Understanding Spiritual Growth - Lesson 5

Dr. Stephen Martyn 
Understanding Spiritual Growth  
sf304-05
The Path of Discipleship 
Lesson Transcript

Welcome to session five of our time together. Here is another critical session on the bridge. I want you to think in terms of now on the PowerPoint that's up before you right now.

You're going to see a bridge. So, we've got people envision your people that you want to walk with on the path of discipleship. They're going to be on the left-hand side.

We know the Lord wants to help us and to move us to get them over the bridge and get them on the right-hand side of this bridge. And to do this, I want you to think in terms of a twofold process. Now, I'm going to write it down here on the board for you.

So, there's a twofold process. We want we want the faith, the Christian faith, right? I mean, we want to know the message that has been given to us in the word of God. So that's the Christian faith.

Or you could also say this is the content. This is the revelation; this is the content or the revelation of God. And it all came to fruition in Christ.

But there's also not just the content side, but there is a formation side. Now, formation is basically put and get this. This is so important.

How do I get the content of the revelation of God into my life and into the lives of those who I've been given to steward or shepherd across this bridge into maturity? Now, that's a little bit misleading in that I'm not the one responsible for transforming the human heart, but I am given a responsibility of presenting the whole message of God. And that's part of our stewardship. So, another way you can look at this is we've got content and then right along with it, we want to have integration or incarnation for that matter.

I want the faith and I want it integrated into my life. So, another way you can put this is I want biblical, I want a biblical, I want a strong biblical foundation. And I want ongoing obedience.

And I want it in my life, and I want it in the lives of those that I am leading and serving. Remember again now from the last sessions that the Lord promises through his great commission to be with us in this process because you're going to see this bridge and you're going to think, oh, my goodness, how in the world. So, I mean, just envision this long, long process here of getting people over a long arching bridge to the other side.

So we're going from an immature, a wannabe disciple, you know, those who are called. And we're going to get them over to this other side over here on this other side to those who are now grounded and actually walking, living in the faith. Now, I want to suggest to you that we've got planks along the way.

Important, important planks every step of this bridge. Now, this is going to be our story. This is going to be the biblical, theological content.

And what I'm talking about are the major doctrines of the faith. Now, I want you to look again at the PowerPoint and see some of these doctrines and please don't go, oh, my gosh, how can I do all of this? You can do it all. You can be involved in knowing our story.

This is something that we're called to be about. Now, let's talk about these doctrines. What do each one of as you look at all of these doctrines that, you know, so just envision now all of these major planks in the bridge.

And look, just think about where do we start? We start with the story of the Trinity. Who is God? Who is God? And we end up over here in the biblical revelation with the new heaven and the new earth. And right in the middle, you know, the major planks right in the middle, you know, the huge content of the gospel here.

We're going to have the incarnation of Christ. So, we've got incarnation. We've got atonement.

We've got resurrection. We've got ascension. We've got session where the Lord sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty and intercedes for his children.

You know the story. You know how from the very beginning, God created the whole cosmos. And at the apex, if you know Genesis first three chapters there, you know that humanity was created in his image.

So, we've got creation and we've got the goodness of that creation. It was good. And we know that we are the hallmark.

We are the image bearers of who God is. And we know from the New Testament that that image is the image of Christ, his son upon us. So we are made in the image.

You also know the next major catastrophic plank, which is, you know, let's just draw a brokenness here all the way down. And that is the collapse of sin where lack of faith in the goodness of God gripped the original couple's life. And the result was death.

And that death works itself out in all in physical disease and physical death. But worst of all, it works itself out in in separation from the Lord himself. And then, you know, the whole long story after that.

I mean, we were so far gone that God had to send proveniently his grace for us to even make any kind of judgment or to even have any possibility of hearing his voice. And so, you've got all of the well, you got promise is next. And you've got the testimony that you see in God calling Abraham.

And I mean, the whole rich Old Testament story, which you've got all these summaries already on biblical training dot org. And it all leading up to the promise and then the actuality of the incarnation of Christ. Well, after Christ, you've got the coming of the Holy Spirit.

So over on this side, I mean, you have the establishment of the church. Right. So we keep taking things down, down here all the way down to the cross and the death, the physical death of Jesus. 

And then the resurrection begins to take it all the way back up and ascension. And then the coming of the Holy Spirit, the establishment of the church, all of the morality of the church, the teaching of the Beatitudes. How do we walk? How do we live? What are what do these things do? They provide a firm foundation for our lifelong journey in Christ. 

We're talking about a firm path, trustworthy path to walk on as we grow in Christ. They speak to us of the nature of God. Who is this God that we serve? Who are we? Who's what is our dignity? And what does it mean to be fallen from that dignity? They speak to us of the nature of the whole creation and how all of it points to the Lord.

The early church sometimes would talk about the second book of the Lord, the second book of God being creation itself. It is always pointing beyond itself to the creator. So they're going to teach us how to live and walk with others.

They're going to teach us how to serve. It's going to give us a firm path. It's going to encourage us along the way.

You know, there's sections of the Bible that were meant to be prayed and to be lived in. And so when you when you're thinking about who is the knowledge, who is God and how do I come to know him? And we have the word of God, which has been opened for us. And the early church, medieval church, had this wonderful saying about a psalm always on the lips, Christ always in the heart.

Semper in ore, psalmus, semper in cordae, Christus. Don't you love that that original Latin that they use? Now, what do they mean, semper in ore, psalmus? Well, always on the lips a psalm so that you could pray, pray continually. This is fulfilling 2 Thessalonians 5, 17.

You know, we're fulfilling the apostolic commandment to pray constantly. Or Luke 18, 1, where Jesus told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. So, the early church fulfilled this by memorizing the psalms.

All right. These doctrines, including the efficacy of the word of God, I mean, we love, we love, we cherish the miracle of the written word of God to us. And we don't trifle with it.

You know, it's not meant to be redone and improved today. Not at all. So, I find that as they guide us toward completeness in him, we'll also find that they guard us from the powers of evil.

That's an important doctrine for us to know, that we fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil, the values of the world, the fallenness of our own disordered life. That's from St. Augustine, disordered affections that lead us astray. They fight against the demonic influence that is seeking to pull us away from keeping our hearts, our minds focused on the living Lord Jesus, keeping the cross always before us, following and staying true to what we have been given and fighting against the evil that we encounter in the world today.

These doctrines correct are bent toward sinfulness. You, you know, the hymn prone to wander, Lord, I feel it prone to leave the God I love Lord help us here. So, what do we do if we don't have a foundation to walk upon to build our lives upon? But I'm telling you there's, there's, there's, there's many, many formational discipleship movements today that will major on techniques or just major on disciplines.

Now, as important as disciplines are to us, and they are important to us, that's not the foundation we walk on. The foundation is Christ our Lord. That's where we walk.

That's who we walk with. And that's who sets our agenda for us without a foundation discipleship becomes merely about techniques. Lord save us from techniques or even worse.

It becomes about heroic spiritual discipline and training. Lord save us from anything heroic here. That's not what we're called to be about.

So I want you to fill these major doctrines in. Now I've got a whole set. I've got a whole class on biblical training.org that covers these doctrines.

Um I think there's 20 plus videos. It's going to go over every major doctrine we find in early classical historic consensual by consensual. I mean, it was hammered out in the creeds of Christianity.

It's, it's a class that covers Tom Odin's great systematic work called classic Christianity. I want you to know your doctrines. I want you to know your roots and you may have a different understanding of some of these classical doctrines, even then what Tom Odin has will be true.

If you're a part of a well-grounded stream of Christianity, you know, be true to what those who've gone before you want to highlight in that stream of Christianity. Now in this light, I, I just want to encourage you. Now, if this business of the bridge and trying to get all of the resources in looks overwhelming, please don't let it be in a two-year period.

You can run your people through the major doctrines of the faith. Now to encourage you, let me give you two wonderful resources. The first is from my friend and former colleague Dr. Sandra Richter, Old Testament professor whose work Epic of Eden tells the whole story particularly from an Old Testament standpoint, but she goes all the way into the end, to our home, the new heaven and the earth classic work that she's done.

And then the second one is the text by Beth Felker Jones and the Beth, the Beth Felker Jones text is called Practicing Christian Doctrine. It will do this as well. And it's a wonderful text with questions in it.

you will be blessed by both of these works. So, we want the bridge art, but now we want the planks of the bridge. But now I want to get my people, the people that the Lord has given me to raise up and to disciple.

I want to get them over the bridge. I want to get them to the point of at least a relative sense of being mature in Christ. We're always going to be growing, right? We're always going to need to be dependent upon the Lord.

There's never going to be a point where, where you can say, I have arrived. No way, no how, but there can be a point of growing up in Christ. Paul had quite a bit to say about that.

So, this business is about integrating the doctrines that the word of God gives us the greatest gifts we have integrating the doctrines into our daily lives. Now I'm talking about concrete ways of living out our faith in Jesus on a daily and mundane in a daily and mundane manner. This is living the faith.

This is walking the truth of God. And you and I are called to step into this type of obedience. So look, look at, look at this.

We want we want faith, right? We do want faith, but on the other hand, we want obedience. I mean, don't the devils believe? So yeah, let's walk in faith and obedience. And we, we, it's that whole formation or integrational part.

So, we want not only a faith here, but we want to walk in the light of the gospel. We want, what do we want? We want Christian doctrine. So yeah, we want Christian doctrine here, but also we want Christian what? Living.

We want the word of God and we want to know the word, but also we want to be faithful disciples who fulfill the word, faithful disciples. We want the content of the faith. So, we want content.

But what else do we want? We want application of the faith when the world is coming against all that we are, all that we stand for. And when it's coming in increasing intensity and even you know, it's a fierce battle feel good messages and technique driven spirituality or worse functional transcendence where I'm given tools to live a more successful life. Those are not going to hold up in the battles we're going to face.

People need the foundations of who we are, the foundations that we can only find in the word of God. So, we got to keep these together. It's a both ends.

It's a single coin. It's just two sides of the same coin or what are we end up with jello or worse. We end up with cultural Christianity.

God save us from diluted merely thinking in some generic sense that I have allegiance to the doctrines of Christ without living them out. Or we end up in spiritualism all of which are sub-Christian and will do damage to God's church. It's an important task and you can do that.

You can listen. Here's the, here's the good news for you. You can build this content as you walk across the bridge.

You don't even have to have it all worked out in your life. Just get reliable, solid sources. And so what I'm going to suggest now in this twofold process is that over a period of two years, you are going to be instructing your people and yourself.

And there may only be a one or two others of you. It may be your own kids. You're going to be training them in who we are as the people of God.

And so that is going to mean some didactic um, download kind of instructional time. but at this and walking parallel with that, there's also going to be the critical issue of integration. So not only a time of giving them content, but a time of allowing them to fold the truths of the gospel into their daily lives.

So blessed be the name of the Lord for his reigns that are upon us even now in this studio, blessed be the name of the Lord that he will lead you in this path. 

Now, let me just see if there's any other comments that we want to - Ed Taylor has an important comment, please brother. So Dr. Martyn, as you're talking about doctrine and practice, can you, and maybe you'll get to this later, but can you explain or give a picture of what the role of the Holy Spirit, like listening as an individual to the role of the Holy Spirit's voice in this process? How does that get you from doctrine to practice? Thank you.

And Ed, that's a critical question. And let me just springboard on your word listening, because it's not going to be a matter of merely knowing doctrine. It just cannot be.

And so, in the process, which is next session that we're going to cover, I want to, I want to really so you're making a wonderful segue for us to get, to get over there. I want us to really look at the issue of what it means to not only read and hear biblical truth, but how in the world does the Holy Spirit get that ingrained in my life and think of it. We'll think of it in terms of invitations that the Holy Spirit sends to me for specific acts of faithful obedience.

Huge issue. That's in the next video. Any other, we got another.

I just wanted to mention that in terms of the planks on the bridge on biblical training, if they search for the name where W-a-r-e, he did a great 10-hour class and then an 80-hour class giving us all those planks. So, there's lots of options for people. You've got it covered.

You've got it covered. And I say, thank the Lord that we do have it covered. Just quick and anecdotal statement here.

I got out in seminary. I thought, I don't like these things. I really didn't like systematic theology at all. And it didn't take me long to realize in pastoral ministry, I didn't have a good foundation. And I knew that I could not blame my seminary. I had to blame myself for not paying attention. And so, it's been a lifetime getting these planks in place. So we're going to look at Dr. Ware. What's his first name? Bruce.

Bruce Ware. Yes. I've heard of him.

Bless you. Persevere. Know the faith. Amen.