Before ascending into heaven, Jesus told his disciples to go and to teach people of all nations what Jesus had taught them (King James Version, Matthew 28:18-20). This process is commonly called discipleship. How to go about doing it correctly is laid out in Matthew 5:13-7:29, as well as in John chapter 3. Discipleship can be broken down into its guiding principles, how one witnesses to others, how one lives out their lives for others to see, how one interacts with the world at large, and leaving a legacy of discipleship for future generations to consult.
The guiding principles of discipleship can be found in the Sermon on the Mount. The first principle of discipleship, according to the text, seems to be remaining conspicuous for the good deeds one performs (Matthew 5:14). The teacher intent on making disciples must be righteous, or living an authentic piety (Matthew 5:17-20). Someone teaching Christianity must not only obey the commandments of the law, but also the Spirit in which they were written, neither being angry over minutia with his or her fellow Christians, nor lusting after women other than their wives, nor divorcing unless there is no other option, not even swearing an oath or getting revenge on someone who wronged them—in short, the teacher is to mirror God’s perfection in his or her own life as much as humanly possible (Matthew 5:48).
Most of all, teachers are to be motivated by God’s glory and not by the adulation of their peers. In Matthew 6, Jesus warns against doing good deeds to be seen, stating that those who do so have already been rewarded with the attention of others, and therefore God has no need to reward them (Matthew 6:1, 6:5, 6:16). Instead, good deeds are to be done, and they can be done in public, with a spirit of charity towards others and not caring about the opinions of lookers-on. One is to fast, pray, and do good works for their own sakes, and not to be noticed. Jesus wants people worshipping God, not themselves.
The metaphor Christ uses for this is found in Matthew 5:13, where he says, “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” Salt is a powerful commodity, and a preservative, turning meat into jerky. It is an interesting metaphor to use, because the purpose of salt could be to add flavor, to preserve meat, to increase feeling and dry out infections (salting wounds), etc. In other words, the disciple-maker is to be eminently useful, able to enrich, heal, and keep his or her charge spiritually alive through periods of doubt.
One’s witness, then, has a purpose. That witness is to enrich belief, heal those with spiritual and emotional hurts, and to help troubled believers endure. Jesus states that as a result, those who would make disciples need to live their faith out proudly (Matthew 5:16), but for God’s glory and not their own (Matthew 6:1). Authentic living is an additional necessity to give veracity to one’s witness. If someone claims to be a Christian and yet doesn’t live like it, lacking grace and forgiveness when he or she should have both in abundance and ready to use for bringing people closer to God, especially young believers, than he or she has “lost his [or her] savour” (Matthew 5:13). At which point, he or she is doing the faith more harm than good, and is to be thrown out of the Church; at least then, when nonbelievers look at the excommunicated person, they would see that neither God nor His Church is willing to put up with someone actively poisoning the minds of people against them, especially under the auspices of teaching others to follow Christ.
So if followers of Christ are to witness effectively to others, they are to be as strong a reflection of God as they can be, they are to make people’s lives better via their witness, and they are to live authentically. With all this moral high ground occupied and defended, what happens when one trying to witness sees someone doing wrong? “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1). The Christian, then, is to forego condemning non-believers, and is instead to show them the same mercy God provided him or her at the time of his or her conversion. As Paul, who was one of the most effective missionaries at making disciples, once said:
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting. (1 Timothy 1:15-16).
The Christian, therefore, is to remember that he or she is not superior to the non-believers they encounter. In fact, acknowledging one’s own sinful past is a necessity, and is helpful in keeping one’s humility when others cannot help but give the offender a piece of their mind. If Paul, one of the great Fathers of the Church, calls himself the chief sinner, then no one else in the Church has the right to feel smug about their own relative purity. When trying to walk the walk in terms of faith, the Christian has to remain humble and compassionate in order to demonstrate Christ’s love to others.
That said, the Christian attempting to disciple young believers needs to keep in mind that the world will not always be understanding of them, which may lead to dejection (Matthew 7:13-14); that there are those who would try to divert people from the faith down the wrong road, into heresy (Matthew 7:15-20), and that there are those who would do many good deeds, only to find out in the end that their reliance on doing great works of charity was not enough to get them into heaven (Matthew 7:21-23). These pressures, internal and external, are still here in the world, and they put real pressure on the authentic Christian, whose attempts at discipleship and authentic living may put them on the wrong side of office politics, or ostracize them from their family, or worse. However, Jesus assures his followers that by putting his teaching into practice, that they will be able to persevere through those pressures (Matthew 7:24-25).
Such perseverance can leave a legacy of faith to those who come afterward. John the Baptist is one such figure with a legacy of faithfulness. In John 3:22-36, he testifies to Jesus’s being the Messiah that the Jews had been looking forward to. When one of his own disciples complains that Jesus is siphoning off some of the crowds that used to come to hear John speak and then be baptized, John replies that he had been waiting for Jesus to come and begin his ministry, calling his own joy “fulfilled” (John 3:29). And so he himself stepped back and affirmed Jesus as the Messiah, encouraging his disciples to do the same (John 3:31-36).
Discipleship, therefore, has certain key ingredients. Among these are a certain set of guiding principles, authentic living, effective testimony, staying humble and showing mercy to others, and persevering through difficult times, in order to leave a legacy of discipleship that inspires future adherents. For the Christian that does that, he or she can truly live out the Great Commission.
Works Cited
The Holy Bible: King James Version. Bible Gateway. 1 Jan 2016. Web. 15 Feb 2016.
