Personal Discipleship - Guest Blogger Nathan Brown

For this week's blog, I have invited a friend of mine to be a guest blogger.  Nathan Brown is a co-worker of mine and is the Discipleship Coordinator for the Bible Methodist Connection of Churches.  Nathan developed the circles of discipleship graphic that I shared with you in church this past Sunday.  He also has a very good discipleship website: www.disciplingnewconverts.org.   In his article below, Nathan shares his thoughts about what personal discipleship looks like.

What is a Disciple?

A disciple is anyone who desires to learn from and follow after someone else. For Christians, that ‘someone else’ is Jesus Christ. He is our master, and our goal as His disciples is to learn His teachings, model His way of living, adopt His values, embrace His beliefs, and become like Him in our actions, attitudes, and words. The master-disciple relationship may sound a little strange to us today. Perhaps the best modern equivalent we can relate to and understand is the coach-player relationship. When you join a sports team, you become a 'disciple' of your coach. You place yourself under his authority and agree to do whatever he tells you. Your goal is to learn to think about the game like your coach—to model his attitudes and actions, and follow his direction. You are subject to his correction and discipline, and you work hard to earn his praise and respect. Being a member of a professional sports team is not a part-time endeavor. It affects every area of your life. It's the same way with being a disciple of Jesus. It's a life-long commitment that will require you to give 100% in order to be successful.

Personal Discipleship: What does a disciple do?

We sometimes forget that the ones who are going and making disciples are themselves disciples. This means that we must make personal discipleship a part of our daily lives. We must:

·         Take time. When we got saved, we began a relationship with Jesus Christ. As we all know, relationships take time. If we don't schedule time for personal discipleship, it won't happen. Jesus left us an example: He regularly left His disciples, went off by Himself, and spent time alone with God (Luke 5:16). We need to do the same. Find a place where you can be alone, and eliminate as many distractions as possible. Quiet yourself, clear your mind, and push the cares and responsibilities of the day to the side.

·         Listen to God. I use the phrase ‘listen to God’ because I want to emphasize that when we read the Bible, God is speaking directly to us. Most people think of reading as a solitary activity, but when we read Scripture, we have just entered into a conversation with our Heavenly Father!

• How much of what God has said should we be interested in hearing? All of it! We need to have our minds regularly exposed to the entirety of God’s word. Here are several reasons why:
•  Familiarization—getting to know the Bible. God’s people ought to have a basic knowledge of His Word. If we aren’t familiar with the entirety of Scripture, we will inevitably overlook something God wants us to know (e.g., the feast of booths in Nehemiah 8:13–14).
• Veneration—giving God the profound respect He deserves. When we read the entire Bible, we show God that we honor everything He said, not just those parts we feel are particularly relevant or applicable to us. When Ezra read the law to the remnant in Jerusalem (Neh 9:3), they stood up for “a fourth part of the day.” Why? They were showing God how much they respected Him and His Word.
• Manifestation—learning to accept and appreciate the multi-faceted character of God that is manifested in His Word. If we don’t regularly fill our minds with everything God has revealed about Himself, our understanding of Him will inevitably become unbalanced. For example, if we only spend time reading about God’s love, we will be horrified when God tells us how He killed Uzzah for touching the ark (2 Sam 6:1–7). If we only spend time reading about God’s wrath and judgment on sin, we will be astounded when God tells us how He restored Manasseh to the throne after he repented (2 Chr 33).
• Orientation—knowing where things are with respect to other things. Think about geography—if you know the seven continents and where they are on the globe, then you can quickly find the area you are looking for. When we read the Bible all the way through, we gain a bird’s-eye view of Scripture that allows us to quickly locate various sections of interest. For example, we need to know where in our Bible to go to find: (a) what happened after the exile, (b) the history of the early church, (c) the law, etc.
•  Connection—seeing the connections that exist between the various parts of Scripture. Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 is a good example of this—he starts out with Abraham and ends with the people who crucified Jesus, and he has it all connected. The Bible is like a tree—it is a growing revelation that starts with the roots in Genesis and ends with the fullness of the Son’s revelation in the NT.
• In what order should I read the books of the Bible? I suggest that reading the Bible in chronological order is an excellent way to maximize your learning experience:
•  Flow—Reading the Bible in chronological order gives us a better sense of the overall flow of biblical history from beginning to end. When we read chronologically, we are carried along by the unfolding story of redemption, and we gain insight into how God was working through history to bring about the salvation of men and the establishment of the Kingdom of His Son, Jesus Christ.
• Context—Reading the Bible in chronological order helps us put each passage of scripture in its proper historic context. For example, the first sermon in the book of Haggai (Hag 1:1–13) should be read against the backdrop of the construction of the temple as recorded in Ezra 4–5 (construction started in 536 BC but it stopped after opposition by local enemies, and was not restarted until the preaching of Haggai and Zechariah in the late summer and fall of 520 BC). Also, David’s psalm of praise to God (Ps 34) is connected to the story of his escape from the Philistines in Gath where he pretended to be insane (1 Sam 21).
•  How can I read the Bible in chronological order?
•  I've personally tried several different chronological reading plans. I wasn’t satisfied with any of them, so I decided to create my own. You can use it by clicking the Bible menu on the website. The plan is designed to take you through the Bible in a year, and you can read the Bible in several different versions (e.g., NASB, KJV, LEB, and NET). If you enjoy listening to the Bible, you can have it read to you in the English Standard Version, courtesy of esvbible.org. The availability of this plan on the internet facilitates groups of people reading the same passage of Scripture each day.

·         Talk to God. When you're done reading God's Word, remind yourself that God has just spoken directly to you. The only polite thing to do is to respond. If a friend spent ten minutes talking to you, and then you replied on a different topic, completely ignoring what they just said, how would they feel? Yet that is often how we interact with God. We need to process what God just said to us, and then respond to Him in prayer.

·         Be accountable. Find a fellow Christian to whom you can be accountable. Humble yourself and confess your faults to them (Prov 28:13; Jam 5:16). Ask them to enter into a commitment of accountability with you. We are not meant to live the Christian life apart from the help and encouragement of the church. That is why accountability to other believers is so important (cf. Heb 3:12–14; 10:23–25; 1 Thess 5:11; Gal 6:1–2).

I'd like to know your thoughts about what Nathan has to say, so comments are welcome.