Does Your Discipleship Produce Apostles and Prophets?
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What does the church with a similar venture do? It gets the best. Expectedly, it gets those with bible school and seminary degrees, even doctorate degrees. It's a serious and major task so the church gets nothing less. Most preferably, people selected should have a position--director of this and that, superintendent, bishop, etc. If not, they undergo rigid training, schooling or seminars in the best bible institutions.
But what does God do?
When Jesus was about to start his important mission--save the world, a big task, nothing like it in all of world history--he chose "ordinary, unschooled men" said Acts 4.13, and put them in a discipleship--not a university or prestigious seminary or bible school. A discipleship. You get that? A mere discipleship. He was to train men who were to be apostles (not just bishops or superintendents), and he just put them in a simple discipleship. They were to lead the church worldwide to spread the Gospel and plant churches everywhere.
With such a huge, serious task, God thought a discipleship was the right thing for them. No seminaries or anything like that. He didn't proceed to build them either. Churches today spend millions building them, but Jesus thought discipleship was more than enough. You see how powerful his discipleship is? It's important to see this. Discipleship is God's way. Schools aren't. To God's mind, attending classes and lectures under professors and taking exams and passing them to get good grades isn't the way to train for ministry.
But churches today see discipleship as some mini-program for "basic" training. If you want the real stuff, they tell you to enroll in a bible school or seminary. They think bible school and seminary are higher stages. If you see discipleship this way--just a tool for "basics"--you've lost it totally. It's not what God has in mind. Discipleship is where you train people for major, serious (real) ministries like apostolic and prophetic tasks. For evangelism, missions, doctrine and signs and wonders. That's genuine discipleship. Do you have that discipleship in church?
It should be Jesus' discipleship--exactly what he did in the bible--not just any discipleship. Definitely not a discipleship where you just study the bible together. Some even use bible study materials and call it discipleship. That's nothing but group bible study. Genuine discipleship is where LIFE impartation happens--the LIFE of Jesus in the discipler gets imparted to the disciples. It's life transfer so the LIFE of Jesus propagates.
A real discipleship has tremendous power. Bible school and seminary are nothing compared to it. Bible schools and seminaries do not produce apostles and prophets. Jesus' discipleship did. It's not where you do thesis and earn degrees in masters and doctorate. Jesus didn't have any of that. The important thing is you get Jesus' spiritual DNA. Jesus is formed in you (Gal.4.19). It's no longer you who live but Jesus (Gal. 2.20). Grades are nothing. Being valedictorian or salutatorian is zero. These things do not give us power for ministry.
Jesus was talking to his disciples when he said, "The secrets of the Kingdom have been given to you. But not to them." You see the power in a real discipleship? God lends supernatural power to it so that disciples possess the secrets of the Kingdom, the powers of the age to come. Hebrews 6 talks about this and hints at "tasting" the goodness of the Word. Like Kingdom secrets, the powers of the age to come is through tasting the Word--or eating. Taste has to do with eating. And Jesus said we have to "eat" his flesh or else we have no life in us.
Jesus is the Word of God. We eat the Word. We eat Jesus. To eat Jesus means to "live on" Jesus (John 6.57). This is what takes place in a real discipleship. Even in spiritual fathering. It's about the LIFE. The Jesus LIFE.
Unless you are in a real Jesus Discipleship, the secrets of the Kingdom won't be given to you. When you read or study the bible, all you get are parables. You cannot go past human theology, hermenuetics and homiletics. You're stuck with powerless (and often misleading) human wisdom so that all you get is the letter of the word. The written code. The letter kills, says Paul. It's the Spirit who gives life. You don't get any supernatural revelation outside of the Spirit--you even laugh at any notion of this.
Bible schools and seminaries--because they are of man and uses the world's sytem--will give you nothing but the letter of the word, not the Spirit. If you want the things of the Spirit, be part of a Jesus discipleship. It will train you in the deeper dimensions of the Spirit, like apostolic and prophetic teachings. Nope, you do not become an apostle or prophet. But you get the Jesus spiritual DNA. And that's all that matters.
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