Page 53 - Discipleship Ministries Student E-Book

Study Section 6: The Process of Discipleship

“Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient
believes.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

6.1 Connect

You might say, “Boy, I wish I had a disciple.” Well, the answer to the problem is that you must
go out and get one! Christ commands us to go and share the Gospel with the lost. If you
actively do that, someone most certainly will believe. Presto! You now have a disciple.

The key to making disciples is to win lost people to Christ. Evangelism is the starting point. As we bring
lost people to understand what Christ has done for them, and they received the gift of eternal life, they
are ready to be discipled. We are to teach them the ways of Christ. It is a process. Step by step, we
help them understand how to grow in Christ through reading the Bible, through prayer, through
personal fellowship with other believers, and through sharing their new faith with their friends and
neighbors. We help them grow up. That’s what discipleship is all about.

It all starts with step one: sharing your faith with others so they can become a disciple of Christ. Today,
we are going to look further into how to share our faith.

6.2 Objectives

1. The student should be able to define the Great Commission with an emphasis of “Having
gone.”

2. The student should be able to describe the basic ingredients of the Gospel.

3. The student should be able to clarify the traits in a person’s life the demonstrate genuine faith.

6.3 Evangelism

Discipleship begins with evangelism. A person cannot be a disciple of Christ until he come
into a relationship with him through the salvation experience. So, to make disciples, it is
obvious that you first must win someone to Christ before you can disciple him.

“Having Gone.”

Matthew 28 is our marching orders for disciple making. An exact rendering of verse 19 in Greek is:
“Having gone, therefore disciple all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit.” It is assumed that the disciple will go somewhere. He will live his life on earth
until Christ takes him home. Another way of saying, “having gone” would be “in the course of life” or
“while you are going through life.”

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