A super-duper, disciple-making story.
Hi, welcome to today's little lesson.
Thanks so much for joining me.
If you're a regular viewer, you know, we've been talking about discipleship, and being
a disciple, and making disciples, something that Jesus expects of all of his true followers
and believers.
It's not that we're just supposed to believe in Jesus and then attend church and maybe
invite other people to church.
No.
We're supposed to be not only believing in Jesus, following and obeying Jesus, and sharing
what we know with others about Jesus, and making disciples.
We've covered a number of real simple, basic concepts.
But I wanted to share on today's little lesson a story about someone who applied these very
simple principles some years ago, and was extremely successful in seeing a movement
launch, that was a movement that resulted in multiple generations of disciples that
continues to this very day.
I heard this straight from the lips of the person who experienced it firsthand.
His name is Curtis Sergeant.
He and his wife Debie, went to China in the early 1990s to Hainan Island off the southern
coast of China.
It was a province of people who spoke Hainanese, and it wasn't even a written language.
They're very backward folk, very primitive folk by modern standards, and an unreached
people group, just maybe no more than a hundred believers amongst a population of almost 7
million Hainanese.
So, Curtis and his wife started trying to share the gospel as southern Baptist missionaries.
Curtis ran into the typical roadblocks and hurdles that missionaries you run into, and
it dawned on him that if he won one person to the Lord every day, by the time that he
retired, there would be only so many people who are Christians, and it wouldn't even keep
up with population growth.
That is, winning one person a day, by the time he retired in 30 some years, Christians
would be a smaller part of the population percentage-wise than they were when he started.
So he realized, "I have to do something to multiply.
I have to plant churches, that will plant churches, that will plant churches."
And that's exactly what he set out to do.
He erased all of the typical hurdles of having only trained clergy, professionals be leaders.
He tried to train everyone to be a leader, because every Christian can be a leader and
can lead other people to Jesus Christ.
And, every Christian could also disciple other Christians, because if you know more than
somebody else, well you can share it.
Okay?
We do that all the time on many other levels and different realms in our secular lives.
All right?
So, he began making disciples, who teaching them to make disciples who then in turn would
teach their disciples to make disciples.
Within a few years, they had thousands of believers.
Curtis, I think, only ever knew maybe about 60 of them all together.
Realize this is communist China.
And so, things are underground and secretive and clandestine.
You know?
They're not building church buildings.
They're not doing stuff out in the open because it's all illegal.
So, he and his wife were able to leave then after just a few years.
That movement has continued today to where there's almost 1 million people in Hainan
Province in China who can trace their spiritual legacy back to this one missionary couple.
Isn't that astounding?
Now what if we all were able to do that?
Well, we might not be able to do it to the extent that Curtis and Debie Sergeant did
it, because they were amongst an unreached people group and there wasn't a lot of Christian
religious inertia against what they were doing.
Of course, there were obstacles, and hurdles, and roadblocks, and resistance on other levels,
but let's face it, the harvest is riper in some places of the world than it is in other
places of the world.
For example, here in the United States of America where I happen to live, Christian
religion has had a building inertia since before it was even a nation.
In many traditional forms and fashions, it exists today, and so people aren't open to
the idea of, in many cases, simple faith in Jesus Christ that results in obedience to
His commandments, which then means I'm a disciple who's trying to make disciples.
We can do that outside of the context of all the things that a lot of folks think are absolutely
essential to Christianity, which of course you can't find them anywhere in the book of
Acts.
Things like buildings, and programs, and staff, and salaries, and all that kind of stuff that
actually slows down, in many ways, the process of disciple making because there's so many
other things that people are pursuing.
Buildings, and programs, and staff, and so on and so forth.
When making disciples becomes your singular goal, and you realize that, "I can do that
anywhere, anytime.
I don't need a building.
We don't need a seminary-trained professional, a Bible school graduate."
No.
If I know Jesus, if I believe in Jesus, I can tell someone else how to believe in Jesus.
I can tell them what it means to be born again.
If I'm following Jesus endeavoring to obey his commandments, I can tell someone else
how to do that.
I could show them some scriptures and I could give them a Bible.
They can find out themselves.
They can become self-feeders.
All right?
So, this is a super-duper disciple-making story of what happened to Curtis and Debie
Sergeant in Hainan Province, Hainan island in China.
But you can be an ongoing continuation of that story by looking around and asking God
to open your eyes.
"Lord, who can I disciple?
Are there unbelievers around me that I could lead to Jesus?
That I could tell them what God has done for me.
Tell them my story of how I came to the Lord, and how I'm different now.
Are there believers around me who are really baby Christians, or they're missing some pieces
that maybe I could fill in to their jigsaw puzzle, and help them to grow and become more
like Jesus."
All right?
Now of course, you first will have to examine yourself.
"Am I a disciple.
Am I a disciple worth multiplying?
Does God want more of this?
This person.
Is that what God wants?"
God wants some more of people like me.
And if you look at yourself and you come up with a negative answer on that, well, then
the first thing to fix yourself, and thank God through the power of the Holy Spirit,
you can be fixed.
Praise God.
Okay?
So, that's a super-duper disciple-making story that I couldn't resist sharing with you.
Hope to see you next time.
God bless you.