Thoughts on discipleship

One of the principles that is at the heart of Jesus's plan or vision for Christianity is spiritual multiplication. Jesus, he invested most of his time during his public life on twelve people. And of course, these twelve people then went out, and Christianity spread all around the world.

How did that happen? Discipleship and spiritual multiplication. Because if twelve people go out and work with twelve people, and then those people go out and work with twelve people each, it adds up very, very quickly. In fact, it compounds astoundingly quickly. But one of the things that is missing in our churches is discipleship.

Very often we haven't been discipled. We haven't sat at the feet of Jesus and allowed him to disciple us. And so, in turn, we're not able to disciple other people. And so there are two things that we should think about very seriously. One is, okay, how am I being discipled? Am I sitting at the feet of Jesus enough so that he can disciple me? Am I allowing other great Christian voices to disciple me so that I can in turn go out and disciple other people? That was Jesus's plan. His plan wasn't one person going out and discipling ten million people. His plan was you going out and discipling a dozen people in a really, really powerful way. That's what he did, you know?

We talk a lot about being like Jesus. We talk a lot about Jesus as a role model. He picked twelve. He focused on twelve. And I think very often we overlook that. We overlook that. And we should be on both sides of that. We should be on the side of, okay, we need to be discipled. We need to be transformed into disciples of Jesus, and then we need to be constantly encouraged and inspired as disciples of Jesus, because it is very easy to get discouraged. But then we also need to go out. We're called to disciple other people. And that is the powerful principle of spiritual multiplication, which is right at the core of Jesus's vision for Christianity.

Matthew Kelly