Robinson Daring to Disciple

Making Jesus' Last Command Our First Priority
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-6485108-4-0
Verlag: CHI-Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

DARING TO DISCIPLE by Dr Stuart Robinson. We are sleep walking into oblivion unless there is a dramatic change. DARING TO DISCIPLE reminds us of the biblical imperative of not merely calling for conversions, but more importantly to make disciples. The principles within the pages of this book have been demonstrated to be effective in all religio-cultural contexts. Their simplicity, adaptability and flexibility is their strength. This insightful and convicting book is a clarion call to make disciples. If you want to change the world then read this book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robinson, Stuart

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1
A Shakey Start In 1958 I was invited by a Christian friend to go to the cinema on a Sunday night. At that time where I lived nothing operated on a Sunday night, including many of the streetlights that local youth had smashed. The possibility of seeing a movie on a Sunday night wasn’t a temptation. It was a miracle. Upon entering the cinema I was surprised and disappointed to learn that there was no movie. Instead the main attraction was a man with an American accent on an elevated platform preaching about Jesus. Many years later when I was researching for my own doctoral dissertation, I learned that the preacher, Dr J. Edwin Orr, was world-famous for his prolific writings on the history of Christian revivals. And he had five PhDs. Genuinely awesome! He talked about the problem of sin, breaking God’s laws and how this left us with a dilemma. We could repent, ask God to forgive us, believe in what Jesus had done and proceed to heaven. Or we could remain in our unredeemed state and go to hell. The solution to our problem was dependent on a person called Jesus, who had lived a couple of millennia ago. He was said to be a sinless person who had come into the world, lived, died and rose again. His death on a cross somehow could relieve me from the penalty of sin. All I had to do was to confess I was a sinner, ask God to forgive me, believe in Jesus, invite him into my life and all would be well. Not only did I not understand any of this Christian jargon, what the speaker was suggesting was physically impossible. Dr Orr said this Jesus was, at my invitation, to come and live within me. South African cardiac surgeon, Christian Barnard, didn’t attempt the first heart transplant until 3 December 1967. Even then his patient, Louis Washkanski, lived only 18 days. So nine years before a heart transplant was attempted, how was a complete person going to be able to cohabit within my skin? But help was at hand. The speaker assured us that free literature was available to help all those who accepted the invitation to invite Jesus into their lives. That word “free” focused my attention. Our family was relatively poor and so we were always on the lookout for any free handouts. Besides if I could just get the literature maybe I could work out his gobbledygook for myself. However to qualify for the freebie there was another hoop through which to jump. “Just raise your hand wherever you are seated. We will pray for you,” the preacher suggested. To do that among all those Christians could expose me to be one of those unrepentant sinners bound for hell. Anyway how was I to know if what the speaker was saying was true? Quickly I weighed up the odds. If he was speaking rubbish and I responded, I had lost nothing. But if what he was saying was true and I didn’t respond, I would lose everything. Either way to respond seemed like a win/win situation. The clincher was that I happened to be sitting next to a girl who, in my estimation, was the most beautiful girl in the district. Because she was a Christian, if I presented as a new believer that night, I was bound to win a kiss from her. With hindsight I understood better. I never got the girl but God got me. The big lesson to remember is this: never question the motives of anyone who is seeking for God. In the developed world people come seeking Jesus mostly for internal reasons like inner peace or healing from past hurts. In the developing world the motives are often for external reasons, hoping for a job, a handout or help to migrate to an affluent developed country. In the developed world people accept Jesus as Savior and for much of the rest of their lives the challenge is to help them understand that Jesus is Lord. Conversely, in the developing world, people easily accept Jesus as Lord but the challenge is to help them understand he is Savior. The end results are similar. In my case I wasn’t there yet. Having raised my hand, I got neither the free literature nor the kiss from the girl next to me. I was the victim of what I later regarded as an evangelical trick. Having raised my hand, only then was I instructed to leave my seat and to go right down to the front of the cinema. Hoping the embarrassment of everyone looking at me might be outweighed by the free literature, I went to the front. There I was met by a kind Pastor who years later became my father-in-law. He advised that as a Christian I had to do four things: 1. Pray 2. Go to church 3. Read the Bible 4. Be a “witness”. That was it. Many decades later I am still waiting for the free literature. And in all of my preaching on relevant occasions I tell everyone right at the beginning what will be happening at the end. No sleight-of-hand evangelical tricks. Among all of my relatives there was zero church attendance and never any “God talk”. Later genealogical research showed that there were no known Christians for at least five generations. Beyond that? Australia had been declared “terra nullius”—a land that belonged to no one. The same could be said of spiritual forbears in my family tree. As far as known Christians inhabiting my landscape—none, ever. However when I was a child my mother had told me that, when Christians prayed, they put their hands together in front of their face, knelt by their beds, closed their eyes and said, Gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Look upon this little child. Pity my simplicity. Suffer me to come to thee. According to Rev. Google, this and other prayer verses of its kind were developed in the 18th century. I never got to verse two because my “suffering” began at line four. My older brother, seeing me kneeling beside the bed, hurled himself across the room and crashed into me, demanding to know what I thought I was doing. That was the end of the development of my prayer life for some time. Perhaps this may explain why to this day I usually rise at about 5:00 a.m. to pray—alone. It feels safer to do so. Going to church was easier. There was one just down the road. It was a small rural Baptist Church. In all the time I was associated with it, it never grew to encompass more than about twenty adults and a children’s Sunday School. Nevertheless every few years it produced another missionary or trainee pastor. This meant that about 50% of the congregation ended up in full-time Christian ministry. If in God’s sight the true greatness of any church is measured not so much by its seating capacity but by its sending capacity, this was one of the greatest churches in the world. Yet nobody knew it! It was also where I preached my first sermon to a generous long-suffering congregation within twelve months of my cinema decision. Now that I was in a church I really needed a suitable Bible—one worthy of a young adult. I had noticed that the more important a person was in the Christian community the bigger the Bible they carried. It had to have a black leather cover with gold-edged pages. There was only one version, the King James Authorized Version. Collecting all my coins I ventured into a Christian bookstore, 20 kilometers away in the city. I was able to purchase a very impressive Bible with gold capital letters on the outside announcing it was a “Holy Bible”. It also had thumb tags cut into the edge of the pages so I could quickly find any reference mentioned by the preacher. I was so glad I was no longer the last one to find the Bible verse the preacher quoted. Still, when it came to reading it by myself, that was a different matter. At the very beginning there was a very long introduction written in the tiniest lettering. It took weeks to read through that. It didn’t seem very inspired, although all my new Christian friends were assuring me the whole Bible was inspired by God. I assumed this included the introduction. It was exciting to break through into the amazing stories found in Genesis and Exodus. By the end of those two books I’d built sufficient momentum to wade through Leviticus. But I got bogged down in Numbers. Although I cheated by skipping ahead to Deuteronomy that provided no relief—except in trying to guess the number of “thees” and “thous” that might appear on any one page. At about the six-month stage in my post-conversion experience with Jesus living within, I was ready to give up on the Bible. It was then—for the first time—someone asked how I was faring in my “new life”. I explained that I now attended lots of church meetings and had already been appointed to leadership in the youth department and was also teaching Sunday School. But I was on the point of quitting the Bible reading stuff because I couldn’t understand much of it. When I reported in more length on my difficulties I was relieved to find there was a solution. “New Christians are to read the New Testament,” I was told. Thus encouraged, I re-launched into Matthew chapter one. “Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Jacob begat Judah…” On and on it went. Obviously everyone else understood what this meant. But I was too embarrassed to ask what “begat” meant. Today’s sex education programs probably still don’t explain that word. I paused to rest for a couple of months till another believer asked how I was going. Upon hearing of my problems with Matthew, I was told—but never had it explained—that new Christians were actually meant to start by reading John. I have a brain that will not allow me to pass by something that I cannot understand sufficiently well to be able to explain to others....