By guest blogger Dave DeVries
No matter what method or approach you use for making disciples, the goal of disciplemaking is to teach loving obedience to Jesus. His great commission to them ends with “… and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matt. 28:20) As such, teaching to obey needs to form a primary part of any discipleship endeavor.
I’m amazed at how often people experience Bible teaching or discipleship or small group learning… and then no one ever checks back in to see if they are living out what they are learning. Often a “life application” portion rounds out the end of a lesson, but the following week when they get together again no one asks, “So how did that go when you did x, y, or z?” or “What happened when you obeyed?”
What I call a “teaching-to-obey” mechanism consists of 1) learning something, 2) deciding how to obey that teaching, and 3) following up to see what was learned through that obedience. In this way, we are not just giving lip service to obedience, we are living it out.