Faithbase

Hello and welcome to Thinking About the Bible and today we are thinking about the term disciple. All of us who confess Jesus as Lord are disciples. We're supposed to be disciples. We might be a poor disciple or it might be a good disciple, but a disciple is someone who is a follower, a learner from the teaching of a master. And one of the scriptures that always comes back to me when I think about this is Jesus at the end of his Sermon on the Mount says, You call me Lord, Lord, but you don't do what I say. I'll show you what it's like for someone who hears my teaching and follows it. And then he gives us the analogy of someone who builds their house on a solid foundation so that when the storms come that house remains standing. Those who call Jesus Lord but don't do what he says, when that house, that life of course, it was what the house represents, is built without a foundation. And so when the storms in life come, their house, their life is destroyed. So a disciple is someone who not only hears the teaching of the master but puts it into practice. And Jesus said that his true disciples will experience much the same thing that he did. He says the disciple is not above his master and so we should expect to experience some of the same persecution that Jesus did. Now that ties in with what I just said about being a disciple who not only hears the teaching of the master but obeys it. And if we do that, when we experience the persecution, the same type of persecution or something akin to the persecution that Jesus did, we'll be able to make our way through it. So I want to encourage you today, this is a very simple concept, that if we're going to call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ, we need to truly be followers of Jesus. And one of the issues there is to know Jesus, to know his word, so that we can put his teaching into practice in our lives, so that we can learn what he says as a disciple and live it out. And that's what a disciple does. So again, all of us who have confessed Jesus as Lord, who believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, all of us who have been brought into fellowship with God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, all of us who have had our sins washed away by the blood of that perfect sacrifice, our Lord Jesus, we are his disciples. And we can be good disciples who obey him, learn from him and obey him, or we can be poor disciples who hear the teaching but never put it into practice. So that's what I want you to think about today, how you can be a good solid disciple for our Lord Jesus Christ. And God bless you in that endeavor. We'll see you again tomorrow.