Impact of Discipleship: Kage Edgar
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“My spiritual life was connected to the vine but dead in my understanding”
I was a good person. I cared about people and felt I was generally nice. I didn’t cuss and wasn’t addicted to anything crazy. Any struggles I had I tried to get over them the best I could through my church and Christian community. It didn’t mean anything. I grew up a Christian nearly my whole life, and while I knew a lot about the contents of the Bible, I still felt empty. I was struggling to deal with persistent sins in my life and a large majority of my friends wouldn’t have known if I was a Christian or not. My flesh got me to a place of uselessness. I was mostly happy and functional, but I was useless. And I knew it.
John 15:2 says, “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.”
This is a terrifying message if you’re in the same boat as I was. It is so easy to live a Laodicean Christian life that is rich and happy on the outside, but in actuality is wretched, miserable, and poor (Rev 3:17). In John 15, Jesus is giving his disciples doctrinal truth through a very simple and logical analogy. If a farmer notices that there are branches on a vine that don’t bear any fruit, he’s going to cut it off so that the vine can more efficiently allocate resources to the branches that do provide a crop. I, and I’m sure many other modern Christians, find ourselves comfortable in a place where we can just leech the nutrients the church provides us without any intention of producing more fruit for the kingdom. My spiritual life was connected to the vine but dead in my understanding and willingness to do what God tells me to do as it applies to our mission here on earth. Verse 6 gives us the conclusion to this way of living, in that we will be cut down as a branch and cast into a fire.
Now, if you have believed in your heart and confessed with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and that God raised him from the dead, you have eternal security through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This verse is talking about the disciples' usefulness here on earth. If we refuse to be used as fruit-bearing branches on the true vine, at least we can have some use as firewood.
My life before discipleship was useless and solely focused on being comfortable and had no real intention to glorify God. It wasn’t until I chose to submit my life to the authority of Christ and my local church and commit to this Discipleship 1 thing that everyone kept talking about that things began to change.
“...abiding in Jesus comes from listening to him. ”
Established in Worship
John 15:8 “Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.”
Jesus clearly tells us that if we aren’t bearing ministry fruit (evangelizing and making disciples), then we are not his disciples and are therefore not glorifying God which is our primary purpose on earth. A fruitless life (like mine before following Jesus as Lord) is a life that is not glorifying God, and that is an extremely big deal. Worship is the act of esteeming God more important than any other thing (see Genesis 22, the first mention of the word worship). The first step of a life well-lived is through worshipping and glorifying God, and I had to reckon with the fact that I was not doing that with my walk. God’s glory is the number one theme in the Bible, and the means by which we have to honor God in our lives is never-ending. This started in my life by committing to coming to church consistently and committing to Discipleship 1. This first step of obedience and laying down the busy life I once thought important established the groundwork to being able to do the work that most glorifies our God in this dispensation of grace: “bearing much fruit.” Biblical Discipleship guided me in the process of instituting God in the place of authority and priority he deserves.
Established in the Word
John 15:3 “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.”
I cannot glorify God and bear fruit through my good deeds, kindness to others, or attempts to correct sin patterns in my life. The only way to make disciples and glorify God on this earth in this way is shown to us in John 15:4: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.” Fruit comes from abiding in Jesus, and abiding in Jesus comes from listening to him.
After choosing to submit to God’s authority in your life and worship Jesus as Lord, the transformation process continues to take shape as you read and meditate on God’s word. As I began to take reading the Bible seriously, I began to see major changes in my thought processes and actions, and more importantly in how I saw the Bible itself. I am so thankful for my discipler Seth Harper and his commitment to God’s word and refusing to provide an answer unless it has a book, chapter, verse attached to it. Learning that God’s word is sufficient for all our needs is the key to seeing a once useless life changed. My decision to transition to KJV (I was a certified thees, thous, thuses hater prior to this) gave me a different outlook on how I saw each individual word God placed in his book. Difficult passages of scripture were no longer brushed to the side and given the “I don’t know what this is but I’ll just have faith to trust it means something important” tag. Instead, I can know what it is God is talking about and how it applies to the rest of scripture. Reading the Bible in its entirety was no longer a storybook or a daunting intellectual challenge. It became a constant reminder of God’s continuous grace for his people despite the difference in dispensations, and more importantly, a stimulus and motivation to do the job Jesus gave us to make disciples of all nations to glorify our Lord. The thing that transformed the disciples from mediocre and sinful working-class dudes to evangelistic ministry powerhouses were the words Jesus spoke to them. When God says his word is powerful and sharper than any sword, he means it. When you are a part of a discipleship process that is in full subjection to God’s word, that is when a life is really changed. Biblical Discipleship turned me from a lazy, selfish, fruitless, and Laodicean Christian to one that submits to God’s authority as laid out in scripture and in turn is able to be a part in Jesus’ commandment to “Go ye therefore and teach all nations.”
True Biblical Discipleship is submitting to every word God gives us in his Bible and learning how we can share that to others to produce fruit for the Kingdom!
“Most importantly, discipleship has prepared me to ‘go’”
Establish in the “We” (The Local Church)
John 15:12 “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.”
If this sinful world is to be won, we have to do it together. Jesus says this exact thing a couple of chapters prior in John 13:35: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” We as disciples in Christ have to love each other as Christ loved us. I am so thankful for my discipler Lon Amick for being the absolute best example of what it means to be a loving brother in the body of Christ. Before submitting my life to Christ as his disciple, I really struggled in giving in to the sin of seclusion (or introversion if we want to give a fluffier name to it). I saw the people in the church as merely coworkers, and I have never been the type of person to hang out with coworkers. And guess what, my ministry and evangelism were going absolutely nowhere. As I grew in my heart for worshipping God and my understanding of the word, I had to reckon with the fact that I can’t complete God’s mission for my life alone. The world knows that we are of Jesus by the love we have for one another and Jesus sent his apostles on missionary journeys as pairs for a reason. Humans were meant to be united for the sole sake of worshipping God, and as we saw earlier, glorifying God comes through the work of evangelism and producing more disciples. Biblical discipleship prepares you for this important step by walking in God’s word together with more spiritually mature brothers or sisters in Christ.
Established in the Work
John 15:16 “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.”
If you can submit to Jesus and commit to being established in the worship of God, the word of God, and the local church, then the fruitfulness of ministry flourishes. As Jesus says in verse 16, we are to go and bring fruit, and we do this through the work he establishes us in in the ministry. Biblical discipleship has prepared me to be a minister to third-grade students and to share the gospel with them monthly as they learn and grow more to hopefully decide to follow the Lord themselves. Discipleship has prepared me to be a part of worship ministry in a selfless and God-honoring way, giving me the ability to use the talent God gave me for something meaningful. Most importantly, discipleship has prepared me to “go” and to share the gospel with my work, my friends, and the lost world.
“The word allows me to abide in Christ and for him to abide in me”
The worship of God establishes the purpose and motivation to bear fruit to glorify the God that gives me everything. The word allows me to abide in Christ and for him to abide in me and is a solid foundation and rich soil in this rebellious world. The local church allows me to team up with my boys Seth, Lon, and Cordell, Romeo’s UMKC Thursday Bible Study, C&YA, the third-grade class Antonio and I teach on first Sundays, and every other disciple of Jesus to bear fruit and glorify God together. Biblical discipleship was instrumental in establishing my life to not pointlessly strive to be a good person, but to be a part of the fruit-bearing vine that produces more disciples, a joy that remains, and a life that honors and worships the God that loves me enough to have created me and died for me even though I did not deserve it.
Kage Edgar is a member at Midtown Baptist Temple and is a part of C&YA. He is also a part of the Gospel Choir, Worship Ministry, and Kidtown. He is a also involved in one of the men’s UMKC Bible studies.