Lesson #2



Bible Lesson for Bible Teachers, Lesson #3

The Goal is Not to Make Smarter Sinners

Mathew 28.19, 20; John 8.31, 32; John 13.34, 34; John 15.7, 8

Good Questions Have Groups Talking



If you like this format of lessons, I have a couple of thousand at

OPEN

What is your name and what is one thing that is preoccupying your mind these days.

DIG

Follow up. Last time we talked about the “with Him” principle. Did you have an opportunity to spend some time with the people you teach?

Go places with them, listen to them, talk to them, think with them, pray with them. Follow-up is not done by something, but by someone—not a method or a system, but you.

Prayer, of course, is key in this. Prayer is an absolute essential because effective follow-up is really the work of God and his Spirit, and the true goal of follow-up is the formation of Christ in a person’s life. You are his instrument to help accomplish his purposes in the life of his child. — Discipleship Journal, Issue 1 (January/February 1981) (NavPress, 1981).

One thing I like to do from time to time when I teach is to misquote a verse and ask people to catch where I have misquoted it. Let me try this with this week’s key verse—the Great Commission. Listen carefully. Where have I misquoted this verse: “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 everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:19–20 (NIV2011)

Notice that the goal of teaching is not to impart knowledge but to instill obedience. Often when I hear others quote the Great Commission, they say, “Teaching them everything I have commanded you.” The church does that well—we’re good at making people smarter sinners[22]—but that’s not what Jesus told us to do. He told us to teach them to obey everything he has commanded us. And the best way to do that is by example. Just by obeying Jesus you will teach newer disciples to obey him.

And don’t miss the content of our teaching. What is it? The whole Bible? No. That’s a good ultimate goal, but it is not our initial goal. Jesus commanded us to pass on to others his teachings. Never forget that a Christian is someone who follows Christ. You don’t have to become an expert on all Scripture, but you do need to be a student of the Gospels. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another” (Col. 3:16).

Finally, don’t dodge the tough stuff. Teach others to obey everything Jesus commanded, because—as you and I are discovering—his easy yoke and his light burden are found in his most radical teachings. — Greg Sidders, The Invitation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011).

What is the main verb in the Great Commission? What is Jesus telling us to do?

So what is great teaching? Simply put, great teaching is teaching that creates great people. Where disciples of Jesus are being developed, great teaching is taking place. Jesus’ teaching was great, not because his stories were interesting (which they were), but because his disciples turned the world upside down. When the people in our small groups and classes turn their worlds upside down, we have done a reasonably good job of teaching. Jesus told us to make disciples, not merely to make converts (Matthew 28:19-20). The objective of Christian teaching is to produce mature disciples of Jesus Christ.

Teaching is not about methods. It is about results, about changed lives. We are out to create people who enjoy God and get along with others. Paul, by his own admission, wasn’t eloquent (1 Corinthians 2:4), but he changed lives. He reminds the Corinthians, “You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:3). So I ask: Who can you point to and say, “This person is living the disciple’s life because of my teaching ministry”? Teaching that makes disciples is good teaching. Anything less is simply not enough.

If we cannot point to men and women, boys and girls who love God and others, we have failed. Gathering a large crowd—even doubling our classes!—doesn’t make us successful. Teaching lessons that everyone compliments for their insight and relevance doesn’t make us great teachers. Both of these miss the point of good teaching. The point is to change lives, to help people live differently on Monday morning. Teaching that produces disciples is good teaching. — Josh Hunt, Disciplemaking Teachers, 1996.

What is a disciple?

A disciple is one who responds in faith and obedience to the gracious call to follow Jesus Christ. Being a disciple is a lifelong process of dying to self while allowing Jesus Christ to come alive in us. — Greg Ogden, Discipleship Essentials: A Guide to Building Your Life in Christ, Expanded edition (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Connect, 2007), 24.

I’d like to look at three verses that speak to what a disciple is. The first is John 8.31, 32. What do we learn about what a disciple is from these verses?

The word “disciple” means “disciplined one.” Who are Jesus’ disciples, His disciplined ones? Those who continue in, take heed to, and make a high priority of His Word. And it is as they comprehend the truth of the Word that they are free—really, truly free. — Jon Courson, Jon Courson’s Application Commentary (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003), 508.

To whom were these words addressed?

What is a disciple? Jesus gives us a glimpse into the answer to this question in three passages from the book of John. The first is John 8:31, “If you hold to my teachings you are really my disciples”. It is interesting that He says this to those who had already believed in Him. The Word for hold is used in other contexts to mean, “abide, live, dwell, to be at home.” Those who have a firm grasp of God’s word and make it their home are on their way to being Christ’s disciples. This is the first mark of a disciple: abiding in Christ. The second mark has to do with the body. — Josh Hunt, You Can Double Your Class in Two Years or Less, 1995.

What is the difference between a convert and a disciple?

Quality is more important than quantity. By quality I mean the quality of the lives we are producing. God has called us to make disciples, not converts. Nothing less than the production of fully mature disciples can be hailed as obedience to the Great Commission. Some aspire to make fully devoted followers of Christ. Fully devoted is not enough. You can be fully devoted in a heartbeat—many in foxholes are. Maturity, on the other hand, takes years to cultivate. The goal is fully mature followers of Christ. — Josh Hunt, You Can Double Your Church In Five Years or Less, 2000.

How do we make disciples who hold to Jesus’ teaching?

I suggest a different model. instead of making yourself do fourteen things you don’t want to do, get in the habit of one and only one thing: have a Quiet Time. Start your day with your Bible on your lap. Start your day in the Word and in prayer. As simple as this sounds, this one habit has the power to totally transform your life. If you will get in the habit of spending half an hour a day in prayer and in the Word, your life will be unrecognizable a year from now.

Christianity is about a relationship with God. A relationship is about communication. God talks to me; I talk to Him. God speaks to me primarily through His Word. I speak to Him through prayer. Once these two habits are in place, all the rest will follow as night follows day. — Josh Hunt, The Habit of Discipleship (Pulpit Press, 2015).

John 13.34, 35 What do we learn about discipleship from this passage?

Are we Jesus’ disciples? Are you? Am I?

No doubt most of us will answer gladly, “Yes, I am his disciple.” But as we think about it, let us think about discipleship according to the definition Jesus himself gave to it. Jesus defined a disciple as one who continues in his Word, loves the brethren, and bears much fruit. Do we do each of these? Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, then you are really my disciples.” He said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” He said, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” God grant that we may do each of these things as we drop all lesser loyalties and draw ever closer to him. — James Montgomery Boice, The Gospel of John: An Expositional Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 1048.

We always want to teach for application. One way to do this is to make a list together of things you could do. Then, challenge people to do some little something off that list. Let’s make a list. What are some practical ways we could “love one another”?

Here is one idea: There is nothing like getting into a person’s home to really get to know them. I cannot imagine having a friend I considered to be close unless I had been in their home dozens of times and they had been in mine the same.

You learn so much by getting into people’s homes. You learn about their hobbies, how they decorate, who they have pictures of, and what they like to read. Every teacher would do well to get into the home of everyone in his or her group every year.

Jesus said to Zacchaeus, “I am coming to your house today.” We ought to say to our people from time to time, “I’d like to come over some time and visit.”

Jesus was in people’s homes. Teach like Jesus. Love like Jesus.

Of course, this could be overdone. I stopped by to visit a guy once and asked if I could come in and visit. “Uh, I am not much of a house keeper,” was his reply. I took this to mean he didn’t want me to come in and visit. You will have people that don’t want an in-house visit. But, for the rest, here is how to make an annual in-house visit:

← Make an appointment.

← Communicate that you will be doing this with everyone and there is not something wrong with them—particularly if they are not regular attendees.

← Keep it short. There is an exception to this rule, of course, and that is if they want you to stay longer. Don’t give them the impression you have to run off. But don’t feel obligated to fill two hours when thirty minutes will do.

← Observe their life. Notice the pictures on the wall. Did they have a boat out front? What kind of movies do they watch? What can you learn about them from seeing their space?

← Ask if you can turn the TV down. Hopefully, they will turn it off.

← Ask about their life. Ask about their kids. Ask about the parents. Ask about the work. Ask about their extended family. Ask about their history—how long they have lived here and what kind of church they went to growing up.

← Ask how you can pray for them.

← Pray together.

Josh Hunt, Teach Like Jesus, 2012.

Someone has said that discipleship is personal, but it is not private. What does that mean? What are the implications?

SPIRITUAL FORMATION, GOOD OR bad, is always profoundly social. You cannot keep it to yourself. Anyone who thinks of it as a merely private matter has misunderstood it. Anyone who says, “It’s just between me and God,” or “What I do is my own business,” has misunderstood God as well as “me.” Strictly speaking there is nothing “just between me and God.” For all that is between me and God affects who I am; and that, in turn, modifies my relationship to everyone around me. My relationship to others also modifies me and deeply affects my relationship to God. Hence those relationships must be transformed if I am to be transformed.

Therefore Jesus gave a sure mark of the outcome of spiritual formation under his guidance: we become people who love one another (John 13:35). And he does not leave “love,” that “many splendored thing,” unspecified. Instead he gives “a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (verse 34, NRSV, emphasis added). The age-old command to love is transformed, made a new command, by identification of the love in question with that of Jesus for us (see 1 John 2:7–8).

Love of “the brethren” in this supernatural way allows us to know that “we have passed out of death into life” (1 John 3:14). We simply can’t love in that way unless we have a different kind of life in us. And the “love” here in question is identified as that which is in Christ because it is one that makes us ready to “lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16).

Failure to love others as Jesus loves us, on the other hand, chokes off the flow of the eternal kind of life that our whole human system cries out for. The old apostle minces no words: “He who does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14). Notice that he did not say, “he who hates,” but simply, “he who does not love.” The mere absence of love is deadly. It is withdrawal.

Notice also that he did not say, “he who is not loved,” though that also is true. That too is death, but our purpose cannot be to get others to love us. Love comes to us from God. That must be our unshakable circle of sufficiency. Our purpose must then be to become one who loves others with Christ’s agape. That purpose, when developed, will transform the social dimension of the human self and all of our relationships to others. Love is not a feeling, or a special way of feeling, but the divine way of relating to others and oneself that moves through every dimension of our being and restructures our world for good. — Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), 182–183.

How you would evaluate how loving your group is?

One of my follow-up surveys related directly to the issue of people skills. There were three interesting findings that came out of that survey. Take advantage of them all.

Cell-phone use. I asked leaders how many members’ phone numbers they had programmed into their cell phones. My suspicion was this: Leaders of growing groups would likely have more numbers programmed because they contacted their group members on a more regular basis. Turns out, my suspicion was right. Rapidly growing classes were more than twice as likely (112%) to have 10 or more class members’ phone numbers programmed into their cells.

So make it easy for yourself. Get your group members’ numbers in your cell. Then call them and say, “Let’s go get a pizza!”

Where are your best friends? I asked teachers how many people in their group would say, “My best friends attend my group.” Again, rapidly growing groups were more than twice as likely (105%) to have 5 or more people who said their best friends attended group, too. What do we learn from this? Rapidly growing classes, normally, are groups of tightly knit friends. This also puts to rest the myth that non-growing groups are relationally closer. People sometimes fear outreach because they think it will disrupt existing friendships. The opposite is true—relationships help groups grow.

I like this group! I also asked, “To what degree do you agree (or disagree) with this statement, ‘I really like my group’?” The results were even more pronounced—rapidly growing groups were more than three and a half times more likely to strongly agree. People often say to me, “I don’t know if we want to grow our group. We’re just happy the way we are.” The research suggests that they’d be even happier if they embraced the vision of growing their groups—and their circles of friends.

What emerges from these findings is a very different picture of group life than I find in some churches. Again, this is not so much an organized program that has strategized to reach a goal, but rather, a tightly knit group of friends who enjoy doing life together. If you don’t have good people skills, the joy in being together never materializes. Here are some ideas on how to use your social skills to help cultivate that joy. — Josh Hunt, Make Your Group Grow, 2010.

What can we as group leaders do to encourage our groups to “love one another”?

So right about now you’re thinking, Hmm. How do you program that?

You don’t.

You can create practical Bible teaching, but you can’t create a providential relationship.

Our team spent a lot of time discussing the church’s role in this important faith catalyst. Here’s what we concluded. While it’s beyond our ability to manufacture any type of relationship, much less one characterized as providential, what we can do is create environments that are conducive to the development of these types of relationships. So we determined to do just that. I’m not exaggerating when I say that may be the most significant decision we’ve made as a team. We determined to create a model that was relationship-centric. We began looking for ways to get people connected more quickly and to keep them connected longer. This had significant implications for the way we approached family ministry and adult groups.

In Creating Community, Bill Willits provides a full description of our adult group model. What’s relevant to our discussion here is that the value we placed on providential relationships was what drove us to build our model around closed rather than open groups. We decided not to leverage adult groups as a growth engine, but rather to do everything in our power to create authentic community. So our adult Community Groups are designed to stay together for two years. We were told this wouldn’t work. But then, we were told a lot of things wouldn’t work in those days. Our entire ministry model is designed to move people into groups. We believe circles are better than rows. And we know anecdotally that within the context of our adult groups, men and women who may otherwise have never met are being used in significant ways in each other’s lives. At least 90 percent of the adults we baptize thank specific individuals in their small groups for the roles they played in their coming to faith and their decisions to be baptized. They may not use the term providential to describe these relationships, but when they tell their faith stories, it’s obvious that they were. — Andy Stanley, Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012).

John 15.8. What do we learn about discipleship from this verse?

The mark of what a disciple produces comes next. “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples” (John 15:8). In addition, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last” (John 15:16).

Jesus expected His disciples to reproduce. That is what fruit means—by their very nature, they by necessity produced fruit. If the branch remains connected to the vine for a sufficient time, it will bear fruit.

If the disciple remains in Christ for a sufficient time, the disciple will bear fruit. Fruit bearing does at least three things: It glorifies God (see John 15:8), it meets with the expectations that Christ had when He called the disciples (v. 16), and there will be a lot of high-quality fruit (vv. 8, 16). — Bill Hull, The Disciple-Making Pastor: Leading Others on the Journey of Faith, Revised and Expanded Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007), 87–88.

What is fruit?

There is some discussion as to the nature of the fruit. Is the fruit that of personal evangelism, or is it simply generic? This is not an either-or situation. Just as by its nature a healthy branch connected to the vine will bear fruit, so a healthy Christian will bear fruit. The healthy Christian’s nature will reproduce the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23). This fruit is characteristically active, not passive. Kindness is not a sickly smile; it takes action, it does something. A simple act of kindness may be picking up a dropped table utensil, or it may be introducing the person to Christ. The fruit of the Spirit is much more than personal evangelism, but fruit bearing without personal evangelism is unthinkable.

Therefore, we don’t want to limit fruit bearing to evangelism, but all demonstration of the fruit of the Spirit touches evangelism. No positive thing a believer does could be excluded from being a witness to someone for the authenticity of Jesus Christ. The one nonnegotiable we should not overlook is that all Christians are responsible to share their faith. — Bill Hull, The Disciple-Making Pastor: Leading Others on the Journey of Faith, Revised and Expanded Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007), 88.

Context. What is the secret to bearing much fruit?

The story of the Bible can be summed up by this simple phrase: God initiates and we respond.

“Just at the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6).

So often we like to run off and do our own thing. We like to initiate things and then pray for God to bless them, pray for Him to stamp them with His rubber seal of approval. Then we wonder why our efforts bear little fruit.

We have the equation mixed up. God initiates; we respond. If we want to learn how to bear much fruit and know His power infusing all we do, then we need to learn this simple principle: Stop and then go.

What do I mean?

Stop: Stop running around trying to make things happen, and enter the secret place—His presence. Spend time there. Abide there. Dwell in the secret place and listen. Hear Father’s heart; listen to what He is telling you.

Go: Now, go. Go and do what He has told you to do. God will empower you to do what He has instructed you to do. He will make the necessary resources available to you. He will equip you to carry out His will. He will empower you and sustain you.

Stop and go. Every day, go into His presence before you go out onto the streets. Live out of the secret place.

Stop and then go. — Heidi Baker and Rolland Baker, Reckless Devotion: 365 Days into the Heart of Radical Love (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014).

How many people in our church would you say bear much fruit?

I’ve asked audiences all over the world how they would describe the level of fruit bearing among Christians today. Their responses are consistent. They conclude that nearly half of all Christians bear little or no fruit. Another third bear some fruit. Only about 5 percent bear a lot. — Secrets of the Vine: Breaking Through to Abundance (Breakthrough Series Book 2) by Bruce Wilkinson

Verse 7 suggests that as we remain in Christ and His words remain in us, we will bear much fruit. How does this inform our job as Bible Study leaders?

If you are a church leader—perhaps you are a pastor, or you lead a small group—you would do well to concentrate on this point. Leading people to live Christianly comes down to this: leading people into the habit of a Christian Quiet Time.

I can summarize Christian living as one habit: the habit of the Quiet Time. There is much that will come after this—service and evangelism and all kinds of character development. But, it all flows out of the time alone with God in prayer and in His Word.

If we can get people to get the Quiet Time right, there is a good chance that all else will follow. If we don’t get the Quiet Time right, we might do more harm than good. What do I mean by that?

There is always a danger of inoculating people against the gospel rather than infecting them with it. We give them a small dose of the gospel and they think they have the real disease. Thus, they are not interested in true Christianity because they think they have experienced true Christianity.

But, what they have experienced is a country mile from true Christianity. It is churchianity. It is bootstrapianity. It is the stuff of the Pharisees—the stuff that Jesus railed mercilessly against.

There is no Christian living without the Quiet Time. There is no Christian living without prayer. There is no Christian living without being transformed by the renewing of our mind. (Romans 12:2) This is done through time in the Word.

If you are a pastor, you can boil your job down to this: get people into the habit of a Quiet Time. If you are a small group leader, you can distill your job to this: help people form the habit of a Quiet Time. Once you do that, discipleship will follow as surely as night follows day. Simple, right? — Josh Hunt, The Habit of Discipleship (Pulpit Press, 2015).

What do you want to remember from today’s discussion?

How can we support one another in prayer this week?

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download