A popular but misleading doctrine of false teachers is the idea that there are two categories of Christians, the “believers” and the “disciples.” The believers, they claim, are those who believe in Jesus but who are not committed to obey Him. Nor are they willing to pay a price to follow Him. And that is OK, false teachers maintain, because salvation is by grace. So, as long as those uncommitted believers believe, they are safely on their way to eternal life, and anyone who claims otherwise is, they claim, preaching “salvation by works.”
The “other category” of Christians, they say, are very rare. They are the “disciples.” Jesus, of course, did make it very clear that there is a commitment and cost to being His disciple (see, for example, Luke 14:25-34), so false teachers claim that being a disciple can’t possibly have anything to do with salvation, because salvation is by grace, and thus there can’t be any commitment or cost associated with it. Grace is unconditional, they say. Therefore, becoming a disciple is an optional, secondary step that believers may or may not take. If they don’t become disciples but remain only believers, all they risk is missing out on some bonus rewards in heaven.
And based on that “logic,” the idea of two categories of Christians is contrived out of thin air, without any scriptural support, and in the face of massive of scriptural contradiction.
The irrefutable truth is that, nowhere in the New Testament is it taught by Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, John or Jude, that there are two categories of Christians, “believers” and “disciples.” Nowhere. The New Testament makes no differentiation between believers and disciples. Rather, in the New Testament, all believers are disciples, and the disciples are the only true believers.
Moreover, there is nothing in the New Testament that supports the idea that the cost of discipleship stands in contrast to the principle of grace in salvation. That is because neither Jesus, nor any New Testament author, viewed God’s grace as a license to sin. They, in fact, warned against the idea of “turning the grace of God into licentiousness” (Jude 4). They believed that grace can be (and most often is) conditional.
Jesus told His disciples to go and make disciples, starting by baptizing them (see Matt. 28:19-20). Isn’t it interesting that those who advocate that one can be a believer without being a disciple baptize people who, by their own definition, are not disciples, but are only believers? Why are they baptizing people who are only believers but not yet disciples? Jesus said to baptize the disciples.
The idea that there are two categories of Christians, believers and disciples, is indefensible from Scripture, and it is not too strong to say that it is heretical, because it misleads people into thinking they are believers when they actually are not, as proven by the fact that they are not committed to Jesus in obedience or willing to pay a price to be His follower. Again, if one is not a disciple of Jesus, one does not believe in Jesus. To reject that truth is to reject the consistent testimony of the entire New Testament.
Anyone who is honest and who studies the subject themselves in the New Testament will arrive at the obvious truth. Of course, that is exactly what false teachers never do, because they are dishonest. So, they rely on false premises and twisted logic that can only fool the biblically ignorant.
If you are interested in studying the subject for yourself, just get a concordance and look up the word “disciple(s)” in the New Testament. There are over 250 references. That sheer number, by itself, disproves the “two categories” theory. Modern false-grace teachers claim that there are many “believers” but few “disciples.” Yet if you study the word “believers” using a concordance, you’ll discover that there are only 11 references in the entire New Testament. If there are two categories of Christians (and there are not), then in Jesus’ and Paul’s day, the disciples were the overwhelming majority.
All true believers are disciples who are committed to Him in obedience and willing to pray a price to follow Him. Anyone who is not Jesus’ disciple does not actually believe in Him, and they are not born again. But don’t take my word for it…study the New Testament yourself. You will come to the same conclusion.
