Discipleship: A Matter of The Heart, Not The Hype

THE CRISIS: At the end of 2008 69% of the total population was under 40 years old. 37% was under 20, and the largest percentage of the population, 10% are between the ages of 10 -14, followed very closely by 9% being 15 – 19 years old. Some of you here today fit into these age brackets, while the others of us here are just above. What happens to our churches if we do not have at least a similar proportion of youths in them? What future is there for our churches if these are the adults of tomorrow and they are not reached won for the Kingdom? Where do you fit into God’s Kingdom agenda for Jamaica? Where is your MYF heading if the hottest debate before and after your meetings is who she Gaza and who seh Gully?

I firmly believe and submit to us today that at their stage of development one of the leading influencers in the life of youths is the peer group. You at Christianna High, and Russea’s High, and DeCateret, and KC and JC, you are in a uniquely qualified position to reach your fellow students. God is depending on you. Will you let him use you? Will you take it on?

THE CLASSROOM: The power of personal influence- Let no one look down on your youthfulness but rather in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, show yourself an example of those who believe. 1 Tim. 4: 12. “One sermon lived is more effective than a thousand preached eloquently in a public square.” – Spurgeon. Christian youth reaching out to their peers has proven and continues to be one of the most effective forms of evangelization of youth. This is what discipleship by youths for youths is about. This is not about hype, this is not about building a vibes, its about hard work, its about serving the Kingdom, its about becoming radically sold out to Jesus. Its about the heart and not the hype.

I believe we will not reproduce the Great Commission––to go into all the world and make disciples unless we recover the art of discipling. It was the method Jesus used with the twelve. He didn't play a video for them or tell them to tune into a radio or TV broadcast. Instead, He built relationships with them, and transformed them in the classroom of life. He built relationships with them, and transformed them in the classroom of life.

HE DISCIPLED THROUGH PROXIMITY: He appointed twelve—designating them apostles[a]—that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach” (Mark 3: 14). “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” John 15: 15 . Jesus demonstrated the transforming power of friendship and the peer group.

Observe closely with me Mar 3:14 That they might be with him: He chose his disciples not as servants but as friends. He shared moments of joy and grief with them and asked for them in times of need. As disciples we must first recognize that we are called to a relationship with Jesus. We are called to be with Him, to spend time in His presence. It is when we spend time in his presence that we are equipped to transform our circle of friends. He also wanted to send them out to preach: From his very first invitation the Twelve Jesus knew what would transpire on Calvary. He knew that the ultimate success of his mission depended not just on what he accomplished in a few years but on what the initial disciples and the soon to be thousands then millions would do after he had left. The success of that mission in the next 10 years depends on us here today. We here at Kendal today! What will it take?

We read a lengthy and problematic text earlier this morning. It’s one of those texts that I quite frankly at times wish was not in the Bible! Verse 20 of Matt. 5 is perhaps one of the scariest sentence that Jesus uttered. Mat 5:20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness greatly exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven!" Jesus! You got to be kidding! I have to do better than the Pharisees to enter the Kingdom? That statement would have surely made the crowd sit up and take notice!

The Pharisees, the popular party of the middle class, often found themselves on the fence vacillating between separatism and collaboration. Pharisees and teachers of the law competed with each other in strictness. They had split up God’s law into 613 tiny pieces of rules- 248 commandments and 365 thou shall not’s, and added 1521 pillars of their own making to support these rules. To avoid breaking the 3^rd commandment “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD,” they refused to pronounce God’s name at all. To avoid sexual temptation they had a practice of lowering their heads and not even looking at women (the most serious about this were known as bleeding Pharisees) because of frequent collisions with walls and other obstacles). To avoid defiling the Sabbath they out-lawed 39 activities that might be considered to be work. How could an ordinary person’s righteousness even surpass that of such professional holy men? As if that was not enough Jesus suggested that their righteousness needs to greatly, overtake that of the Pharisees, like a river overflowing its bank, like a cup filled to the brim and running over!

This is critical for us here today, for the hype driven culture that is our youth’s today, will fail and fail terribly to grant us entry into the kingdom and bring other youths with us.

The superiority to the Pharisaic righteousness that Jesus requires is the kind of righteousness, not the degree. Our righteousness, then--if it is to contrast with the outward and formal righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees--must be inward, vital, spiritual. It must be one of the heart and not the hype.

There was something about the fraudulent religiosity of this group that disturbed Jessu greatly. He is equally disturbed where the same is evident in our lives today. Jesus’ harsh rebukes of the Pharisees will make this clearer for us. He saw through their façade, their religious dress and antics and exposed the real condition of their hearts. Mar 7:6 Jesus answered them, "How right Isaiah was when he prophesied about you! You are hypocrites, just as he wrote: 'These people, says God, honor me with their words, but their heart is really far away from me. [GNB]. Mar 7:6 Jesus replied: You are nothing but show-offs! The prophet Isaiah was right when he wrote that God had said, "All of you praise me with your words, but you never really think about me. [CEV]. Mat 23:27 "How horrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees! You hypocrites! You are like whitewashed graves that look beautiful on the outside but inside are full of dead people's bones and every kind of impurity.

Mat 23:25 You Pharisees and teachers are show-offs, and you're in for trouble! You

wash the outside of your cups and dishes, while inside there is nothing but greed and

selfishness. Mat 23:26 You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of a cup, and then the

outside will also be clean. [CEV] Mat 23:25 "How horrible it will be for you, scribes and

Pharisees! You hypocrites! You clean the outside of cups and dishes. But inside they are

full of greed and uncontrolled desires. This same Jesus stand among us today and he

sees behind the masks and the layers of make up and our fanciness. He is sifting every

heart right now and He knows those of us who are only going through the motions.

Those of us who know how to sound Christian and look Christian but being the

supposedly closed doors there is all kinds of muck and mire. Before the all seeing Jesus

we are now exposed. Except our righteousness exceeds hype and becomes heart we

will never see the Kingdom of God.

As Jesus continued to confront the hypocrisy in the Pharisees, he identified yet another indication that they were more into hype than heart. Let us not for a moment think that the Pharisees were not involved in making disciples. In fact they went to great lengths literally to make disciples! Again the words of Jesus sends chills down my spine as I ask myself, is that me LORD? Mat 23:15 You Pharisees and teachers of the Law of Moses are in for trouble! You're nothing but show-offs. You travel over land and sea to win one follower. And when you have done so, you make that person twice as fit for hell as you are. [CEV]. This is for those well meaning ones of us who are a part of the outreach missions of our churches. We invite our friends to church, they come and we are not growing ourselves so they become stuck in a rut just as we are. Learn this, you will never be able to take anyone where you haven’t been, or beyond where you are.

Everything about the religion of the Pharisees amounted to hype, even their prayers and fasting became a means of gaining men’s approval. They had not learned how to live before the audience of one, to gain the divine nod of approval. They were into it for themselves. The discipleship that Jesus calls us to is of the heart and not the hype because hype is exactly what Jesus rejected in the temptation to throw himself down from the roof of the temple. Hype is the exact opposite of the cross.

Jesus directs most of his comments to the serious seekers. He constantly pushes them towards a deeper level of commitment, with strong words that would bring anyone up short. “You cannot serve two masters,” he says. “Forsake the love of money and the pleasures the world has to offer. Deny yourself. Serve others. Take up your cross.”

This is no idle metaphor: along the roads of Palestine, Romans regularly nailed up the worst criminals as an object lesson to the Jews. What kind of image would that conjure in the minds of his followers. “Is he to lead a procession of martyrs?” Actually yes. Jesus repeats one saying more than any other, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matt. 16: 25. As Elton Trueblood has observed, all the major symbols that Jesus used had a severe offensive quality: the yoke of burden, the cup of suffering, the towel of servanthood, and finally the cross of execution. “Count the cost,” Jesus said, giving fair warning to any who dared follow him. A central jewel of Christianity is that the cross we bear comes before the crown we wear. To be a Christian one must take up the cross and carry it until that very cross leaves its mark upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which only comes through suffering.

Have you counted the cost? My friend Samba from The Gambia bears on his body the marks of Christ, almost killed by his own family for rejecting Islam. Counting the cost may mean refusing to laugh when your classmates are passing around dirty videos via Bluetooth. It may mean deleting some emails and sending a message to the sender not to send you any more mails like that, and the sender taking offense and replying ‘yu a gwaan like yu better than everybody!”

On one occasion he is travelling along the road and a young man who apparently was into hypeness shouted, “Jesus I will follow you!” “Foxes have dens, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man doesn't have a place to call his own." Jesus said. Were they living in modern times, with the crackdown on homelessness, Jesus and His disciples would likely be harassed by police and forced to move on. The hype culture caused the writers of the dictionary to add the word bling-bling to the dictionary a few years ago. The Heart culture of Jesus declares you cannot serve God and money, it teaches us to pray ‘keep me satisfied with three square meals a day.’

At beginning of the sermon on the Mount Jesus declares “Blessed are the pure in heart”. Statements like these are haunting to say the least. What to make of such advice? Should mutilate myself after a wet dream? Tear out my tongue after speaking a harsh word to my brother? After being asked read the Sermon on the Mount and write a paragraph on it, one student simple wrote: “The things asked in this sermon are absurd. To look at a woman is adultery. That is the most extreme, stupid, unhuman statement that I have ever heard.” You’d probably be surprised to learn that the struggle with lust stays with humans as they get older. An old French writer has said “Old age risks being a period of redoubled testing because the imagination of an old man is substituted in a horrible way for what nature refuses him.” Marriage does not cure lust because lust involves the attraction of unknown creatures and chance meetings. Sexual desire is like a tidy wave powerful enough to bear away all the best intentions. Self-discipline, repression, and rational argument are inadequate weapons to fight the impulse towards impurity. In the end there is only one reason to be pure; that which Jesus presented in the Beattitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”. Impurity separates us from God… purity is the condition for a higher love- for a possession superior to all possessions, possessing God. This is what is at stake, nothing less. The love that God hold out for us requires that our faculties be cleansed and purified before we can receive a higher love, one attainable in no other way. That is the motive to stay pure. By harbouring lust I limit my own intimacy with God.

THE CHOICE: Before we lose heart and begin to despair that there is no hope for us in today’s sex crazed, naked driven, violence riddled, anti-God 21^st century Jamaica let us hear the real point that Jesus is making. The purpose of these difficult sayings of Jesus is to create in us a tension. A life changing tension between absolute ideals and absolute grace… This tension runs throughout his teachings, throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount. In his response to the rich young ruler, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, in His comments about divorce, money, or any other moral issue, Jesus never lowered God’s ideal. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” he said. “Love the Lord Your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” No one has ever completely fulfilled those commands.

Yet at the same time Jesus tenderly offered absolute grace. Jesus forgave an adulteress, a thief on the cross, a disciple who had denied ever knowing Him. He tapped that treacherous disciple, Peter, to found his church, and for the next advance turned to a man named Saul, who had made his mark persecuting Christians. Grace is absolute, inflexible, all-encompassing. It extends, even to the people who nailed Jesus to the cross. “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” were among the last words Jesus spoke on earth.

The sermon on the mount forces us to recognize the great distance between God and us, and any attempt to reduce that distance by somehow moderating its demands misses the point altogether. It proves t hat before God we all stand on level ground: murders and temper- throwers, adulterers, and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace. Grace is for all of us.