By: Raymond Billy
For the previous year, I have been a discipleship overseer for Youth With A Mission, an organization dedicated to spiritual mentorship, ministry training, evangelism and humanitarian work. In some ways, I might seem an unlikely candidate to participate in discipleship ministry. Not only am I naturally an introvert (meaning I appreciate lengthy periods of solitude) but I’m also a curmudgeon (meaning I’m a no-nonsense kind of person. Given the fact that humans are often nonsensical, no one would ever be discipled — myself included — if the world were only populated by diehard curmudgeons).
Despite the ostensive incongruity of me being a discipler, I do it mainly for this reason: I love the Truth. I’m not just talking about the idea of the Truth as written on the pages of Scripture. I’m talking about the Truth incarnate — that is, manifested in people’s lives in a manner that demonstrates its self-evident supremacy versus competing world views.When you love something, you usually want to see it proliferate. If you love roses, you would probably enjoy having an entire garden full of them. If you love rain, it might be a good idea for you to move to Seattle, Chicago or someplace else where you would have the opportunity to be soaked by it all of the time. If you love the Truth — that is, the truth about God’s virtues, His nature, His favors and His warnings — the only way for it to exist in abundance is for as many people to live by it as possible. That’s why I disciple (that, and the fact that I’m annoyed to see so many Christians living nonsensically or contrary to the Truth. I guess that’s how my curmudgeonness actually drives me toward discipleship ministry instead of away from it).
The ministry of discipleship is easily the most important thing I’ve done during my 30-year lifetime. Obviously I’m still being discipled myself. No one ever graduates from the process until God has made them perfectly like Jesus. The beauty of discipleship is that everyone gets to participate by helping elevate people less far along in the process than they are. It is my privilege to be able to do this full-time as a vocation. A foundational question that drives my interactions with discipleship students is this: What do I know about God that He also wants them to learn right now? Put differently, how can I help students work through the barriers that hinder them from increasingly enjoying their lives with God? This is a joyous ministry. Yet it is not without hardships.
Hardships come for this reason: I am a sinful person. When you take on the role of a discipler, you don’t all of a sudden become supernaturally perfect. You still have to confront your own sins. That process can at times be emotionally taxing. The emotional toll is compounded by the fact that as a discipler, you are charged with the task of confronting other people’s sins too. Most people, for understandable reasons, don’t like confrontation. They won’t confront someone’s sin unless it directly affects them. In discipleship ministry, we must fulfill the Levitical command to “rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.” In fact, the preceding statement in Leviticus says “do not hate your brother in your heart,” suggesting that not confronting someone about personal sin is hateful. That, of course, is because sin is self-destructive. Why would you stand by and let someone be destroyed if you loved that person?
The pitfall of a sinful person confronting another sinful person about the other’s faults is that we are prone to making much of someone else’s sin and little of our own. You must be very careful, and prayerful, about when and how sternly to confront someone about their sins. All of this can be quite exhausting and sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth the commitment — especially when it’s difficult to tell whether my efforts are making any difference. But this is when I have to be humble and rest my hopes on the potency of God’s Truth (and the ability of His Spirit to apply it to the hearts and minds of discipleship students) rather than on my competence as a discipler. As long as I am faithful to minister God’s Truth and don’t do anything to obscure His message, God promises that His word won’t return void. I take solace in the words of the Lord, who compared the sharing of his Truth to a farmer planting seeds.
“This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.” As long as those who I’m discipling have open hearts and I’m faithful to administer Truth to them, that Truth will bring results, not me.
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