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How Is Discipleship Done?

The word discipleship cannot be found in the Bible. This word is unclear in English. It will mean discipleship with the sense of a personal pattern of following Christ, trusting him and realizing from him. That’s discipleship. It will mean that. Or this will mean an activity of helping other people be disciples in a sense of learning and growing from him.

“People needed to become Christians, people needed to be taught about how to feel and think and act as one real Christian. That is being a disciple.”    

The next meaning is to help other people. It has a verb in the Greek New Testament: to make disciples. It will mean preaching the gospel so people will be converted to Jesus and became Christians and, therefore, disciples. An example in Acts 14:21 that states, “When they had spoken of the gospel to a city and created many disciples, they will go back to Iconium and Lystra.” So that “will make disciples” is a Greek word there, that means “to have them transformed to Jesus.” That’s what it meant.

Or when it will mean the entire procedure of baptism, teaching and conversion of the ways of Christ as it can be read in Matthew 28 up to 19–20: “Go therefore & make disciples.” And here’s what he meant. “Baptizing them in our Father’s name, and the Son and also the Holy Spirit, and teaching to them to watch all that has been commanded you.”

It is a really long procedure which is like the lifetime process. So take them converted. Baptizing in them and spending a lifetime educating them to obey everything that Jesus said. It is what the word “disciple” in this New Testament would contain.

Second-Stage Christian

The disciple word in our New Testament doesn’t mean the second-stage Christian. There had been some ministries which are built about this distinction that’s just so unbiblical, since there were converts, and then there had been disciples who are the little stage-2 Christians who discover more, and also, there are disciple maker.

Now every grouping is linguistically foreign to the New Testament. The disciple in the New Testament is merely a Christian: “In Antioch the disciple is first named as Christians” in (Acts 11:26). Everyone that had been converted to Christ was a disciple. Everyone that was changed to Christ was a Christian.

It seems that disciple was not the most preferred word for Christian at the time went on. Paul never used this word, even as a verb or a noun. The truth is, neither the verb nor the noun disciple makes disciples occurs in anywhere in either the New Testament that is outside the Acts or the Gospels.

And so it is believed that, what is essential is not this terminology, but a reality. People needed to be Christians and the people had to be taught about how to feel and think and act as Christians. That is the disciple, Jesus follower, one who embraced him as Savior and Treasure and the Lord.

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