John 14

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.