Discipleship, Part Five: Conclusion

So, this is the fifth part and seventh post in my Discipleship series. If you've stayed with me the whole way through, congrats! I'm not positive I'd read seven posts that some goober on the Internet machine wrote, regardless of topic. Alas, today we draw to a close on this series. Our final topic for the series feeds off of my post from last week, Discipleship, Part Four: Teaching. We will look briefly at one question today: how do you balance teaching with the other three aspects of discipleship? As a refresher, let's re-cap the four elements of discipleship, then we'll dive in.

4 Elements of Discipleship

1. Commitment: be personally invested in your disciple
2. Modeling: you set a good example for your disciple
3. Personal Attention: you pay direct attention and care to your disciple
4. Teaching: teaching biblical knowledge, doctrine and life to your disciple

OK, so how does one balance these? We learned that both are necessary to discipleship last week, so we have to have both. But just how important are they? A few points to close out the series:

-Biblical knowledge isn't the key to spirituality: We looked at this last week. You have to do more discipling than just teaching; if knowledge-giving was the key to discipleship, then the best advice I could give would be to send my disciple to [insert your local Christian book store] to get a few commentaries and such, then watch 'em go. Obviously, the first three elements are needed along with the fourth.

Additionally, the personal side of discipleship is needed, as one can teach without discipling. When I preach on occasion, I may have 150-200 people listening to me. I am not discipling 150 people. I may be teaching, as well as aiding their spiritual walk, but that is not direct discipleship. Jesus preached to a lot of people in His ministry, but had a significantly smaller amount of disciples.

-Non-teaching isn't good enough to stand alone: Ponder with me for a moment. If I wanted to be a doctor, how would I go about it? What if I had a skilled doctor that cared about me, was dedicated to leading me, showed me how he does his job, and kept up with me on a day-to-day basis? Am I any closer to being a doctor? Of course. In my time watching and being around this doctor, I have gotten glimpses of what being a doctor is all about. I've learned some things, and probably have a pretty good idea of what this whole doctor lifestyle looks like.

Yet, what happens if I take that and try to become a practicing doctor? Will I be able to be licenced? The obvious answer is no. Why is that? I have no medical school diploma, which would be the evidence that I have knowledge in the area of medicine. I would be familiar with things I had seen with my doctor-mentor, and I would have a general idea of some different things. But what happens when I run into a disease I have never seen, or I need to prescribe a medicine that I have never heard of? The results would be disastrous.

The same goes for discipleship. Our disciples can learn by watching and being with us, no doubt, but a lack of real, intense teaching will prove disasturous for them in their walk. We won't always be their for them when they run into something they've never learned about. Also, guess what: we may model something contrary to God's Word. Even with the best intentions, we are still imperfect, sin-scarred beings that will be that way until we die and resurrect to be with God. We will mess up, and we will show them the wrong thing to do at some point.

There must be teaching, as the Word of God is essential to discipleship, and you are not capable of true discipleship without it.

-A balance must be found: In our very first post in this series, I referred to discipleship as spiritual parenting. A good parent will have commitment to their child, will model how to live life to their child, show their child personal attention and have concern for their child learning about life. Think about a parent that does the first three without teaching: the child will not survive once it moves out, as the parent never told it how to live. If the parent teaches, but never shows love or commitment or care, the child may go on to physically live, but it will be a socially warped human, having never seen how someone shows commitment, love and compassion for another human.

We must have a healthy balance. Nutritionists suggest a balanced meal; too much bread will leave you with a protein deficiency, while too much meat will leave you with no energy from carbohydrates (yes, I simplified all of that a lot. Bear with me, science geeks.). The ideal meal features elements of both, and so should discipleship. Keep the Gospel/Great Commission as the focus, apply the Scripture that went along with each element of discipleship as needed, and you are on your way to spiritual parenting.

Being a parent is never easy, and you'll mess up along the way (and like biological kids, they may very well tell you so). Don't let that scare you; you've got the Spirit of God inside you, and He will make sure you are capable to do this work. He wouldn't have sent us on this mission otherwise.