(upbeat music) - A new week begins, a very sweet week, and a very full one as well in Minneapolis as we welcome many friends in town for the annual Pastors Conference, the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors and Church Leaders in partnership with DesiringGod.org, once again, it's downtown at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

This year's theme is this, Joy Set Before Us, Perseverance and Hope in the Day of Opposition. For these first three days of the week, we'll be talking at the conference about the reality of cultural opposition to the gospel and learning how to spiritually flourish and faithfully minister in the face of cultural persecution, however subtle or severe that persecution is.

It is, of course, a leaders' conference, but this one, I think, of all years, will be especially relevant for any attentive Christian who wants to engage our culture with the gospel thoughtfully and humbly. The speakers include you, Pastor John, of course, and I know you're prepared and ready to go.

Also, Don Carson is in town, and of course, Jason Meyer and Leonce Crump, and missionary Tim Kazee from the Dispatches from the front DVDs you may have seen. He's in town along with us, as is Oz Guinness and many other speakers. You can follow the schedule and the livestream at DesiringGod.org/live for more.

Well, on to the inbox. Many questions have come in this month, Pastor John, and they have had to do with the theme of discipleship. So maybe I'll just ask this. What is discipleship? What is the aim of discipleship? How is it done typically? Pastor John, what would you say in sort of the macro context to sort of orient us to this work, this discipline of discipleship?

Couple of observations about the word. The word discipleship never occurs in the Bible, the English word discipleship. It's not in the Bible. The term is ambiguous in English. It can mean my discipleship in the sense of my own pattern of following Jesus and trusting Him and learning from Him.

That's my discipleship, could mean that. Or it can mean my activity of helping others be disciples in that sense of learning from Him, growing in Him. The second meaning, you know, there's helping others, does have a verb in New Testament Greek, mathe teuo, to make disciples. It can mean preach the gospel so that people get converted to Christ and become Christians and thus disciples.

For example, Acts 14.21, when they had preached the gospel to that city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium. So make disciples is one Greek word there, and it means get them converted to Jesus. That's what it means. Or it can mean the whole process of conversion, baptism, and teaching the ways of Jesus as it's used in Matthew 28.19.

Go therefore and make disciples. And here's what he means, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe everything I commanded you. That's a very long process. That's like a lifetime of process. So get them converted, baptize them, and then spend a lifetime teaching them to obey all that Jesus said.

That is what the verb disciple in the New Testament would include. The word disciple in the New Testament does not mean a second-stage Christian. - Yes. - There's some ministries that are built around this distinction that's just so unbiblical. As if there were converts, then there are disciples who are a little stage two Christians who've learned more, and then there are disciple makers.

Now all those groupings are linguistically foreign to the New Testament. A disciple in the New Testament is simply a Christian, Acts 11.26. And in Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians. Everybody that was converted to Jesus was a disciple. Everybody that was converted to Jesus was a Christian. Disciple was, in fact, not a favorite term for Christian.

As time went by, it seems, Paul never uses the noun or the verb disciple. In fact, neither the noun disciple or the verb make disciples occurs anywhere in the New Testament outside the Gospels and Acts. So I think what is important is not the terminology, but the reality. People need to become Christians, and people need to be taught how to think and feel and act as a Christian, that is, a disciple, a follower of Jesus, one who embraces him as Lord and Savior and treasure.

Now, where and how should that happen? I mean, that's what I think all the talk about discipleship is. It's just a fresh concern about how to bring people to Christ and grow them up into being what they ought to be as Christians or as followers of Jesus or as disciples.

There's a lot of different words that people are using these days to describe Christian. So how does that happen? Well, the conversion of people from unbelievers to believers, Christians, disciples, should be happening in any and every situation, okay? So no single strategy. There is no limit to the ways a person can be told the good news of Jesus.

And so, quote, "Discipling," unquote, in that sense, is as varied as there are ways of saying the gospel or living the gospel in front of people to draw them in. As far as training Christians how to think and feel and act as a Christian, that is, discipling in the sense of growing them into more and more maturity that happens in so many ways in the New Testament.

Here's just a grocery list of possibilities. Titus 2.4, "Older women are to train younger women." 2 Timothy 2.2, "Paul trained Timothy to train others "to train others." Ephesians 6.4, "Fathers are to train their children." Matthew 28.20, "Missionaries are to teach the nations "everything Jesus commanded." Hebrews 3.13, "All Christians are to exhort each other "every day to avoid sin and to stir each other up "to love and good works." Chapter 10, 1 Peter 4.10, "All Christians are to use "their gifts to serve others." Acts 18.24, "Priscilla and Aquila, on the spur of the moment "it seems, explained the way of God more accurately "to Apollos." And we could go on and on.

Every Christian should be helping unbelievers become believers by showing them Christ, that is, making a disciple, and every Christian should be helping other believers grow to more and more maturity, that's making a disciple. And every Christian should be seeking to get help for themselves from others to keep on growing, and that is also His, their, our discipleship.

And every church should think through how all of these kinds of biblical disciple-making find expression in their corporate life. - Huge entailments, thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for this survey of disciple-making, and thank you for listening to this podcast. I hope to see a number of you today at the conference.

If you're there, come over and say hi. And tomorrow we're actually gonna talk about conferences on the Ask Pastor John podcast. We're gonna hear from a listener who wants to know how you, Pastor John, square your wartime lifestyle of simplicity with the expensive conference venues that you often speak at.

That should be interesting. Until then, for more information about the podcast or to find our most recent or our most popular episodes, go to our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and I need to get off to the conference. Thank you for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with John Piper.

We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)