THE WHEEL
ILLUSTRATION
I JOHN 2:6
“He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk as He walked.” This verse is the root verse to which our Bible Study in founded on. What does this verse mean to walk as Jesus walked? What do you call a person who walks as Jesus walked?
Luke 6:40- “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher.”
Luke 14:27 – “And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My
disciple.”
Romans 12:1- “I beseech you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”
A dictionary definition of a disciple- is someone who follows and teaches the doctrine of another. When you look at Matthew 28:19-20, following and teaching is exactly what Jesus tells us to do.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age.”
So you see that our Bible study is about making disciples. Our primary mission is to evangelize/recruit people by inviting them to our homes, teach them to be followers, and then how to be teachers. The person that we are teaching them to be like is no other than our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. How do we do this?
First off what are the requirements to be a disciple anyway?
(Let us get the most obvious and the most important one out of the way.) To be a disciple one must first believe that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God, who is God, who came to die on the cross to be the propitiation of our sins. - John 3:16, John 1:1, 1 John 2:2
If one is going to be Christ’s disciple, he must believe and live by what Christ came to do. Christ came to die in our place so that we may reign with Him forever.
2. Luke 14:26 says , “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
Did Jesus really mean that we should hate our loved ones? Jesus is simply telling us what priority he must take in our lives. If we are to be His disciples, nothing should ever come between Him and us even if it means we have to leave our loved ones behind. We are to love Christ first. So what does it mean to love Christ?
Romans 12:1 says we must give ourselves as living sacrifices. This means that we give not only our lives to Christ but our bodies as well. We fully commit to do God’s will and to live in Him as we go about our daily lives.
4. John 14:21- “He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”
(more on this later)
