Spiritual Multiplication

0:58I barely know one way to do math, much less new ways to do math. They say that you learn more by teaching, and as I've been helping my kids with their homework over the years, I feel like I've actually learned some math for the first time. Like, for example, that multiplication is actually fast addition. Who knew? I want you to keep that principle in mind for a minute here as we talk: multiplication is fast addition. We're about halfway through our Back to the Basics series now. This fall, where we're trying to get back to the basics of Christian faith and Christian life.

1:35And Jesus commanded us to make disciples of all nations. And I think when we hear that commission, we've a lot of us have heard that many times, when we hear the commission, make disciples of all nations, that can cause us to freeze up. That can cause us to just get overwhelmed. I mean, all nations, where do I even begin? How would we, as a church or I individually, how could I possibly begin to reach all of those people? Well, this is where the concept of multiplication comes into play.

2:08Because if it's just up to you or to me to make disciples of all nations, well, we're not going to be able to do that. But I don't think that's what Jesus had in mind. Because our commission is not to add disciples, but it's to multiply disciples. Our commission is not just to make more followers of Jesus, but to make followers of Jesus disciples who can then turn around and make more disciples of Jesus. The concept of multiplication. We are called to be spiritual multipliers, not spiritual adders.

2:48So imagine if you resolved today to share your faith every day for the next 30 years. And every three days, roughly, you saw someone come to faith in Christ. So, every single year, you see 100 people come to faith in Christ. After 30 years, you'd see 3,000 people come to faith in Christ. That's a lot of people. Most of us would be thrilled with those kinds of results. We haven't seen anywhere near that many people come to faith in Christ probably in our lifetime. But then consider this. If you, over the next year, said, I'm going to disciple two people and I'm going to teach them to become disciple-making disciples. And each one of them then goes out and disciples two people and teaches them to become disciple-making disciples. And that goes on for 30 years.

3:40The only thing that you do is that first year, you disciple two people to be disciple-making disciples. After 30 years, there aren't 3,000 believers. There's over 1.3 billion. I know because I tried to use the formula to figure that out, but I couldn't do it. So I just added over and over again until I got that number. I'm not a math guy. Friends, we're living in an age that's constantly telling us that bigger is better, that more is always better.

4:13And so we have this idea in our mind that big things, lots of people gather together, that's the goal. And so we can feel like if it's not big, if we're not making this massive immediate impact, that it's a failure. That if our church isn't a thousand people, it's a failure. That if your Bible study that you're leading isn't packed out. Every week, it's a failure. That if you're not seeing loads and loads of people come to faith in Christ, you're failing. Because in our minds, in our culture, it's always bigger is better, more is more.

4:41But I want you to walk away today with a different idea in your head that we could actually focus on getting smaller. And instead of being obsessed with gathering large numbers of people at events, we would focus on simply investing, discipling, mentoring a small group of people and teaching them to become disciple-making disciples. That if all of us as a church and as individual Christians, if we taught Christians to fish instead of just gathering them together so we could hand out fish every week, I think we could see phenomenal results like what we talked about.

5:20So we're going to talk about spiritual multiplication today. Let's jump into 2 Timothy 2. Verse 1, Paul says, You then, my child. And I want to pause there because you just get this sense from the way that Paul writes all of his letters, especially the way he writes to Timothy, that they had a special relationship. If you read 1 and 2 Timothy, there are so many instances where Paul calls him, my child, my beloved child, my true child in the faith. He calls him his child over and over again. They had this very special father-son relationship.

5:58And you may recall that Timothy. Grandmother Lois and his mom Eunice, they were Christians and they taught him the faith from an early age. But his dad was a Greek, he wasn't a believer. So he had this spiritual void in his life. He didn't have a spiritual dad. So Paul stepped into that void for him, and he became his spiritual father. And church, I think that same kind of relationship is what so many people are looking for, what so many people in the church actually need.

6:30In the past few weeks, we've heard a couple of testimonies from some brothers who came to faith in Christ just recently, and both of them come from non-Christian families. Their dads may be, probably are, very good men, but they can't be a spiritual dad to these brothers in Christ. So who's going to step into that gap? Where are these men going to find a spiritual father if not in the church? And so, older men and women, I want to challenge you, and you're an older man or a woman if you're 22 and a half or more.

7:07I want to challenge you to open your eyes and to see these young men and women, these elementary-aged children, these middle schoolers, these preschoolers, these high schoolers, these college students. I want you to open your eyes and see these young men and women. And I want to challenge you to engage them, to engage them. Because a few of them have spiritual moms and dads already. But increasingly, what I see in our community as a pastor is that more and more students move to our community and they do not come from Christian homes.

7:39They don't know what a Christian marriage looks like. They don't know what a Christian family looks like. They don't know what it looks like to be a Christian employee or employer. They don't know what it looks like to be a Christian in the community. They don't know those things. And so it's up to us to stand in the gap and to be a spiritual mom, a spiritual dad to these young men and women because none of them should be a spiritual orphan.

8:03So let's think about what Paul commands Timothy here. Take a look at the text, verse 1. You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Now, that's one of those phrases: be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Spiritual people hear that or read that, and they're like, hmm. You know what I'm talking about? That sound that we make when somebody says something real spiritual? What does that mean? Be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

8:37You know, I read that several times, and I had to really think hard about it. Like, why would we need to be strengthened by the unmerited favor that God has poured out on us? Well, friends, first of all, because disciple making is spiritual work. Disciple making is spiritual work, and you can't do spiritual work apart from the spirit. Our constant temptation is to look for a silver bullet. It's to look for this life hack that will make all things that are difficult easy and efficient.

9:12But there is no easy, efficient way to take a person who is dead in sin, who probably cultivated all kinds of ungodly, unhealthy habits, addictions, bad ways of doing things, and turn them into a fully formed follower of Jesus Christ in just a few simple steps. That's not how it works. God alone can regenerate hearts, he can grant new life in Christ. Our calling is to be faithful, to preserve and proclaim the gospel, to call them to follow Jesus.

9:47But only God can bring the dead to life. Conversion is spiritual work. But so is making disciples. You know, however long you've been following Jesus, that you can read the Bible for weeks, months, even years and read the same truths over and over again. And then something happens one day where your eyes are opened, your ears are open to see or to hear something new that you've never considered before. Why is that? It's because these things are spiritually discerned. And so, as we're making disciples, we have to rely on the grace of God. We have to rely on the Spirit of God because we cannot help people understand spiritual truth apart from the Spirit. Disciple making is spiritual work. So, we need the grace of God that is in Christ.

10:35But, second, we need the grace of God that is in Christ because disciple-making is challenging work. It's challenging work. It's helping repentant sinners know and follow Christ and teaching them to obey everything that he commanded. That's hard. That requires serious commitment spiritually, emotionally, mentally, financially, even physically. Because discipling people to follow Christ requires a lot of times that we give up sleep, we give up energy in order to help these younger men and women in the faith.

11:12Setbacks and disappointments are frequent. You know, sometimes young men and women seem to be making spiritual progress, and then they fall back into some of the same sins that they were enslaved to before. Sometimes they're led astray by weird teaching. Sometimes, people that you are helping to follow Jesus decide that they don't want to follow Jesus anymore at all. That was one of the most disappointing things in my life. I remember early my junior year, there was a guy that came to faith in Christ, and I bought him a Bible, and we met together multiple times a week for a year and a half. I taught him everything that I knew, and he walked away from Christ. And to this day, he's not following Jesus. That's hard. That's hard. Setbacks and disappointments are frequent. And so we must be strengthened by grace because we're going to be tempted to lose heart. When you see people falling back into the same sins or not following Christ anymore, you're tempted to say, What's the point? Why am I giving up my time, my energy, my money to help these people follow Christ when it doesn't seem to make a difference?

12:24Disciple-making is challenging work. And so we need to be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. This is how Paul conducted his ministry. I want you to take a look at 1 Corinthians 15 on the screen. He says, For I am the least of all the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

13:03Look at Colossians chapter 1. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present to everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy, that he powerfully works within me. So Paul believed that the reason that he was able to outwork all of the other apostles. The reason that he was able to toil and struggle to make disciples is because of the grace of God, God's energy that was powerfully at work within him. That's what he credited. And friends, that grace and that energy is available to us through Jesus Christ. When we believe in him, we are filled with his Holy Spirit, who gives us that grace, who gives us that energy to expend ourselves for his cause, so we can carry out the challenging spiritual work of making disciples. We're empowered for ministry by the Spirit. And so, Timothy is to be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. But what's the specific work? Take a look at verse 2.

14:21And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. Now, it seems from the context here that Paul is speaking specifically about raising up elders or pastors within the church. That seems clear from the reference to faithful men. That brings to mind all of the qualifications that we find for pastors in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 and 1 Peter 5 that we covered a few weeks ago. And then you also see that there's that qualification, able to teach. That's the one qualification that is. Distinguishes a deacon from an elder. They both have high qualifications for character, but elders must be able to teach. And so I think that what Timothy is being told to do here specifically is to raise up elders, men of good character, who can teach the members of the church how to be disciples, who make disciples.

15:20But if you think back a couple weeks ago to our sermon on church leadership from 1 Peter 5, what is one of the main things that elders or pastors are doing in the church? We're setting an example for you to follow. And so pastors like Timothy are to take the apostolic message of the gospel, that message that he entrusted to Timothy in the presence of many witnesses. They're to take that message and entrust it to faithful men who can teach others also. And then Christians in every church are going to preserve and proclaim the gospel and make disciples and train those disciples to preserve and proclaim the gospel so that they can go and make more disciples as well. So that's just being passed down over and over again. In other words, there is supposed to be a culture of disciple making in the church that starts with the pastors and filters down to every member of the body of Christ.

16:16But, friends, many churches don't have a culture of disciple making. And I think part of the reason for that is because ministry has been professionalized, like everything else in our culture. Think about. How many jobs that the average person just used to do on their own that now you pay somebody to do for you? And ministry has become that way as well. So, in the church, many Christians don't think of discipleship as something that they do, it's something that the pastors do.

16:48But I want you to look at Ephesians chapter 4, verse 11 through 16 on the screen. Look what we find there. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds or pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, listen to this, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

17:58According to Paul, the job of shepherds. Shepherds and teachers in the church is to equip the saints for the work of ministry so that the body of Christ builds itself up in love. It's not just our job to make mature disciples, it's our job to equip you to make mature disciples so that you can build each other up in love. Look at what Steve Timmison, Tim Chester, wrote: We need to recapture the sense that gospel ministry is not done by pastors with the support of ordinary Christians, but something done by ordinary Christians with the support of pastors.

18:41Now, listen, you can agree with everything that we've just read in Ephesians 4. You can agree with Timmison Chester that disciple making is the job of every Christian and still feel like you're not able to do it. And part of the reason, as we talked about earlier, is that so many of us never had a spiritual mom or a spiritual dad. So we ourselves weren't discipled. We have no idea what it looks like to disciple somebody because we weren't discipled.

19:13But I think it's also true that we've just overcomplicated the work of discipleship. We've turned it over to professionals because we've come to believe that it requires formal training to make a disciple. So, what I want to ask you to do. Is turn in your Bible to Deuteronomy chapter 6. We're going to end there this morning. Deuteronomy 6, I don't have the page number written down for you if you're using one of our Bibles, but in my Bible, it's page 179. So who knows?

19:45It probably won't be on page 12,000. Deuteronomy 6, we're going to focus on verses 4 through 7, 4 through 7 in the text here. And so I want to start off there. In chapter 6, verse 4, this is a well-known verse. In Hebrew, it's called the Shema. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

20:24So what I want you to notice is this passage starts where all good theology starts, and that is with God. It doesn't start with you, it doesn't start with me or what we're supposed to do. It starts with God, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And after we've established God, then it moves on to us. And what is the command? It is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and might.

20:51And again, I want you to think about that message from a couple weeks ago in 1 Peter 5 on pastors, on elders in the church. What is our first job? First responsibility. When Paul met with the Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20, he said, keep watch on yourselves and all the flock that God has entrusted to your care. The first thing that pastors have to do is keep watch on themselves, because if we're not keeping watch over our own souls, we can't very well keep watch over your soul. And I think the same thing is true here in Deuteronomy 6. Before we make disciples, we have to be disciples. We've got to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and might. We've got to be following Jesus if we want to help other people follow Jesus. And so that's the rub for some of you. For some of you, you're not making disciples because you yourself aren't a disciple of Jesus.

21:52You may have gotten baptized as a kid. You may have grown up in the church. You may have always considered yourself a Christian. But the reality is, you are not a disciple. You are not a follower of Jesus yourself. You might be one of those folks who thinks, at the end of my life, I'll turn to Jesus. He can be my Savior. But guys, if he's not your Lord today, then you're not his disciple. And so you need to be a disciple of Jesus before you can disciple anyone else.

22:24But for those of us who do love the Lord, if we're following Jesus and His words are in our hearts, then what is His Command. What do we do? Verse 7. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. So according to Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 7, what are parents and by extension spiritual parents supposed to do?

23:01We teach and we talk. We teach and we talk. We teach God's word to our children and our spiritual children, and then we talk about God's Word with them whenever we can. So teaching implies a more formal setting. That might be a sermon. That might be a lesson in a classroom. That might be a formal lesson over a table at a coffee shop. That might be something formal that you're doing in your home with family worship or a Bible study with friends. Teaching implies something more formal.

23:36But here in verse 7, we see talking, which is clearly informal in nature. It's just done when you're sitting at home or when you're taking a walk or when you're tucking your kids in at night or when you're getting up first thing in the morning. It's just done throughout the day in the course of ordinary life. And so, friends, discipleship should include teaching and talking, formal and informal. Planned and unplanned means of spiritual training. Think about Jesus and Paul and their ministries. They had formal times of teaching, didn't they? Jesus taught in the temple. He sat on the mountainside and taught thousands in a formal way.

24:17Paul taught in the temple and in synagogues. He taught in the hall of Tirnus. But tons of what they did was informal. Jesus is just having conversations as they pass by bodies of water that lend themselves to illustrations, as they walk by a fig tree with no figs on it. I mean, it's just in the course of everyday life, they're just talking. We need both of those things. Discipleship is more than just teaching and talking, but it's not less than that. And it really is that simple. Teaching and talking. It boils down to teaching people to obey everything Jesus commanded and then answering the question, in light of the gospel, how does this apply to my life? How should I live as a husband, as a wife? How should I live as a student, as an employer, as an employee, as a neighbor, as a friend, in light of the gospel? What does this have to do with my everyday life? Discipleship is helping people answer that question through teaching and talking.

25:21But I think for a lot of us, you know, the inner defense lawyer is raising up. And in your heart and mind, maybe for some of you, there are these objections that. Coming about why you still can't make disciples. And so, as we close this morning, I want to hit a few of these objections that you might be thinking about in your own heart and mind. And the first objection that may have come to your mind is that you're not qualified, you're not qualified to make disciples.

25:54And that may be because you think that you're not godly enough, or you don't know your Bible well enough, or you haven't been following Jesus long enough, but for some reason you think that you're not qualified, and so you'll leave disciple-making to someone who is more mature, more godly, has been walking with Jesus longer, who knows the Bible better than you do. Well, friends, it's important to note that Jesus seems to think that you are qualified because he called all of us to the work of making disciples, not just some of us. And the reality is, if you've been following Christ for any length of time, there is at least one person in your life who has been following him less than you have. You are qualified to disciple that person. And chances are, there's dozens and dozens of people for whom that is the case.

26:48I think a lot of us have this thought that it's humble to say that we're not qualified to disciple others. But, friends, I would. Submit to you that I think it's not humility that keeps us from making disciples. I think it's pride. It's prideful to tell Jesus that we're not qualified to make disciples when he has said, go and make disciples. And it's prideful because I think a lot of our refusal to make disciples is because we're afraid of being exposed.

27:25We're afraid of being exposed in the sense of some younger Christian is going to ask us a question about the Bible that we don't know and we're going to look foolish. We're afraid of being exposed because these younger Christians are going to see that we're not perfect, that we're still struggling with sin and disobedience in our own life. And we don't want to look foolish. We don't want to be exposed. And so I think it's pride, not humility, that causes us to say that we aren't qualified to disciple others. So let's humble ourselves. Let's recognize that none of us is godly enough, none of us knows enough about the Bible to do this, but we're going to be obedient anyway.

28:05The second objection that you might have is: I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time to make disciples. I would if I could, but I don't have enough time. I was listening to a podcast a couple weeks ago, and the speaker on the podcast pointed out that the President of the United States of America has the exact same number of hours in the day as you. The leader of the free world also has 24 hours. He does not get additional time when he becomes the president or one-day sheep. Right? You don't get more time because you're the president.

28:43We're all busy. So it's not like we can just leave disciple making to the non-busy people out there who don't exist. We make time for our priorities. Anything that we truly value will make its way onto our calendar. We make time for our priorities, which is just simply another way of saying we do what we love. So if we prioritize disciple making, we will make time for it. It will find its way onto our schedule. But, friends, I think so many of us see it as one more thing to add. How am I going to add disciple making onto my busy work schedule and family schedule and personal schedule? How am I going to add one more thing any given day or any given week? I want to encourage you to break out of that way of thinking and stop thinking of discipleship as something to add and instead something to do in the course of ordinary life.

29:46Why would we eat alone in the break room at work or on campus? Why not invite a non-Christian or a young believer to come and eat with us and just Open up conversation about spiritual things. You are already going to eat 21 times this week, I predict. And so you can just do that too. For some of you, you're in a similar life stage as we are, which means you spend about a hundred hours a week at practices for your kids. And, you know, I look around, I see a lot of parents, and they're just scrolling on social media while the kids are playing soccer or playing baseball, whatever. Why not use that time and call up a younger believer and check in on him? Why not invite somebody to meet you at the soccer field or the baseball field and just sit there for that hour with you and talk about spiritual things?

30:41My point is, we can be creative and redeem the time that we have instead of using this as an excuse to say, I don't have enough time. Let's redeem our time for the work of discipleship. And then the third and final objection I want to bring forward is: I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. So even if you're with me to this point, you're like, okay, I see that I'm called, I'm qualified to be a disciple maker. I know I have time in my schedule. I can make this work. You still might be stuck because you're like, I just don't know what to do.

31:20And this comes back to what I was talking about earlier: that I think we've just made disciple making way too complicated. So here's what I want to encourage you. To do, think of yourself not as a modern American living in a university town that thinks of everything in terms of formal classes, but think of yourself as a missionary. What would you do if you moved to a foreign country where nobody had heard about Jesus and nobody had ever read the Bible before? What would you do?

31:55You would probably build some friendships and then you would say, Would you like to read the Bible with me and talk about it? Teach and talk. That's probably what you would do. If we believe that God's Word is true and sufficient and powerful, it's not going to return void. You are not going to know the answer to every question, especially when you get to Genesis 1, which is the first chapter. So let's just humble ourselves and remind both ourselves and the people that we disciple: we are not Christians because we know all of the answers. We are Christians because we believe that Jesus is the Christ. He is the Savior that we need. And we're here to humbly point people to Him, not to ourselves because we know all the answers.

32:49So, church, the first step in recovery is to admit that we have a problem. And we have a problem in the church. The problem is that most people. Christians are not actively engaged in making disciples. And if you find yourself in that position this morning, I want to encourage you, I want to challenge you today. If you can't think of one person, at least one person, right off the top of your head, you're like, I am doing the best I can to disciple this person, then I want to encourage you and challenge you to find somebody.

33:22It's not hard in our church. You can just simply visit a life group. You can walk up to somebody that you don't know who looks younger than you, and you can start getting to know them. How you disciple, what that looks like, is going to look different based on your own gifts, your own maturity, your circumstances, and your life stage. It's not all going to look the same, but every one of us needs to be involved in disciple making. And it can be as simple as, why don't we meet together regularly, open up God's Word, read it, and talk about it.

33:54And if you're younger in the faith and you're hoping to be discipled by somebody, let me encourage you not to wait for somebody to approach you, but instead, walk out in the lobby, pick up this blue book that is called, How Can I Find Someone to Disciple Me? It's like we chose these things on purpose. They go with the messages. It's wild. How can I find someone to disciple me? You know, I think that some of you are like, but Alan, how can I find someone to know where these books are? Because it seems like everybody's always looking for these things. If you look for me at the end of the service, when you walk out, I'm easy to find. I'm the guy. That looks like a telephone pole. So, if you find me, just look to the right. There's this table, and all these books are right on it as you leave. So, grab one of these. And let me encourage you to then go and ask somebody to disciple you. And if they're too busy and they legitimately can't add another person, another thing to their schedule, don't be discouraged. Just go ask someone else, or come and find me or one of the other pastors and say, I need help finding someone to disciple me. We would love to do that because we don't want you to be a spiritual orphan.

35:03And then, finally, for those of you who aren't yet disciples of Jesus, I want you to think through the concept today that you are being discipled by someone. You may not be a disciple of Jesus, you may not be a follower of him, but you are a disciple. You are a follower of someone. Someone is training you to value certain things, to love certain things, to live your life for certain things. And I want to encourage you to think through: where does that road lead to? Where does it end? If I do everything that my teacher, my influencer, the person that is discipling me in whatever way, where does that road lead?

35:49Jesus said, What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet forfeits his soul? Does the road you're on lead to life? Or does it lead to destruction? I mean, just think for a minute: if you live your life and you become as successful and famous and rich and powerful and influential as you hope to become, will that really matter to you at all one second after you die? I don't think it will.

36:21And so I want to encourage you: instead of following whoever it is that you're following down a path that leads to destruction, become a follower of Jesus today. He said that he's the way, the truth, and the life, and that his path, following him, leads to abundant life, eternal life that starts today. You don't even have to wait for it, it starts now. I want to encourage you to become a follower of Jesus. You don't have to clean yourself up first, which is great news because you can't do that.

36:52So you become a disciple of Jesus today. Turn from your sin and receive him. And I promise you, we will do our very best to help you become a disciple maker tomorrow. Let's pray. Father, it's so clear in your word that you've called us to be disciple makers. And yet we have to say that for most of us, disciple making, even if it's somewhere on our list of priorities, it's not at or near the top. And maybe that's because of one of the things we talked about. Maybe it's because we've made excuses about our qualifications or having time or not knowing what to do. And so, God, we pray this morning that you would help us by the power of your Spirit to overcome our objections and to be obedient to you, joyfully obedient to you, and helping others to follow you on the path to eternal life.

38:24God, I pray that our culture would be one of disciple-making, where we're not obsessed with large numbers and big crowds, but we are focused on making disciple-making disciples who can reach our cities, the campus, our nation, and the world with the good news of Jesus Christ. In His name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to the sermon audio. From New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.