of your life. And as a result, there are lots of different new experiences, new beliefs, new ideas that you have to incorporate into your existing educational structure, your existing mind. And all the time I have teenagers come to me scared because they've learned something new or been presented with an idea. And suddenly, it's caused them to wonder, is God really true? Is God really good? Is God really there for me? And those fears, those questions, if we believe that being a disciple is an ironclad moniker of commitment without any give, such thoughts amount to blasphemy, to heresy, to brokenness at an epically horrible level. Now, most of our teenagers, and I would say most of us, adults, we don't actually voice questions like that. We don't voice questions like is God good. We don't voice questions like is God real? Those are, again, just sound too big, but we do voice stuff like this. How could God let my brother get sick? How could God get me really, really excited about this thing and then not let me into this college? Why would God send my gay best friend to hell? These on the ground questions make it very, very hard to have a belief structure that says, I don't feel things like that. I don't experience things like that if I'm a real Christian. What I love about this passage is that I think Matthew absolutely shatters that because these disciples are real disciples. This is Peter. This is John. This is Matthew. These are people who've walked with Jesus, who've seen Jesus. This is Thomas who felt Jesus, the risen Jesus. Even in doing so, that in and of itself does not stop the fact that we are real people living in a real world. Being a disciple does not mean not having questions. There is not only room for who we are as humans in God's world. This is the whole point that we would continually come to the end of ourselves, that we would continually come to a place where we do not have it all figured out and we would be able to bring these doubts to God. What we don't see is Jesus surveying the group and saying, okay, great, seven of you, you were worshiping me. Awesome. You four, sorry. This was the final exam. You can go walk down the mountain now. The great commission is for all of them and it's for all of us too. Secondly, beyond doubting salvation, I think a second thing that this all or nothing idea of discipleship does for us is it imports a sense of Christian apathy because maybe we're not so ironclad as to say, okay, yes, there's no room ever for doubt in Christianity, but being a disciple really means being ex. It means being awesome. It means being great, maybe means being a missionary or being a pastor or being a Sunday school teacher or being a servant in extra wire Z way. Maybe it just is one of those people that you kind of every once in a while you look to make sure they're not floating because they just feel holier than everybody else. But a view of discipleship that says there are disciples and then there's everybody else. Also imports this idea of Christian apathy. It says, I'll never get there. God's awesome. I'm so glad Jesus loves me. I believe in him. He died for me. I'm going to heaven when I die, but the feeling is I am going to make it to home plate, you know, just by the skin of my teeth. It's those disciples over there. Those are the ones who talk about crowns and mansions and have it all together and are good and are holding it up for all the rest of us. I don't know if you feel this way or not. I sometimes do and I encounter lots of people who do all the time who think, okay, yes, I believe I really can't get any farther than that. There's like stage one Christianity and then stage everything else Christianity. I love this passage because in acknowledging that some of the disciples doubted, were able to further think through, wait, did they doubt it other times too? Yes, they did. The disciples are actually a motley crew of people who were at various stages of belief and unbelief throughout their ministry with Jesus. We don't have as much history of the disciples given for us in scripture, post the resurrection and ascension, but we at least know this, our favorite whipping boy, Peter, not only is the one who declares Jesus to be the Messiah first, we heard that last week with Jimmy. He's then the first one Jesus calls Satan to his face. He then is going to be the first one to protect Jesus during the crucifixion. He then is going to curse out everyone around him in denying that Jesus even knows him. He's then going to be restored to Jesus beautifully and then we're still going to get another time of Paul having to take him to the woodshed for a struggling belief in the actual love of God towards real people. And then Peter will eventually die for his faith. Discipleship is messy. Life is messy. Our belief is messy. Now this doesn't get us off the hook. God calls us further up and further in to love him, to grow in him, to grow in our knowledge of him, to grow in our desire for his will and his purposes in our life, to grow in our obedience of him and our trust on him and yet, and yet. It is so helpful for me to know that when I fail, when I struggle, it is not the end for me. And it is not the end for you. If last week you were the biggest failure of your life, great. You have discovered one more thing Jesus died for you about. It's a new day and a new week. If you feel like you're in a season where God is absolutely absent as a pastor and a friend, I want to give you a hug and say I'm so sorry. And there's also an element of me that wants to say I'm so sorry and join the club. We have a whole Bible of that. And that's not dismissive. That's instead saying there are other people who have walked this road. You are not alone. We're going to get to that point in a minute. But please, if you're a follower of Jesus and you are struggling this morning with doubts, it does not make you not a disciple. It makes you normal. And if you are a follower of Jesus who is wrestling with just the normal reality, the mess of our life and sometimes feeling like you are closer to God than others, sometimes feeling like you are more obedient or less, it's not the final word. We're continuing on together because these disciples, including those who doubted, they'd come off this mountain excited. They would then be terrified for another month and a half. And then the Holy Spirit shows up and oh my. And so lastly in this idea of, you know, is there a room for doubt? Is there room for struggle? Is there room for normalcy in being a disciple and saying yes, please know that your own wrestling does not make you automatically spiritually ineffective? It does not make you spiritually ineffective. These disciples, again, will walk off this mountain. They will continue to struggle and then the Holy Spirit will be there for them and will help them. In your life and in my life, we need to not only not doubt our salvation because Jesus is bigger than our feelings and our thoughts. And we don't need to lock ourselves into stage one Christianity that never moves, but we also need to believe that God can use us wherever we are in that process. God can use us wherever we are in that process. And not only can God use it, he does. We're about to go into a second point that says disciples make disciples, and I think this one scares a lot of us, but it's important to say for this as well because, okay, let me show my cards. There is no version of discipleship shown us in the New Testament that does not also involve us continuing to disciple other people and to make other people disciples. People end up being disciples of disciples of disciples of disciples of disciples. There's no version in which you are the end of the family tree of Christianity. But if I say that, that could be terrifying for some, if not all of you. Terrifying because you have no idea what that means maybe. That's why we're having literally disciple being and disciple making the first pillar of this three year plan that we just talked about last week as a church because we're not always good at this. But also it can have just a feeling of I don't want other people to follow me. I'm not worth following. The type of people you might be someone who were, you were shaking your head, yes, when I gave you point one of this. You were shaking your head, yes, when I was point two of this. But now that I'm saying, okay, you broken, normal, regular, messy Christian who God loves, go teach someone else about that same Christianity. That's the line. That's the line that takes us all the way back to the all or nothing thinking because we want real disciples caring for our children. We want real disciples as our elders, as our deacons. We want real disciples as the ones who lead our church. Now, yes, in scripture there is a wisdom to choosing leadership, choosing any kind of calling based on skills and based on relationships and whatnot. I don't want to discount any of that. There's a reason we have a nominating process for leadership. There's a reason I didn't just show up off the street one day and the elders were like, you look like you should hang out with children. Let's bring you up on, you know, no, obviously, right, that's not what I'm talking about. But I am talking about this. There have been so many times that I have wished my kids had a different dad because I am not enough for them all the time. There have been plenty of times I have questioned whether or not I should be a pastor because if you all knew everything that happened into my heart, what would happen? There have been plenty of times I have longed for more for my own life and question why other people weren't pouring into me rightly. You're not alone, but also you're not ineffective. The same Holy Spirit that was inside these disciples and started the church is inside of you as a follower of Jesus. The same Spirit of the church that we just sang about God starting and fanning into flame is here at in town as was present on Pentecost, as was present when great missionary movements happened in this world, same God. You are not ineffective. And I'm glad because when I baptized my kids here, you guys took vows to show them Jesus. That's why I mean that when I say that. You are the people I want pouring into my kids. I'm going to rush through this a little bit, but disciples make disciples. If this is the case that all of us are disciples, there's no getting away from it, there's no feeling that discounts us from it, then that means there are three describers of making disciples in this passage. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and naming the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. All three of them apply to all of us. I'm going to say that again. All three of them apply to all of us. And it's why I'm just going to keep all three of them on the screen here instead of moving them one by one, because all three of them apply to all of us. First one, go or go-wing. And the reason I would say actually go is incorrect there. Go-wing is because it's progressive, it's continual. Some of you, actually, this was a big thing for me, I was raised in a tradition that emphasized foreign missions. And so when I heard this, there was a great burden of go-wing away, and that's who made disciples. When I discovered that it's progressive, it's almost more go-wing or as you go, it was really life-giving to me. And that's true of you as well. Our calling for being disciple-makers, disciple-reproducers, is in our everyday life, in where God has put us. At the same time, I think that can also give us a weird loophole that kind of makes me feel really, really icky, because it makes me feel like, "Oh, well, my normal life is fine. I don't need to go on mission or support things or change in any way." The implication here is that we're living the cross-cultural life of Jesus. As you go means as you are pushing the boundaries of caring for people who are not like you. As you go means as you are living your vocational life in such a way as you are just a little bit uncomfortable, because you're trying to figure out how to do what God's called you to do as a follower of Jesus. As you go means actually living this discipleship thing in every stage of life, not just on Sunday morning at 9.30. As you go, but going means it's going to push us out of these doors, it's going to push us out of our regular lives, it's going to push us to soul Korea, it's going to push us to see God move in all different kinds of places. Secondly, baptizing. Again, the reason I say all of these for all of us is because it's real and true. This does not mean Jimmy and Luke and I want to hear of a massive baptism movement happening in your bathtubs at home. We need to talk about baptism more if that's the case, but I do think it's important to know that Jesus says part of disciple making is baptizing. Why? Because there's an implication of doing this together. This isn't Pat Freeman goes out and finds somebody, hangs out with them for a while, convinces them to follow Jesus, and then that person, if something happens to Pat, that person is off on their own. There's an implication that we're in this together. We're a body of believers. There's an actual thing. There's not 62 million Wikipedia pages about Christianity to think about. There's a real baptism in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, which side note, if you were one of those people who struggles with how Jesus doesn't always explicitly say that he's God in Scripture. Here's another one of those places he does. There'd be no way on earth. Jesus would let people baptize people in his name if he wasn't God. Baptizing. Finally, teaching. I just want to come around to the end. Jesus says, teach them everything I've commanded you. Ironically though, if you look at this, Jesus doesn't actually give us that many commands. If you think about whether it is the Quran, whether it's the teachings and writings of Buddha, whether it is the Old Testament rabbinic tradition, there's a lot of commands in that. Jesus gives a sum. He was a rabbi, but he doesn't give us a ton. But one of the things we get in Christianity that isn't present in many other faiths is we get Jesus. We get his life. One of the things I love about the New Testament and the Old Testament, a way I think that we maybe need to reframe our Bible, is that Jesus still gets to be your rabbi. This is not an intellectual tradition that says we are now the studiers of some other people who walked with Jesus. We're figuring out, piecemealing this religion thing based on some people who actually walked with Jesus, who saw Jesus wake up in the morning, who touched the same things Jesus did, who cooked food for him and ate food that he cooked. We also get to meet Jesus. Both relationally, spiritually, we know him, we can pray to him, we can listen to him, and open up the Bible and meet a Jesus who cries, meet a Jesus who yells, meet a Jesus who is afraid, who is anxious. Now I can say all of this and also believe Jesus did not sin. But if this sermon is titled "Be a Normal Disciple," there's a beautiful aspect of Jesus and we could say that Jesus was the most normal of humans. Jesus is who we're supposed to be like, and you get to know him in studying his word, in walking with his people, in praying to him and listening to him and having the Holy Spirit make you more and more like him. And the like him that the Holy Spirit is transforming you and making you into is not someone who is floating 27 feet off of the ground. It is actually the kind of person that your neighbors are going to want to spend more time with, not less. It's the type of person that people at your kids school are going to want to talk to, not less. Is it also the type of person who's going to really confuse and sometimes annoy and sometimes anger the world? Also yes. But it is not going to be someone who the world will be repulsed from because of a quasi spiritual esoteric cult-like false understanding of what a disciple is. It is going to be because the world doesn't know what to do with real human beings.