Bulletins - Eagles Nest Church

- - Ephesians 2:1–9ESV
Somebody paid to get you here.
Not with money.
With time.
If you are following Jesus,
then almost for sure a person somewhere spent hours trying to help you become more like Jesus.
This is time spent that they never got back.
Someone who answered the same question you asked four times without sighing or rolling their eyes.
Someone who kept loving you and showing up when you were difficult to be around.
Someone who opened a Bible with you when they had a dozen other things to do.
That is discipling.
And make no mistake, discipleship costs something.
So how do you disciple someone?
You find a person.
You set a few goals.
And then you actually do it.
But that last step is where most of us quit,
because to do it you have to pay the cost.
And as Dever points out,
the cost includes four things: time, study, prayer, and love.
1. Discipling Takes Time
First off, not all discipling relationships look the same.
Mine don't.
They all look different.
Some of them are over coffee,
Some of them are in my office,
Some of them are on the phone.
Some of them require meeting weekly,
Some monthly.
But all of them share one thing:
They all take time.
That’s a required cost for discipling.
As we said last week,
Time is a currency - and we only have so much time to spend.
Which means, we can’t disciple twenty people once.
We have to be selective.
Sometimes you can disciple a crowd through preaching, teaching, or writing.
But sitting down and doing life-on-life discipleship is only possible with a few people.
So we have be thoughtful and intentional with this.
Pick people that you can actually invest in.
Maybe people who have the same schedule as you,
or people who live near you or are in your small group.
Or someone who is new to following Christ, and you don’t see anyone investing in them.
Start by being intentional to talk to them after church,
running an errand together,
doing yard work together.
Or having meals together.
Or getting coffee.
Discipleship can and should happen in normal everyday life.
Sometimes discipling people is hard because they make it hard.
They are just too busy for it.
And when you find those people, make a real effort,
But don’t force a door open that is being pushed shut from the other side.
Sometimes the person isn’t ready,
which means your efforts needs to shift, and maybe for this season you role in discipleship is to simply pray for them.
Sometimes we go through difficult seasons of life,
and when those come, don’t be quick to pull the plug on discipling.
Why?
because God often works most powerfully in our seasons of distress in the lives of the people are discipling.
Trials expose what our heart is truly resting in.
And when we rest in Christ in those times of trials, it teaches a powerful lesson to others of what it means to trust God.
So once again, name in your mind the person God is calling you to disciple.
And if you haven’t taken steps to pursue discipleship with them,
stop and ask yourself: “Why not?”
What is it that is keeping you from obeying Christ’s call to engage in the Great Commission.
Is it your time or schedule?
Is it your hobbies.
If so, ask yourself why you are making those more important?
Because I think we all know discipleship is more important,
but if we aren’t ordering our lives around it,
we are showing we truly do not believe it is important.
2. Discipling Requires Study
If faith comes by hearing the Word, then we feed faith with the Word.
It’s really that simple.
The expository sermons you sit under on Sunday, should not be the end of a conversation.
They should be the start of one.
They hand you menu of God’s truths that you can discuss Monday over coffee with someone.
Good books help with this,
But all them must point us to God’s Word.
The truth is we study what we love.
In Dever’s book, he tells about a boy named Sebastian who, at seven years old, had his mother quiz him on baseball statistics off the backs of his cards, like flashcards.
Nobody sat that child down and assigned him baseball cards to memorize.
He just did it on his own because loved it.
So here’s the question.
Should those of us who claim to love the Lord Jesus show less appetite for Him than a seven-year-old shows for a shortstop's batting average?
Loving God includes loving Him with your mind.
We want to know Him, and to help other people know Him,
he way He has actually revealed Himself, which is in His Word.
So in your discipling, do not drift into vague spiritual talk that could have come from anywhere.
Open the Bible.
Study it.
Poor over it.
Spend real time in God’s Word together.
3. Discipling Requires Prayer
In 1 Thessalonians 5:17, Paul tells us to, "pray without ceasing"
So pray for the people you are discipling,
and while you are at it, teach them to pray.
Think about it:
The change a person needs is not a behavior tweak you can coach out of them.
It is a supernatural work, a heart made new like Christ, and only God does that.
And He tends to do it through ordinary means,
and one of those means is your prayers.
So get focused your prayer life and the prayer life of the person you are counseling.
Do they know how to take a passage of Scripture and pray it back to God?
Are they praying at all when no one is watching?
What do they pray about?
Who are they praying for?
Do they pray about their friendships,
their money,
their holiness,
the friends they long to see come to Christ?
These are the things we should be praying about.
And remember,
learning to pray well takes time.
One pastor I’ve read a lot of said that once he started actually working on his prayer life,
it took almost a decade before he started to see real progress in his prayer life…
QUESTION
Why is prayer so difficult?
4. Discipling Requires Love
In John 13:34, Jesus said, "Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another"
Jesus took the whole law and simplified it down into two commands:
Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:28–31).
And what is the key ingredient for both of these commands?
LOVE.
And so without love, our discipleship will be like an engine running without gas.
Think about it:
Love is what makes you deny yourself and step forward to work for someone’s spiritual good.
Love is what makes you risk being turned down, and you might be.
Love for God and love for that person is what makes you look at the cost, count it, and pay it anyway,
because you want to see them grow,
and you remember what Christ did for you.
Love keeps us going when things get hard.
Whenever you disciple someone, you will face difficulties.
That same sin they keep giving into.
A “I’ve got it figured out” when they don’t attitude.
Selfishness.
Ignorance.
Immaturity.
And love is what keeps us going when we face these kinds of challenges.
And where does that persevering power come from?
It comes from remembering how completely God has loved you.
He did not quit on you when you were difficult.
Christ loved you all the way to death, even death on a cross.
That love, poured into you, is what keeps overflowing out onto others.
Love enables us to take criticism.
This one is hard.
Love and vanity do not mix.
If all I care about is what you think of me, I will never say the hard thing you need to hear, and I will never be able to hear it back from you.
Proverbs 27:6 NIV
6 Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.
To give a loving wound, and to take it,
my love for God and for you has to outweigh my love for my own reputation.
Love gives itself away.
As we just memorized: “Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things, hopes all things.”
Maybe you are tempted to think you are too important or too busy to pour yourself into someone.
But if Christ Jesus, who is the Son of God, set aside His position and glory for you,
we who are infinitely lower in position can set aside our busy schedules and time for others.
Love also knows when to let go.
Love humbles us and enables us do this,
Because the fact is: you are not God.
You cannot be everything a person needs.
People move away.
A baby comes.
A job changes.
Sometimes they need help you are simply not equipped to give.
Love is humble enough to admit that what they ultimately need is not you.
It is God.
And God is glad to use you for a season, and then to use someone else.
He doesn’t need us,
But in His mercy and grace He does use us.
QUESTION:
Which of the five is the hardest for you?
Love starts it.
Love keeps going.
Love takes the criticism.
Love gives itself away.
Love knows when to let go.
Of those five, which is hardest for you right now?
starting, staying, taking correction, giving yourself away, or letting go?
What makes them hard and what is the fuel we need to be able to actually do them?
(FUEL IS THE GOSPEL).
Every one of us is made to be loved and to love.
So love God by loving others and fulfilling the Great Commission to create and build up disciples,
knowing that we will one day soon stand before Christ to give an account for how we’ve loved in light of how He’s loved us.
Richard Sibbes put it this way:
“We will one day give an account to God, not only for the sermons we have heard, but for the examples of those we have lived among.”
Look around this church.
The chances to love others through discipleship are everywhere.
And even if they are here only for a short time,
when they leave, your ministry travels with them into the next church.
Yes, it costs. Time, study, prayer, love.
No one ever said it was cheap.
But it is absolutely worth it!
Before you ever spent an hour on anybody, the Son of God spent Himself on you.
He did not disciple us from a safe distance.
He came close.
He gave His time, He gave His body, He gave His blood to make us as His own.
So we do not give in order to be loved.
We give because we already have been.
Go find your person, and pay the cost.
And do it for God’s glory and our eternal joy.
- - Proverbs 27:6NIV2011

Ephesians 2:1–9ESV

Proverbs 27:6NIV2011