For this was how the promise was stated: “At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.”–Romans 9:9

If there is one thing that is for sure, it is that God makes promises. He gives us promises so we can rest our hope upon them. His promises give us something to look forward to. They give us reasons to press on when we otherwise would give up. They inspire us to reach higher, try harder, and dig deeper.

However, we must always be aware that God’s promises also carry with them great peril. That peril isn’t ever the risk from outside factors that always accompany following God. Those risks are rarely as fearsome as we make them out to be, and never bigger than the God who calls on us to take them. No, the greatest danger in God’s promises is that we pursue them so devotedly, so passionately, and so single-mindedly that they become
the object of our pursuit.

That’s what happened to Abraham. God promised him a son. Abraham waited…and no son. So he came up with a plan. Instead of having a son with his wife, he had one with his wife’s servant.

Let’s not judge Abraham too quickly or harshly. After all God gave him the promise. Abraham was only helping God do what God already said would happen.

We all do that, don’t we? We all have an idea for what God wants to do for us, but when we wait too long we figure we need to help God out. We justify it by thinking, “Perhaps God’s called me to do this,” or “Maybe this is how God planned to fulfill His promise all along.” But here’s the rub: when we “help God out” we aren’t helping because God doesn’t need our help to fulfill His promises to us. God never calls us to cross over from doing our part to doing His part.

When God promises, He always gives us enough information to know which part is His and which part is ours. God didn’t only promise Abraham a son, he said it would happen “at the appointed time.” God has a “when” in mind. God’s promises are only ever fulfilled when God wants. Not when we want. Every time we try to make them happen faster we get less-than God desires.

He said, “I will return.” God has a “who” in mind. God’s promises are never fulfilled outside His presence.

And He said, “Sarah will have a son.” God has a “how” in mind. God always sets up His promises so that we know He made it happen. Abraham and Sarah were both older than dirt. But men carry the biological capability of conceiving children right up to the day they die. Women do not. It was nothing special that Abraham could have a child. But for a woman Sarah’s age it was impossible. Only God could make that happen.

Here’s the bottom line: In this instance, Abraham pursued the promise when He should have been pursuing God. God’s promises are great! Chase after His promises, but make that secondary to the pursuit of the Promise Giver.

That means that some of our disciples will be people who do not yet know God, or Jesus, or the Bible at all. So the question is, “Do we disciple unbelievers differently than we do believers?”

We can’t really answer that question until we answer another question, which is: what is the goal of discipleship?

Shortly after Jesus had died on the cross and risen from the dead, He pulled His closest followers aside and gave them their marching orders. Jesus 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 have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Did you catch that? Jesus is the only guy in history to get up from the grave on His own power and start walking around. He then says all authority in all creation has been given to Him. Where does that authority come from? It comes from the very fact that He’s walking around instead of rotting in a cave somewhere. He has just beaten death, do you think He has the authority to tell us what our life mission should be? You bet.

That authority that He has puts a tremendous amount of weight on Jesus’ next words. You see, if Jesus has all authority, that means he pretty much rules all creation. What He says goes. And the fact that He points out His authority right before giving us this command should tell us He means business in what He is about to say. He is serious about it, so we should be equally serious.

So what does He tell us to do? Make disciples. How do we do that? Three things:

1. Baptise them. That’s identification with Christ.
2. Teach them to obey. That’s imitation of Christ
3. Teach them that Jesus is always with us. That’s intimacy with Christ.

That’s how we make disciples. Now let’s get back to our original question. Is discipling an unbeliever any different that a believer? If discipleship is leading people to be baptised, teaching them to obey Christ, and developing a minute-by-minute dependence on Him, then aren’t these all things we need to model and encourage no matter what a person’s spiritual state is?

See, we get caught up on the “pray-the-prayer” and be saved thing. We want people to make a big decision for Christ. But what discipleship is really about is helping people make incremental spiritual steps toward what God originally intended for them, which is an authentic relationship with Him. And the best way to teach others on how to do that is to live out a continually growing relationship with Jesus and invite them to follow.

That means the most important ingredients to any discipleship relationship aren’t knowledge and expertise, but love and time. Sure, biblical knowledge is essential. But helping someone gain biblical knowledge makes a student, not a disciple. Discipleship is about pouring your life into another person intentionally and lovingly in such a way as when you have left that person he or she is a bit closer to Christ than before. That’s something you can do with anyone–believer, or non.

But as we look through the Bible, we see that Jesus never looked at discipleship as a task to be accomplished. Instead, He lived a lifestyle of discipleship.

Surely, there were times that Jesus set aside for His closest followers, and He used those times to intentionally disciple them. But Jesus was also a master at turning every interruption and every circumstance into a discipleship moment. That meant at any moment, any one who was within hearing distance of Jesus was a potential disciple.

Think about it. In John 4, we have the picture of the woman at the well. She went there to get a bucket of water and she left with a soul full of living water. She wanted to know what mountain to worship on, and left knowing it was more important to worship in spirit and truth. In short, she came to the well with one way of thinking and left with another–and that change of thinking changed her life. Jesus had never encountered her before and in one conversation she became His disciple.

The woman at the well wasn’t the only time Jesus did this. There was the rich young ruler who wanted eternal life. There was the blind man in John 9. There were the children who wanted to see Jesus. The examples are countless.

See, Jesus never set aside a time and place to disciple. Instead, He discipled where He was, with anyone and everyone He was with. For Jesus, discipleship wasn’t a task, it was a lifestyle. Every where He went was the place for disdcipleship. Everyone He met was a disciple. Every encounter was a discipleship moment.

Here is what this means to us. Yes, we need to be intentional about discipleship. Being intentional does mean setting aside a time and place in which we focus on how to apply God’s Word to our own life and that of another person. Jesus did that with His apostles. But it doesn’t mean that is the only time we are to disciple someone. To the contrary, we need to live a lifestyle of discipleship. That means everyone we encounter is a potential disciple.

What about those who don’t believe in God or Jesus? Yep, they’re potential disciples too. See, most of those Jesus discipled in the moment weren’t believers either. If everyone is a potential disciple (believers and nonbelievers) then the false tension that we create between evangelism and discipleship completely disappears.

This brings up a question: Is there a difference in how we disciple an unbeliever and a believer? We’ll look at that in part three.

In the classic church there has been a tension between discipleship and evangelism. Evangelism and discipleship seem to war at each other because they each have opposite targets in mind. Evangelism targets the unbeliever, so we need to be more “seeker sensitive” in order to be effective evangelists. On the other hand, discipleship is aimed at the believer who has sensed a need for spiritual growth. “Seeker sensitive” suddenly becomes a hinderence to “going deeper” in God’s Word.

Yet, I am coming to the conclusion (actually I think I have already arrived) that the tension we feel between evangelism and discipleship is a false one brought about by our own inadequate understanding of what Biblical discipleship really is. If we could re-capture a Biblical model of discipleship, I think we would find this tension to be a figment of our frenzied imaginations.

There are two main mistakes the Western Church has made in the past two hundred or so years. The first is that it has believed that its main mission is to convert as many people as possible into believers. The second is that it has spent much too much energy and effort educating Biblical students. The problem is that the Bible never tells us to do either of these things.

If we make converting people into believers our main mission we miss the mark. Biblically Jesus told us to “make disciples,” not believers. The problem with “believers” is that belief alone never translates into a Christ-like life. Each of us needs models to follow. These models cannot only be dusty, old, dead people from the pages of the Bible. Certainly the examples of people like Joseph, Daniel, and Elijah are great, but if you are like me (human, that is) you need a concrete living example of what it looks like to live a life that is fully surrendered to Christ. Getting people to “pray the prayer” just won’t do that. As a matter of fact, you can search the whole Bible and not find one example of a person who prayed the “sinner’s prayer.” You can’t find it because no one did it. People were exposed to Christ’s followers. They believed or they didn’t believe. Those that believed got baptized. Those that were baptized were discipled. It was that simple.

But discipleship isn’t some study program either. When we approach discipleship as an educational process (can you name all the books of the Bible in order?) we miss the mark altogether again. That’s because discipleship is about transforming lives, not transfering information. A process of information transfer doesn’t produce Christ-like lives either. Instead, it produces cocky, self-assured attitudes.

The Biblical model of discipleship isn’t about getting people to be believers and it isn’t about filling people up with information. Back in Jesus’ day a disciple had just one goal: to become just like his master. That must be the number one goal of discipleship today as well. If we are going to be, and more importantly if we are going to build disciples then the goal of that discipleship is to act, breathe, think, love, and live like Jesus. In other words, the measure of discipleship won’t be about how far we get through a set of material that we have been assigned. It won’t be about answering a list of Bible questions correctly. Instead it will be about how well we love God and love others. It will be about how effectively we serve others. It will be about developing humility in ourselves and confidence in Christ.

Now how does this happen? Stay tuned…