While every disciple is a believer, not every believer is necessarily a disciple.
Many may think that the term disciple refers only to the early followers of Christ.
We know that they were a praying, worshipping, loving, giving, and evangelizing group of men and women who refused to keep the truth of the gospel to themselves.
Yet, God still desires disciples today—ordinary people like you and me whom God can use to do extraordinary things.
The Christian experience of the believers in the first-century church may seem radical to many in the church today, but to those early believers, it was normal Christianity.
And these men and women—empowered and motivated by the Holy Spirit—turned their world upside down for the sake of Christ. In short, they were true disciples of Jesus Christ.
If you are a true disciple, your Christian walk will be challenging and exciting, and you will have a sense of purpose and direction. But if your Christian experience can be described as dull, unfulfilling, and even boring at times, you need to seriously examine the statements Jesus made concerning what it means to be a disciple.
After all, how can we expect to fulfill the Great Commission (Mark 16:15; Matthew 28:19) to go into all the world and make disciples if we don’t even really know what one is? It literally takes one to make one.
A disciple is defined as a learner, a pupil, one who comes to be taught.
The relationship between the disciple and his teacher is not merely that of a student listening to a lecturer, or a passively interested listener.
A disciple listens with attention and intention. He drinks in every word of his teacher, marking every inflection of voice with an intense desire to apply what has been learned.
In Luke 14:25–35, Jesus laid out the tests and requirements of discipleship. Jesus saw a large crowd gathering. He knew that these people believed and accepted His message in principle. Prior to this point, Jesus had shown how the message of the gospel was for everyone.
He had exposed the Pharisees as the religious hypocrites that they were. As a result, He had become enormously popular. Now He wanted to weed out those who were following Him for the wrong reasons.
Some wanted to be dazzled by Jesus’ miracles, while others came looking for a free meal. A few even hoped that He would overthrow Rome and establish God’s kingdom. So Jesus turned to the multitude and preached a sermon that deliberately thinned out the ranks.
Jesus seeks quality over quantity
Jesus makes it clear that when it comes to personal discipleship, He is more interested in quality than quantity. The words He spoke that day are perhaps the most solemn and searching words that ever fell from His lips.
Why would Jesus say such things to all those people who followed Him? It seems that He is intentionally trying to get rid of them. In a sense, He is trying to get rid of at least some of them.
A similar account is found in Judges 7:1–22. There God wanted to give His servant Gideon a victory in battle against the Midianites. But the Lord wanted the glory for the victory. So, through a series of tests, God whittled down Gideon’s original army of 32,000 to 300. God knew that He could do more with 300 alert, committed men than He could with 32,000 half-hearted ones.
Three times in the course of this message in Luke 14, Jesus used the phrase, “cannot be my disciple.” In other words, Jesus was laying out some absolute requirements for discipleship.
“And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.” (Luke 14:27).
“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” (Luke 9:23)
The greatest barrier to discovering all that God has for us is our preoccupation with self. We have become a self-obsessed society—Jesus’ mandate goes against the grain of popular culture. In fact, many in the church today have been advocating that the answer to most of the problems in our society is to build up our self-esteem and feelings of self-worth.
Our self-love versus our sinful nature
The Bible makes it clear that it is not a lack of love for oneself that causes problems in society; it is the obsession with self. In fact, this love of self will be one of the earmarks of the last days, leading to a host of other problems (see 2 Timothy 3:1–5).
Scripture acknowledges the fact that we already love ourselves. Ephesians 5:29 says, “After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it” No, Jesus did not say that we need to love ourselves (we already do that). He told us to deny ourselves. To better understand the significance of this, we must first understand what that means.
The word denial means to repudiate; to disdain; to disown; to forfeit; to totally disregard.
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or you see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.”
What is the positive outcome of denying yourself? Jesus goes on to say,
“For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it” (Luke 9:24). The word for “life” in the original Greek was psuche, meaning “soul life”—literally your will, ambition, goals and desires. When you give that up to allow yourself to be conformed into the image of Jesus, you will discover His plan and purpose for you.
Bearing your cross means dying to oneself
Why did Jesus use this particular illustration? He used a radical symbol to get people’s attention. He was not simply speaking of an individual’s personal problem or obstacle. In that day and age, a person who was bearing a cross was walking to his death.
Bearing your cross means dying to self—laying aside your personal goals, desires and ambitions so that God can reveal His desires, ambitions and goals for your life. In essence, it is living life as it was meant to be lived: in the will of God.
Samuel Rutherford said, “The cross of Christ is the sweetest burden that I ever bore. It is a burden to me such as wings are to a bird or sails are to a ship to carry me forward to my harbor.”
“In every Christian’s heart there is a cross and a throne, and the Christian is on the throne till he puts himself on the cross; if he refuses the cross, he remains on the throne. Perhaps this is at the bottom of the backsliding and worldliness among gospel believers today. We want to be saved, but we insist that Christ do all the dying. No cross for us, no dethronement, no dying. We remain king within the little kingdom of Man’s soul and wear our tinsel crown with all the pride of a Caesar; but we doom ourselves to shadows and weakness and spiritual sterility” (A.W. Tozer).
“So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:33).
To forsake means to surrender your claim to; to say goodbye to.
Until I recognize that everything I have belongs to Jesus Christ, I am not His disciple. Consider Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler who asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17).
“Jesus answered, ‘You know the commandments: Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not testify falsely. Do not cheat. Honor your father and mother.’ ‘Teacher,’ the man replied, ‘I’ve obeyed all these commandments since I was a child.'”
“Jesus felt genuine love for this man as He looked at him. ‘You lack only one thing,’ He told him. ‘Go and sell all you have and give money to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven. Then come, follow me.’ At this, the man’s face fell, and he went sadly away because he had many possessions” (Mark 10:19–22 NLT).
Jesus was not implying that to follow Him, we need to take a vow of poverty. He asked this man to “sell all he had” because He could see that possessions were the god of this man’s life. If something else had been on the “throne of his life,” Jesus would have asked him for that.
“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it” (Luke 14:28).
Jesus underlines the importance of counting the cost of discipleship. Many people make impulse purchases without even considering the cost, or they rush into marriage or a career. Sadly, some do the same in their commitment to follow Christ.
This point is illustrated in Luke 9:57–58: “Now it happened as they journeyed on the road, that someone said to Him, ‘Lord, I will follow You wherever You go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.'”
The man in this story did not even wait to be called. He hastily volunteered. He seemed to have a good heart, but he was impulsive. No doubt he had been watching Jesus with great admiration, and now wanted to walk with Him. But he had not counted the cost!
This man did not know what lay in his future, but Jesus did. By the nature of Jesus’ statement to him, it would appear that this man, in contrast to the one who wanted to avoid friction with family and friends, was too concerned with material things in general. In essence, Jesus was saying to this man (and to all who would be His disciples), “Whatever would dull your desire to serve, quench your hunger for the Word and thirst for prayer, or make the world more attractive must go.”
Jesus is not asking if you will commit 20%, 30%, or 50% to Him. He is asking you to commit everything. Billy Graham has said, “Salvation is free, but discipleship costs everything we have.”
I must pay the price for the sins that I may now cherish.
As a disciple of Christ, I cannot cling to a single sin and pretend that I am following Him. In the place of those sins, I can enjoy walking in fellowship and friendship with God, living a holy and happy life.
I must pay the price of this world’s fellowship.
In other words, I must no longer allow secular and worldly philosophy to color my thinking and living. “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold” (Romans 12:2 Phillips).
As a disciple of Jesus Christ, I must pay the price of this world’s friendship. I will be laughed at for my convictions, mocked for my beliefs, and scorned for trying to live by what the Bible teaches. At the same time, in place of the world’s friendship, I will have God’s.
I must pay the price for the plans of my life.
We all have ideas of what we want to do and who we want to be. These are not evil or wrong. Still, I must be willing to give them up if asked to do so by the Lord. And in the place of those flawed plans, I will have God’s perfect plan for my life.
Yes, there is a cost to discipleship, but what we gain in the place of the things we give up is infinitely better.
It costs to follow Jesus Christ, but it costs more not to. If you are settling for anything short of discipleship, you are missing out.
You love God, and you want to follow Him. Now you have to choose:
Though our numbers as disciples are small, we must press on and stand together. God may purge our ranks, but it is only to make us stronger as we pursue His plan and purpose to make an impact upon our world.
Much of the content on this page was taken from Harvest.org, which is a fantastic resource for people at all stages of the Christian walk.
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