So last week we started drilling down into what is termed the great commission. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s this wonderful challenging task that Jesus gave to his followers of all ages. Go out into the world, make disciples. And our commission orders, we’ll just go over it one more time. Says, “Then Jesus came to them and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I’ve commanded you. And surely I’m with you always to the very end of the age. So, last week as we began bit of a miniseries on disciplehip, we talked about what it means to take up our commission and not let it lapse. uh keep it active, be fueled by zeal so that our commission papers aren’t something we just take and stuff into a desk drawer and and forget about. So this morning again as we consider our commission, the first question that should come up to in our minds is what should these disciples, these things were meant to produce look like? What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? And underneath that question is probably an even more important one. If I’m or if we’re all commissioned to go out and make disciples, uh maybe it’s incumbent on us to determine that we’re a disciple first. It’s a if we we can’t make something that we’re already not would never send someone to Nate to teach a carpentry course if they couldn’t cut a straight line with their skill saw or if a a plumber who didn’t know the the business end of a plunger, you know, or or someone who trying to bake something and has never mastered anything beyond toast. we wouldn’t have that person try to make another person like them. So, we can’t hope to make disciples unless we have some idea of what they look like. Neither can we reproduce a disciple unless we’re already a disciple ourselves. So, this is obvious stuff. So, the first thing we need to ask us is what is a disciple of Jesus Christ? What does that person look like? So, I asked Chad GPT to give me 25 definitions of a disciple from various Christian leaders. All of these actually are very helpful and true, but they highlight slightly different nuances or aspects of what it means to be a disciple. Now, some state stated very broadly. For example, Ji Packer said, “A disciple is a believer apprenticed to Jesus.” Oswald Chambers, a disciple is one whose life is abandoned to Jesus Christ. Bobby Harrington, a disciple is one who intentionally rearranges life around Jesus. Others emphasize that disciplehip’s primarily about obedience, learning to obey Jesus. Dallas Willard, a disciples, a person who has decided that the most important thing in life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do. Or Dietrich Bonhoffer, a disciple of one is one who follows Christ in costly obedience. John Sto, a disciple is a learner and a follower of Jesus who submits every area of life to him. Others emphasize the inner transformation or the inner character of a disciple. Greg Ogden, a disciple is one who increasingly takes on the character and priorities of Christ. Howard Hendricks, disciple is a learner whose life increasingly reflects the teacher. Others go a little more interesting direction by focusing on the emotional attachment that a disciple has with their master. So John Piper, a disciple is one who treasures Christ above all things and follows him. Arreua, a disciple is one who learns to live from the love of Christ. Well, Jonathan Edwards, a disciple is one whose affections are increasingly set upon Christ. And one final category is an emphasis on spreading and reproducing the disciplem ministry. So we have Bill Hull. A disciple is someone who follows Jesus is transformed by Jesus and joins the mission of Jesus. Or David Platt, very similar. A disciple is a follower of Jesus who lives for his glory and multiplies his life in others. Neil Cole, a disciple is one who follows Jesus, reproduces that life in others. And finally, Dawson Tropman. A disciple is one who knows Christ, grows in Christ, and helps others do the same. Of all the definitions I looked up, I like this one by Alan Hirs. It’s concise. It’s portable. It’s memorable. He says, “A disciple is a person captured by Jesus and sent into the world.” So, if we gather up and syn synthesize all those different definitions of disciple, you might say this. I think it’s on your outline. It says a disciple rearranges their life around Jesus, obeys Jesus, is being inwardly transformed by Jesus, remains emotionally connected or attached to Jesus, and is active in carrying on Jesus’ mission. And we certainly whatever whatever definition of disciple we come up with, we certainly want it to align with the things that Jesus said a disciple was. And he speaks of disciplehip as surrender. Those of you who don’t give up everything can’t be my disciples. He also highlights obedience. If you hold to my teaching, you’re really my disciples. He doesn’t ignore the emotional attachment or component of disciplehip saying it’s relational. It’s not just heady. It’s released and proven through love. By this, everyone will know that you’re my disciples if you have love for one another. And he also speaks of disciplehip as something we pass on. It’s not ending with us. He says he wants his disciples to relate to them like branches to a vine. They draw their essential nourishment. And then he adds this is to my father’s glory that you bear much fruit showing yourselves to be my disciples. So every statement Jesus makes about being a disciple and following him probably merits a message of its own. But this morning we’re just focusing on two statements Jesus makes about disciplehip in Luke chapter 9. They’re quite potent words. If we even speak them aloud in our sanctuary, you might even hear a pin drop because these are powerful, convicting words. Jesus says in Luke 9, Jesus speaks about how our disciplehip is meant to just uh affect our identity and our priorities. And we’ll start with the identity piece. And that’s the one that Amber read where he said to them, “If anyone would come after me must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit his very self? And when Jesus speaks about saving or preserving one’s life, he uses a word that’s a little richer than merely physical existence. It’s the Greek word psyche or soul. The very seat or control center of everything we are. and our psyche or our soul, it’s always centered on what we feel is most valuable to us. Jesus says that a fixation with creating and preserving our own psyche, our own soul identity, if we try to breathe life into something that’s self-manufactured, it just won’t survive. But paradoxically, if we unplug our psyche from whatever we think is supporting its life, whatever we’re trying to use to keep it alive, and we entrust our soul identity to Jesus, that’s when it becomes a living, breathing thing. So, shortly after the Second World War, When the poet, he wrote a long poem that was aimed at the spiritual uncertainty and the fragmentation of the modern world. and he entitled it, this is just after World War II, the age of anxiety. And the four main characters in the poem, they begin probing the big questions of life. Who are they? What is happiness? Why do I feel so divided inside? Where can meaning be found? One recurring theme in the poem sounds very much today. It begins probing uh what it means uh to self-discover or to be individualistic which time and time again out shows to be a false premise or a false hope. One very memorable line in the poem goes like this. Miserable wicked me how interesting I am. out pressing into the modern individualistic mindset where no matter how broken or fragmented we may be on the inside, everyone still tries to turn their life into some kind of dramatic performance. Everyone feels that despite their suffering and their struggle, their life remains endlessly interesting and ought to be viewed as interesting by everyone else. So out he’s saterizing the modern obsession with looking inside ourselves in search of something genuine, the real me, trying to discover who we really are. The uncomfortable truth about us is that when we look inside ourselves, and if we’re honest, we really know this. What we find is not awfully pretty. Inside us is what Augustine would say is a factory of idols and what the Bible calls a sinful nature. I mean, that’s not everything about us, but that’s part of us. sinful nature wages war against the spirit of God. And uh we have that conflict all the time in us. We may feel that our inner pathologies and what they’re the things that really make us interesting people, but really they just display our brokenness. That’s Odin’s biting line. Miserable wicked me. How interesting I am. But Jesus offers the alternative. He says to his people, to all who will take up their crosses and follow him, he says they’ll find real life rather than just having to preserve a dead one and formaldahhide and keep it interesting and keep it going. People who lose their life for him will find a solid and stable identity as a disciple of Jesus. And Jesus says those who are obsessed with saving their lives, eventually they’re going to hit a wall of reality and they’ll lose their lives instead. Transhumanism is a fairly new term. It’s a movement on the rise that’s highly optimistic about human ability, about technology to overcome our physical limitations, especially seeking to conquer the great enemies of aging and death. And some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, they’re pouring their resource, their resources, their money into simply trying to stay alive. Last September, there was a video that went viral and in it, China’s Xi Xihinping and uh and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, neither of them seem very eager to ever relinquish power. They were caught on a hot mic discussing their shared desire for immortality. Billionaire Peter Teal has outlined his interest in getting plasma transfusions from young people as a means of extending his life. In an interview he gave in a business magazine, he said, “There are all these people who say that death is natural. It’s just part of life. I think that nothing can be further from the truth, and Teal has signed himself up to be cryogenically preserved.” Open AI chief executive Sam Alman, he’s invested about 180 million of his own fortune in a lab whose research is again just aimed at preventing human aging. Jeff Bezos of Amazon’s among the major funders of another lab that hopes to uh to use stem cell therapies to extend human lifespans. And Brian Johnson, another fabulously wealthy individual, he’s devoted his fortune to what one reporter calls his moniacal pursuit of eternal life. bewildering number of approaches, supplements and gene therapy and im immunosuppressants and transfusions of plasma from his own son and much much more than that. And his motto and the tagline of his longevity program is simply this. He says, “Don’t die.” See, if you already have the whole world, as some of these guys do, they essentially have everything they’re ever going to want or ever going to need. The only thing left trying to gain is just eternal life just so they can live longer. But to all humans, Jesus says, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit his very self, lose or forfeit his psyche, his soul, his precious identity?” And the answer to Jesus rhetorical question is, “It’s no good at all. It’s a bad gamble to gain the whole world.” Yet, that’s exactly what many people in the world are trying to do. A disciple of Jesus just can’t afford to carry a self-manufactured identity and a grasping fist to the things of the world, an obsession with just prolonging life. But if you and I can drop that baggage and set that down and take up a cross and follow Jesus, Jesus says we can step lightly into a new life, into a future, a stable identity as a disciple of Jesus. Now, further down in the same chapter of Luke 9, Jesus makes some other uncomfortable statements about the priorities of those who would be his disciples. We read, “As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “Oh, I’ll follow you wherever you go.” Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” He said to another man, this is Jesus’ initiative to this man, “Follow me.” But the man replied,”Yeah, Lord, uh, first let me go bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Still another said, “I’ll follow you, Lord, but first just let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” And Jesus replied, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” So Jesus here, he comes in contact with three men. All three seem eager to follow him. They seem like good candidates to be his disciples. They’re willing to be added to the list. First man’s very bold. He says, “I’m going to follow you wherever you go.” But Jesus answered him by saying, “You know, if you hitch your wagon to me and to my ministry, it’s not going to be comfortable for you.” Maybe this man had a had a nice home and a nice bed and a good solid mattress and uh and a and a and a decent job, but he’s well set up. But Jesus wants him to know that Jesus, he isn’t the kind of leader or messiah who holds large rallies and fills stadiums and people cheer and give money and Jesus sells his merch to all the people there and wins everyone’s boat vote and then everyone goes home and has a good night’s sleep afterward. Jesus says, “No, I’m the savior who’s come to die. I’m going to be a ransom for many. I’m going to be alienated and mocked and tortured.” So by any earthly measure, Jesus is not on the winning side. So, if this man is going to follow Jesus, he’s going to have to get used to losing. Jesus is headed for the cross. Along the way, he says, “I have nowhere to lay my head.” We know that Jesus, he didn’t own a home, and he seldom returned to his hometown of Nazareth, to his family home. So, a life with Jesus meant a lot of years of either camping, I suppose, or couch surfing. And uh and then you get to watch your master die a horrendous death. That’s what Jesus says is in store for this man. if he wants to follow him. Of course, that death would unlock the inevitable judgment of God against sinful people like you and I. It would open a way by faith uh to heaven. We don’t know what happened to the man that Jesus said those words to, but Jesus was making it pretty easy for him to say no to being a disciple. Jesus addressed the man’s dependence on faith or or on comfort rather and wealth. The other two men Jesus met again seemed very willing to follow him, but there’s something they have to do first. One wants to go bury his father. The other just wants to go say check in with his family and say goodbye. Both both of those seem perfectly legitimate things to say to Jesus because there’s nothing at all wrong with attending the funeral of your dad or or checking in with your family. But like the first guy whose heart Jesus senses it might be stifled by wealth and comfort. With the next two, Jesus says that something else is always going to come first in their lives. And as a result, they’ll never make following him their first priority. Jesus will always end up in second place. They’ll always be saying, “I’ll put Jesus first one day.” Jesus says here, “We can’t be his disciple if we’re always relegating him to second place.” When Jesus says, “The dead must bury the dead,” really powerful statement. And he’s talking about people obviously who aren’t physically dead. They can’t do any bearing, but people who are spiritually dead. And putting Jesus in second place to any other activity shows we don’t really know what it means yet to follow him. Putting Jesus second, always responding to his call, but saying, “Yeah, but first I need to do this.” It’s not just procrastination. It’s it’s actually a sign of spiritual deadness. It’s a sign that there’s some gang green setting into our spiritual lives. And Jesus then illustrates his point with this agricultural illustration of plowing. No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God. You know, I had to call our resident expert on this, Mel Stickland. I talked to him as he was on his piece of equipment this week. He sold his farm, as you know, as many of you know, to his nephew a number of years back. But once a farmer, always a farmer, apparently. And every spring, Mel goes back down to the Red Deer area to seed, and he returns in the fall to do the harvest. And on plowing a straight line, Mel says that his dad before him had begun to farm right at the end of the horsedrawn plow era. And his dad bought early machinery much smaller than what farmers use today. And Mel says his dad had this uncanny ability to plow a straight furrow. He would fix his eyes on some tree or some hill in the distance and even over the course of maybe half a mile, he would manage to stay straight as an arrow. Mel says uh he himself could never do that. And later, as his machinery became more sophisticated, Mel had his dad, who was now retired, sit with him as Mel plowed a field. And Mel casually flipped the switch to activate the GPS, which automatically steered the machine in a straight line. And his dad just looked at him and said, “Well, you just cheated.” That’s not right. See, Jesus’ point is that trying to plow a straight line, if you’re looking behind you, it’ll cause you soon to veer off course. You’ll hit a rock. You’ll wreck your equipment. Unless you’re a focus, unless you’re watching carefully, Jesus says, “Well, you’re not fit to do the work.” No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God. That Greek word translated fit has the meaning in the New Testament of being useful. And that’s important to know because Jesus isn’t saying that unless you’re totally committed, totally sold out, you’re not qualified to be part of my kingdom. See, that would go against everything Jesus said about salvation. None of us are ever qualified for God’s kingdom or for kingdom work, especially if we try to tie it to our commitment level. We all just get in by grace by trusting in Jesus alone that his work on the cross is fully sufficient. pay the penalty for our sins and bring us into the kingdom of God and give us forgiveness. Jesus is saying about disciplehip though that if there’s always a yes but or a let me do this first. If it’s always uh yeah but uh but I just need to get this done then Jesus is just going to look down the line for the next man or woman in line to do the work of that moment that needs to be done. I think is a bit like a coach looking down the bench pointing to us to go into the game and we say, “Sure, I’d be glad to, but uh first need to run back to the locker room and put my contact lenses in. You know, if I do that, I’m just not useful at the moment and the coach is going to send someone else in instead.” He doesn’t say I can’t be on the team anymore, but I’m not of any use to him at that moment. I’m not fit for service in the kingdom at that moment. So being a disciple of Jesus, if we want to define it, we could use any of the definitions I used earlier or or the simple one. A disciple is a person captured by Jesus and sent into the world. Jesus says to be a disciple means we can’t hold on to some self-manufactured identity as a way of trying to gain the whole world. We’ll only end up losing. much safer to lose our lives in him, let him define who we are, take up a cross, follow him, and then he says we end up gaining everything. And we need not uh we need to be ready to go into the game when he calls our number and not say, “Well, I can’t at the moment. There’s something I need to do first, but I’ll be there eventually.” Last thing this morning, underneath every definition of disciplehip, everything Jesus says about being a disciple is the closely related Latin word of discipline. Disciple and discipline, very close cousins in their etmology. They have the same root. We don’t like that connection very much. We uh we’re all in for being a disciple of Jesus, but the discipline part, is that really necessary? Does that have to be part of it? Well, yes it does. A disciple is a learner, but he or she requires the discipline of instruction in order to make any progress. We could say it this way. A disciple describes the person, but discipline describes the process that forms the person. So the Bible teaches every generation of disciples for the last 2,000 years have understood this that there are certain spiritual disciplines or holy habits that need to be formed and maintained in our lives to develop our skills, keep us ready to go into the game when the coach calls our number. For example, this this is nothing new to us, but all Christians of all ages have agreed to the discipline of the word. The need to read and study and meditate on perhaps memorize the scriptures. Scriptures, the very words of God that are given to us for our growth and for our correction, for our training in righteousness. All Christians of every age have agreed on the necessity of prayer, relating to God through a regular dialogue of communication and setting a aside some time to talk to God and to listen to God with the help of the Holy Spirit. Christian disciplehip always involves what we’re doing this morning. Getting together, having friendships, doing Bible studies, having conversations, worshiping with one another so we sharpen one another and we don’t drift away into isolation. Every one of us has a spiritual gift or gifting that others in the body of Christ need. So we need to rub shoulders regularly just to spread those God-given benefits around. Another spiritual discipline is to just stay sharp and ready to represent Jesus in evangelism in our relationships with the people around us prepared to give an answer for the hope that’s within us. And surely we can’t read the Bible without seeing things like generous giving, serving one another, sacrificial living. It’s all part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, a disciplined disciple. and to add some add to that list. Not all Christians add to that list, but some add a regular practice of fasting or abstaining from food or restricting uh our usual activities and have a having a quiet Sabbath type experience on a regular basis. I know all those disciplines sound like work and it is work. We’d all rather, I think, just have our our disciplehip membership card renewed and mailed to us uh every year without having to do the disciplines. But it just doesn’t work that way. We need the development and the maintenance of holy habits in our lives. I I don’t think the this this term originated with him or this phrase, but speaker Dennis Weightley once said something like this, “Habits begin like cobwebs, but become cables that either shackle or strengthen our lives.” So what he means is that whenever you and I first start doing anything, whether it’s working out or eating differently or watching a TV series or sports gambling, anything we start doing starts out very, very fragile, tenuous. It’s like a cobweb. We could stop doing it tomorrow and it’ll be gone from our lives. All habits begin like that. We can work out for the first week in January, take a few days off, and the habit’s gone. It’s history. So all habits either positive or negative ones, they take on a life of their own only as we keep them going. Some kind of cable develops in our schedule. It’s not going to be easily broken. Might really help us in our lives or it may be the things that thing that holds us back. Habits begin like cobwebs but become cables that either shackle or strengthen our lives. So as disciples, the good news is that if we begin a new spiritual discipline and if we stay at it say for 2 or 3 months, we’ll find that it’s strong. There’s this cable. There’s this thing happening in our lives that’s consistently doing us a lot of good. And even better than that, spiritual disciplines, they’re similar to other disciplines, but they’re also radically different. Regular disciplines like working out or flossing our teeth, they can do us good, but they don’t place us in the presence of the living God like spiritual disciplines do. Spiritual disciplines, they’re never ends in themselves. It’s not just discipline for discipline’s sake. Spiritual disciplines should be thought of, they’re better thought of as habits that place us in this this place of connection. They offer an avenue by which God and his spirit converge with our spirit. You know, three weeks ago, I was up early in the morning in our Airbnb and Jamaica. It was a wonderful holiday. We overlooked the city of Kingston below us and the ocean not very far in the distance. And the mornings were great. They were so quiet as the city began to stir and it good time to do some reading and put on some headphones and listen to some music. And one habit I have, I don’t think it’s a holy habit, but it’s close, is to listen to clips of some new jazz albums. And uh and one American site that I frequented always features a song of the day. And that morning I was idly listening to the song of the day. And most days those songs are in one ear and out the other. But that morning as I was reading and half listening that song kind of climbed into my ear and stayed there and it drew me in. I don’t know something about the saxophone playing or the electric bass. It made me want to look into it further. It arrested my attention. Drew me in. So, I was intrigued enough to check out the album and the song and I didn’t know anything about the artist. I was surprised to learn that although he’s currently studying in Montreal, he’s actually an Edmonton artist. And a little more research and I discovered that this album that I was kind of taken with was recorded a year and a half ago at the Yardbird Suite, just a stones throw away from the church here. I decided to support the artist and buy the album on Band Camp. and I wrote him a short note just saying that I was enjoying his album although it’s a little chagrin that you know I could have been there a year and a half ago to to hear it but I wasn’t also mentioned I have a son Mitch who’s also living in Montreal and within about 5 minutes he wrote back he said oh I’m glad you’re enjoying my music he says I know Mitch you know we were both doing music together in Edmonton years ago and says he often plays with bibo when he comes to Edmonton he’s rehearsed here at Knox church you know maybe I was the guy who let him So, I’m on his mailing list now and I’m pretty sure I’ll I’ll go see him next time he’s in town. But this is a how a small innocuous habit just listening to the song of the day on a jazz website, it led to this serendipitous connection or this unexpected relationship. I think that’s not a bad way to think about spiritual disciplines. I mean, some days it’s like it’s just pure effort. It’s reading the Bible and praying. It’s like digging in hard clay. But then come those times where that clay gives way to something very special and there’s this serendipitous encounter with the Lord and we’re amazed. We almost have to hold back the joy. So I think I think that’s a a good motivator for us to stay involved in our spiritual disciplines. Our task as disciples is toro approach the disciplines not merely as disciplines but as avenues of relationship with our king and our lord the king of the universe. Jesus once told one of his earliest followers in John chapter 1 that if he followed Jesus, he would see heaven open and when he he would see angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man. I think spiritual disciplines, they not only help us become strong and stable and solid disciples of of Jesus, but they also can open up the gates of heaven and allow us to see God and see Christ with new eyes. So, as we read our Bibles and pray and look for evangelistic opportunities, worship with fellow Christians, we’re not going to perceive it every day in the same way. But developing and maintaining holy habits, it does have a way of sneaking up on us and surprising us with joy. So, as people who’ve been captured by Jesus, sent into the world, our call this morning is just to put our hand to the plow and encourage one another to not look back. Let’s take a couple moments of prayer. And here’s some things out of this uh these words in Luke chapter 9 that you might want to pray back to your father in heaven this morning. You might want to ask Jesus to solidify your identity as one who’s been captured by him and sent into the world. Confess to God any things that you know in your life that are maybe relegating him to second place. And pray that you’ll have the discipline to establish and maintain those holy habits that bring you into daily connection with him. This is just your time of prayer with God. The Holy Spirit’s here and he’s uh he’s working in this room. So, let’s take some uh personal time of prayer.