Simon Cayzer
Making disciples happens life-to-life because so many things are caught rather than taught. The essential elements of life-to-life discipleship are relationships, the Bible, and prayer.
Relationships
Jesus called his disciples to “be with him, and that he might send them out to preach” (Mark 3:14). Alongside a clear purpose for discipleship, Jesus shows us how he made disciples. Jesus did not confine the disciple’s learning to a classroom environment. They saw him in everyday life, and he invited them to be part of the work he was doing in the streets, in homes, in rural areas, at synagogues, at banquets, and at funerals and weddings.
What does this mean for our disciple making? It asks us to go beyond meeting weekly or fortnightly in a café and allow people to see us follow Jesus in our homes, at work, and in our social lives. We are to involve them with our friends, get to know their friends, share honestly from our lives, and allow people to see our struggles and our victories.
The Bible
In John 17, Jesus says he gave the disciples the words his Father gave him—words and truth that transformed them. Reading the Bible together is a key part of life-to-life discipleship. We want those we disciple to experience the Bible as their essential spiritual food. This means helping people develop a regular pattern of engaging with God in the Bible.
The Bible should also be our primary source of insight to address the questions and issues we face in life. Instead of going online to find answers, encourage people to see what the Bible says first. Go to the Bible together as fellow learners and ask questions to help your friends discover the meaning of Bible passages for themselves. The Navigator Backpack is a great discipleship resource to help us be in the Bible together—it is available under resources at navigators.org.nz.
Prayer
Paul and his colleagues prayed night and day for the opportunity to visit believers and provide what was needed in their faith (1 Thes 3:10). We read in the Gospels that Jesus often withdrew to pray (Luke 5:16) and that he prayed with the disciples, teaching them how to pray (Luke 11:1-13). Praying together with people, and praying often for them, is an essential part of our life-to-life discipleship. Ask God for wisdom and discernment on what our friend needs most and how you can help.
God is the one who creates growth and transforms people’s lives (1 Cor 3:6-7, 2 Cor 3:18). There are many things that only God can do in a person’s life, which is one of the reasons there are many prayers in the New Testament—prayers that we can pray for the people we are discipling.
Read the following prayers, memorise them and others. They will help us pray anywhere and anytime for the people we are discipling:
Ephesians 1:15 – 19
For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.
Ephesians 3:16 – 20
I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,
Colossians 1:9 – 12
For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.
John 17:20 – 26
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me, and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one –I in them and you in me – so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
‘Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
‘Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.’
(This article was inspired by an article written by Lynton Brocklehurst in the New Zealand Navigator in June 1991.)