We’ve been talking in our last two previous Little Lessons about the subject of making disciples, and so the question that I posed at the beginning of this Little Lesson is certainly related to that.
What should be the mission statement of every church in the world?
We’re going to kind of pick up where we left off on our previous Little Lesson, as we were talking about the erroneous idea that there are two categories of Christians: those who are believers in Jesus, then the higher class of Christians, the real committed Christians, those who are disciples of Christ.
I began to expose the error in that type of thinking, because it’s just completely unbiblical. Any honest person who studies the Bible is going to come to that conclusion. This is not some difficult thing to figure out from Scripture. It’s just amazing though that more people aren’t talking about this.
We’re going to talk about the idea that there are two classes of Christians: the believers (that is, all those who believe in Jesus) and then the disciples who are often defined as the really committed believers.
I’m going to just spill the beans right off the bat here. That’s false and unbiblical teaching!
Everybody wants to have a life that’s meaningful, one that transcends just the everyday run-of-the-mill, in-the-trenches, survival existence. We want to have something that transcends that going on in our lives.
Even people who are not Christians, I think, find themselves with that same kind of desire. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
On our previous lesson we were talking about what happens when you die. And, I emphasized the fact that your spirit evacuates your body, and maybe angels transport you to the throne of God.
Sooner or later (it doesn’t really make any difference in eternity), we all have to stand before God and give an account.
What happens at the moment of death? Well, it’s important, first of all, to understand that you are more than just a physical being, more than just a body and a brain and internal organs.
Scripture says that we are spirit, soul and body. The spirit and the soul have been variously defined, but I think everybody can agree that the hidden person of the heart (Romans 7:22) as Paul refers to the spirit, is the real you. It’s the part of you that when the body is no longer functioning, no longer alive, the spirit then lives on.
Is it okay for Christians to watch R-rated movies? Today’s question comes from a viewer who wants to know what is and what is not appropriate for a Christian to be watching as far as movies are concerned.
And we might as well throw TV shows in there. They rate TV shows nowadays too, and they should.
Should you sponsor a child? Right now I’m sitting high up in my hotel in a room in Burma that overlooks a good part of the former capital city of Yangon. And this is a place where, at one time, Heaven’s Family was very involved with a child sponsorship program.
We had come here some 15 years ago and began visiting the many Christian orphanages that were showcased for us. We set up a child sponsorship program, and I guess we had almost 1,000 children sponsored at one time, and about 50 Christian orphanages, here in Yangon, and other parts of Myanmar.
We’re going to keep on looking at some things that Jesus said in Matthew 5. There in the Sermon on the Mount, He has six statements where He says, “You have heard it was said,” or, “You have heard the ancients were told,” “but I say to you.”
Some folks skim over the surface of that and come to the conclusion that Jesus was altering the law. But as you look at it a little more closely, you see that He’s not altering the law. He’s bringing back His disciples to the standards that were always there in the law and in the original intent of the law of Moses. And our question today about lust and adultery revolves around that very thing.
In today’s Little Lesson, we’re going to continue thinking about the whole concept of what murder really is in God’s eyes. We looked in our previous little lesson at Matthew 5:21-22, where Jesus began to talk about murder.
