The most important thing we need to know as Christians. A thread:

The most important thing is the concept of discipleship. It hadn't stricken me so much until God began to unveil it to me: The Great Commission ISN'T evangelism. Evangelism is the means to fulfill the

Great Commission. The Great Commission is actually to MAKE DISCIPLES of all nations. Matthew 28:18-20. The actual mission here was to make disciples, not church members. Now who is a disciple? A disciple is someone who has devoted their whole lives to understudy and follow in the

footsteps of Jesus to be transformed into His image and likeness. The plan of God from the beginning was for us to be conformed to the image of His son (Romans 8:29). Jesus came as an archetype of how the Christian walk should be. (2 Timothy 2:2; 1 John 2:6). So if we are not

conformed to the image of Christ, let's be rest assured we cannot walk in the fulness of God's purpose and intent for our lives. Now why discipleship? 3 Major reasons:

1. It is the fastest and most effective way for the Gospel to reach the ends of the earth. Let's look at a certain scenario. Imagine you had Person A, a wonderful evangelist who was winning 30 million souls every year. And person B, a disciple maker who was focused on making one

disciple a year and making that disciple into a disciple-maker who would also make one disciple a year. In this case, Person A wins 100 million souls a year. Person B however wins only 1 soul a year, but person B teaches, prays and trains that soul for one year. Person A sees a

linear growth while person B will see an exponential growth. At the end of 40 years, Person A would have won 1.2billion souls, and Person B would have won... Guess what? About 1.1 Quadrillion souls!!! That's already way more than the population of the earth!

2. Discipleship ensures that an individual is planted in Christ. It is a very dangerous thing to lead someone to Christ and leave them to fend for themselves in the early stages of their faith. It can, in some cases, be better if they were not evangelized to at all. Many of us

can attest to the confusion and lack of direction we had (and even still do) on how to grow in Christ and walk with God, because no proper foundation was laid for us. Because of this, we tend to really struggle with a lot of fundamental concepts. Like prayer, reading and

understanding the Word of God, etc. We are told to pray, read our bibles, fellowship with God. However, we are barely taught HOW. We get caught up in this strange abyss of “what should I do?” and try to get out of this abyss by consoling ourselves with the idea that we just have

to do good and avoid getting into God’s bad books. 3. For the Christian life to become a true reality. We can all attest to a great disparity between the kind of life Jesus lived here on earth and our own lives. How many of us can heal the sick? How many of us can pray for days?

How many of us can love our enemies and pray for them? Meanwhile Jesus said that if we believe in Him, we will do greater than what He did on this earth. In fact, when we look at our current reality, we are compelled to believe that Jesus's life is only something that can be

aspired to, but not necessarily attained when on the contrary, He tells us can be surpassed. Because of the stark divide between our lives and Jesus's teachings, especially with falling into sin, we tend to give up and say to ourselves that Jesus's life is an exception to the

Christian life instead of the norm. The missing piece is actually discipleship. We fail at being like Jesus because we look at what Jesus did and try to replicate it. Allow me to give an example. Supposing we wanted to be like Cristiano Ronaldo. If we watched his videos and

replicated how he moved the ball and how he shot his penalties or freekicks, would we become as good as Cristiano Ronaldo? Of course not. In order to be as good as Cristiano, we would have to subject ourselves to similar discipline and training as he did. Likewise, we cannot be

like Jesus by simply taking His words at phase value, and be like “ok, I’m going to love my enemies and pray for them”. That would lead us to automatic failure. We would have to submit ourselves to the trainings and disciplines Jesus submitted to. We would have to have a heart

surrendered and submitted to the Father, and we would have to have a prayer and fellowship life like Jesus. It is then that the eternal life of the Kingdom of God will flow through us. Discipleship affords us that opportunity. Christianity is not a moral practice, where you

become a good person by doing good things. It is an inward transformation that leads to an outward expression of the inward transformation. Jesus talks about the heart a lot, drawing our minds to how more important our inward state is to our outward actions. He criticized the

Pharisees because they had outward actions that did not conform to their inward state and they thought their outward actions were more important than their inward state. Discipleship opens us up to this inward transformation that is done by the work of the Holy Spirit. When our

hearts are changed, the teachings of Jesus naturally flow through us. No wonder He told us that His burden is easy and His yoke is light. The true reason walking like Jesus seems impossible is because we try to do His teachings by sheer determination and willpower, when we should

be applying ourselves to staying in His presence and allowing the Holy Spirit to transform us for His life to flow through us. No wonder Galatians 5 refers to love, joy, self-control, etc. as the “fruit” of the Spirit and not as “works”.
The reason why the concept of discipleship

was life-changing for me was that, I reflected on my personal life and I realized that I wasn’t being a disciple of Christ although I professed to be a Christian. I hadn’t made it my life’s devotion to know Him and walk like Him. I only found it convenient for Him to come into

the aspects of my life that were more outside my control – like my future decisions. He was to me a personal Divine Consultant, not Ruler and King. That has began to change and has opened me up to realities that I had never imagined.

I pray that you will also be touched by this message and begin this journey of discipleship. The bare reality is, we cannot call ourselves Christians if we have not begun this journey of discipleship. Let us lay all aside and follow Jesus. God bless you all.