Follow Me Challenge (Evergreen Summer Challenge for Young People)

Quote from first session given 5/21/12:

The Great Commission is about making disciples. And the Great Commission is given to all believers so all of us should be making disciples. So the question I have is, how are you doing? And that's kind of a bold question and I'll tell you how to measure it. One simple way is just to ask, how many disciples have you made? Have you ever gotten that real on it. How many people can you look at and say, "They are obeying because I taught them to obey." That's kind of a radical thought in some ways, isn't it? That's kind of scary. Especially in our culture today because you're not supposed to really mess with anybody's life. I mean everybody's life is sort of their life, right? And, they have the right to live their life and you got the right to live your life and we're not supposed to mess with anybody's life. But Jesus has a really different idea about it. He says we ought to be interrupting people and we ought to be telling em, "Hey, you outta live this way."

So, you know, how do you know if somebody's a disciple. I mean, how do you know? How man disciples have you made? Well, what is a disciple? It's somebody that is making disciples. So you ought to be able to look at your life and you ought to be able to look and say, "That person is off doing, teaching people to obey because I got involved in their life.

And like Brent says, in the mega church model, we might even think that is really proud, to think that I would be responsible for somebody, but I think really honestly that's what this is about is helping us swing the pendulum back the other way a little bit and realize, no, people are affected by people.

Matthew 4 says this. "From that time Jesus began to preach and to say repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Now as Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee he saw two brothers. Simon who was called Peter and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea for they were fisherman. And he said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men."

And that's sort of the key verse for this challenge. This whole follow me thing. And Jesus, if you read through the New Testament you see this over and over Jesus walks up to people and boom follow me and then he goes and they have to decide what they are going to do.

"Immediately they left their nets and they followed him. Going on from there he saw two other brothers. James the son of Zebedee and John his brother in the boat with him with Zebedee their father mending their nets and he called to him. Immediately they left the boat and their father and they followed him."

And you know, I think there's two things from these verses that stick out to me. One is, they left everything. And that I'm really encouraged by those from Bloomington who I don't know. Those of you from Lakeville who I do, that you're here tonight. And to make a disciple is not just something that automatically we know how to do. We don't know how to make a disciple. We have to be taught ourselves.

And so it takes some concentration and some effort to learn it. You have to kind of go away from the normal life and invest and concentrate on learning how to make disciples. And of course that's what those guys did they jumped at the chance to be with Jesus and they spent the next three years living kind of a crazy life living not the normal life, but really focusing and concentrating on learning whatever they could from this guy and putting it into practice and they followed him.

And that's the other thing we need to learn this stuff from somebody. And we think of course that it would be nice to learn this from Jesus. Americans aren't really good at following anybody we like to be independent we like to have our own gig and do what we think is wise in our own eyes.

But if you're going to be a disciple first you have to be a disciple before you can teach somebody else how to be one. Then this is the critical step is realizing I need to learn this from somebody and not just a program, but I really think there's an attitude here that I hope you don't miss. Part of this challenge I think one of the things I'm most excited about is I think if I may be bold I know the Lakeville people you guys serve you are exemplary you almost run this church you are church people you are full boar hard working and I'm sure you guys at Bloomington are the same way or you wouldn't be in this room.

But are you really following anybody. Have you submitted yourself. Do you look at your peers and go I could learn from that person.

See, Brent did know me before I was a believer and I stumbled into this group of people. Brent was a pastor younger than most of you in this room. Everybody was my age. Everybody was our peer. There wasn't anybody that wasn't our peer. And we had to look at people. I came and I heard my brother and I saw the philosophy and I said, "Pht," on the philosophy. I had my own philosophy and it was a lot more fun. I didn't need a philosophy. I didn't need that, but what I did eventually, and I got saved, but still I didn't think I needed that church thing, but finally when I got close enough to these people and began to see their lives I made a very critical decision I realized they had something I wanted and I needed to learn from them how to get it.

And so discipleship is a lot more about a person really than it is the ideas. We're so used to thinking about ideas. We sit in small groups and we talk about ideas and we talk about we chat and we do this and we do that.

This challenge is about you having the courage and the humility to do two things. It's having the courage to insert yourself into that chain of people that runs clear back to Jesus and men and women have been faithful in that chain to pass this on down for thousands of years and it's come down to this room. This little part of the chain.

And this summer will you have the humility to insert yourself into that chain and realize wow there's people here, Brent, me, others in this room that you need to have your life be affected by.

I think that's the first critical decision. But that takes humility. But then there's the next critical decision that you need to make and in our culture today this takes a lot of faith which is what excites me excites me. You need to have the courage and faith to think I need to impose these ideas (not in a bad way impose) but I need to impress someone else with how I live my life to the point that they will change.

If that doesn't frighten you, you haven't really thought about it. That's a very frightening thing. Both directions it's very frightening.

It's very frightening to humble ourselves and to follow somebody. There are Brent, I followed Brent for 30 years. I moved. I got married, four days later, I got engaged and two weeks later they came to me and said, "Move to Minneapolis," and I went okay. And it wasn't it was partially the Great Commission but it was people. I knew these men and women, I knew they loved the Lord, I knew I needed to be with them.

And so I'm hoping that some of the things that come out of this summer as you guys make that decision because that will take a lot of faith and when there's a lot of faith the Lord gets involved in works…