Understanding Spiritual Growth - Lesson 1

Dr. Stephen Martyn 
Understanding Spiritual Growth  
sf304-01
Process of Discipleship 
Lesson Transcript

It's such a privilege to be with you here at biblicaltraining.org. I feel very, very grateful to be able to share with you. Let me just share up front, all of this is to the glory of God, to the increase of his kingdom. Let me also share that even though I do teach at Asbury Theological Seminary, that the material I'm going to share comes from real life experience.

We're not going to be theoretical in this at all. And really praying that all of this will be biblically grounded and couched in strong theological concepts. So, I pray that the Lord will bless you as you move through these lectures.

Now, what's on my heart and what do I want to cover? I want to talk to you about the critical place of discipleship in the whole under the whole umbrella of spiritual Christian spiritual formation. So, a disciple is a noun. It's a person.

And we want to talk about the type of disciples that Jesus himself calls us to be. Now, I don't know about you, but one of my all-time heroes of the faith is Dallas Willard. He's in the kingdom now, but I thank the Lord for him.

Toward the end of his life, which was a great prophetic life to the church, toward the end of for the church, toward the end of his life. He challenged the church, and he talked about the terrible elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room is the lack of discipleship in the church today.

Now, he was in the he was in the long stream in a very long stream of church leaders who have spoken to us about this. But when we think about particularly in today's world and in the broader evangelical church in the world today, I think John R.W. Stott hit it right on the nail. And he also is in in heaven.

And we thank the Lord for Stott. But he said this, we evangelicals are good at conversions. But then he went on to say, but not discipleship.

So, let's dive into this and discern together what the Lord's call is for us today. I really do believe that the great invitation from the Holy Spirit today coming from the spirit to the church is to understand discipleship processes. Now, get it in the plural, a discipleship process, not a program.

I'll distinguish those differences for you. Processes that allow the Lord to bring forth the blessed fruit of mature disciples, not programs that may take someone through a four-week study, an eight-week study. I've even seen eight-year programs, but they don't end up with people being more mature in the Lord and growing in the Lord.

They may have entertained people or in fact, they may have helped people. And I'm not against programs. I want you to know that I spent 28 years as a pastor.

The latter part of those years, we ran the Alpha program with Nicky Gumbel a number of times. Now, that's a program. It's got to start.

It's got to end. It's got set content. And it was very helpful.

It really got people in alignment, ready to go into a process that would help them grow even more and even deeper. So processes, not programs. We'll talk about it further.

Now, what spiritual shape do we normally find people in who come to us? Now think about it. You're going to have people who are yearning to grow in the Lord. There may not be a lot of them, but they're going to be there.

You're going to have people who are willing to make commitments to you as a leader or to you as a pastor, to you as a lay person in that church. But they sense something in you that's drawing them toward Christ. And so in prayer and in discernment, you're going to see all sorts of people around you who are yearning for the more than, and the more than can only be filled with God.

That's the only antidote to that deep yearning. In some cases, they may not even know they are yearning for the Lord, but the Father will give you discernment to see into their hearts. You'll trust him as Jesus prayed before choosing the disciples.

He'll send his Holy Spirit to help lead you to help discern who to invite, who to ask. So where are we going to find people? Well, let me say that for the most part, there may be some rare exceptions to this. Right in the middle of their field is going to be a big fat me.

It's all about their fulfillment, their life, what they want to see happen. I know I'm speaking in generalities, but friends, you know, also, we live in a day and time in a culture that is narcissistic to the hilt. So when you look over on the infrasight, on the interiority of their life, where you find memory, intellect and will at work and where they're doing personal process, you're going to see throughout their field a basic thought.

What's in it for me? How can I grow? Where can I grow? How can I solve this problem? How can I find help? Now, that's not all bad. Please, please hear me. But there's nevertheless in all of this an orientation in life that centers them toward self-seeking.

I love the Latin that St. Augustine bought into all of this, and that Martin Luther amplified. And Augustine talked in terms of in curvatures in set, in other words, self-seeking. You'll find it all in Romans to those first verses in Romans to what Paul you when Paul used that word self-seeking the self-inverted back in upon itself.

When, in fact, the self was created to reach out in love and praise and worship and adoration to father, son and Holy Spirit. And then the self was created to reach out in service of God's kingdom by loving the people around us and following his will to serve his kingdom and people. So over on the relational side, you're going to see relationships primarily viewed as how, again, will they serve me? We have to be careful with this, even in the church, because we can end up with some kind of with a functional transcendence.

And what's functional transcendence? Functional transcendence is where I use the things of God, even the people of God to make my life better. We say, well, Steve, surely he wants us to have a better life. Well, now let's back up from that a little bit.

What is his plan? What is his desire for us? We're going to we're coming there. A better life for me is essentially, again, a s self-focused life, not what we are called to be, not the worldview we are called to have. Our life is about service to the master, not about building a self-kingdom.

Then when you look down on where they are situated in life, their immediate situation, basically a question is, how will this situation, I mean, workplace, family, friend, church, you know, just add it all in. How is this going to advance my situation? How is this going to advance me? Again, that whole me thing. Then when you look up on the world poll, the world poll is, you know, you hate to use this term, but it's basically if you feel like you deserve it, the universe will serve it.

Lord, help us. Please deliver us from such vain thinking. But the world, in other words, the greater world, what the world is there to serve.

You got it again. A big fat me. Lord, save us.

All right. Now, we've got some wonderful studio people, guests with us, and I'm just going to turn to them and see, you know, what do you see in people either who are not yet disciples or people who are freshly coming to discipleship? I think it would help to see. Go ahead.

Brother Bill. Before I say that. Yeah.

Could you define what a disciple is? Yes. Thank you. And we're going to get into this because we want biblical understandings of a disciple.

And so, I promise that's coming. But we're going to see a twofold, twofold definition. The great commandments to love the Lord our God.

If you look at the Mark version with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, which is going to result in a person following Jesus. I mean, Billy, use the word disciple in the New Testament site over 200 times that noun. And then you can see the Great Commission.

And so, the Great Commission is going to be for in the forethought of this person. And you can fill in as well. This is Bill Mounts.

And I'm so thankful to have him interacting with us. To answer your question, what I see a lot in the church is this emphasis of, you know, the altar call, the conversion, that stage of it. And then people thinking that everything else is optional.

And so, you know, you have Jesus talking about the narrow gate and the broad gate, the narrow path and the broad path. And people think that they can go through the gate of conversion and then they don't have to travel on the journey. They don't have to grow.

They don't have to follow Jesus. They've got this one friend said they've got their get out of hell free card and nothing else really matters. So, to me, that's one of the greatest challenges in the church today.

I agree 100 percent. And it brings up this whole issue of dashboards. And so, what's a dashboard? Well, when you look at the dashboard on your vehicle, when you're driving, it's all the gauges that tells you gives you important information.

And so one of the prominent dashboards that you'll see in evangelical Christianity today is how many conversions and how many people in the pews. And what is the level of giving now? Please, we the Lord counts every soul. The Lord counts every sheep of his.

And he wants people in the pew. Do I hear an amen? And he wants people to accept him. But this is what Willard and before him, there's a whole host of people saying the same thing.

If you want to see the hardest word on this ever, go to the cost of discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That's just the beginning. Conversion is the beginning.

And we want conversions. But there's an end product. And we're going to see we're going to see more of that in product here in terms of disciple coming up.

All right. So there's this there's this major issue of we've got to deal with people where they are. We don't expect maturity.

It's normal. Now, I come from more of a I come from a Methodist background. It's absolutely tragic.

But it's normative in Methodist churches to see people who don't know the Bible. They simply don't know it. They just have not been in it.

Now, I know we're not the only ones impacted by that at all. So, you're going to have people coming to us to you who they don't know our story. They don't know the story.

They don't know the word of God. They're not in any kind of they're just not in the disciplines. Or if they are in the disciplines, they may be in it for the wrong reason, because just being in the disciplines is not our goal.

That's only a means. But we don't expect them to. But here's what we can count on.

The Holy Spirit himself is drawing those people to the fullness that Jesus accomplished for them on the cross and in the resurrection and in the ascension. There's a longing built into their hearts that the father planted there. And we can trust that.

We can be co-laborers with Jesus to gather these dear folks, to gather them together. So don't demean the sheep, even though they're ragged, even though they're sinful. We are one of them.

I don't know if you've ever been around sheep, but I've often been amazed that Jesus compared us to sheep. Friends, it was not a compliment. I'm so sorry.

They're very smelly and not all that smart. Yet he loves us despite our condition. And that's part of the good.

That is the good news of the gospel. So here's the deal. We want people to be shaped into the image of Christ.

Now, I want to hold up a wonderful text from one of my colleagues who's in the kingdom now and heaven now in Robert Mulholland. Here it is. Invitation to a journey.

This is having a substantial resurgence right now in Christianity. On page 720, Mulholland says spiritual formation is the experience of being shaped by God toward wholeness. Now, wholeness is not as the world defines it.

The world defines wholeness as autonomy. In other words, self-complete. Lord, save us.

I am not self-complete. I will never be self-complete. The world defines wholeness as autarky.

Autarky means self-rule. Well, that's the path to hell. No, wholeness is, as we're going to see, being transformed into the image that we most deeply are in Christ.

We're being formed by God. He invites us. He forms us, friends.

He transforms us. It's an amazing process. And it's not a do-it-yourself thing.

It's not functional transcendence where I find techniques and methods to help me feel better about myself, to help me do better, like centering prayer, which is not Christian at all. No, this is about learning to lean into Jesus as I follow Jesus. Now, Mulholland says on page 20, God is the initiator of our growth toward wholeness.

He starts it. And we are to be pliable clay in God's hands. I'm praying now that the Lord will give you a longing, a yearning to find just a few.

Don't go after masses here. That's not what Jesus ministered to the crowd, but he only discipled a few. So I'm praying for that yearning in your heart to find those around you, your little children, your spouse, your friends.

If you're a leader in a congregation, those who you discern are being called. If you are a businessman, I surely hope there's a bunch of businessmen and women watching this. Who's in your organization that you can come alongside and meet with to bring them into the kingdom? This is the first.

This is the beginning of the call for us today to recover the journey of discipleship. Blessed be the name of the Lord for how he calls us to follow him and fulfill the Great Commission. Amen.