Pillar 4 - Maturity / Discipleship - Digging Deeper
What Is Discipleship? A Review of the Goal and the Cost of Being a Disciple
The word discipleship is widely used and rarely defined precisely enough to practice — this pages examines the goal of discipleship and what it genuinely costs to be made into someone who can make other disciples.
Digging Deeper
Discover Discipleship
Scripture presents discipleship as the process of making followers of Christ into His likeness and training/equipping them to make disciples of others. It is a lifestyle that involves continual death to self and surrender to Christ. Matthew 28:18-20 records Christ’s final instructions: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Discipleship has two major goals. The first is your transformation into the likeness of Christ. Romans 8:29 states God’s purpose: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” This ongoing progression is described in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” As you can note this is a Spirit-empowered transformation.
The second goal is for each disciple to become disciple-makers. Colossians 1:28-29 describes Paul’s discipleship aim: “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” The goal then is to present every person mature in Christ. Ephesians 4: 12-15 portrays this maturity within the body of Christ: “… building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine … Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”
Scripture reveals that suffering is often God’s tool for producing mature disciples. Romans 5:3-5 teaches: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Accept hardship as training, character development and pruning to bear fruit. Accept hardship as identifying with Christ.
The cost of discipleship can be high. Grounded in the word of God, discipleship involves an allegiance to Jesus that supersedes all other relationships, including spouse, parents and children. Christ announced some of His most challenging words, recorded in Luke 14:26-27: ““If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” He concludes His statement in v 33: “So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”
These passages make it clear that discipleship may cost your reputation, security, family harmony or even life itself. Yet this leads to the paradox noted in Matthew 10:39 when Jesus states: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Trying to preserve your life on your own terms results in loss, while surrendering everything to Jesus results in true life. Luke 6:40 observes: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.”
Significantly, Jesus never created a two-tier system – ordinary believers versus devoted disciples. The call to discipleship is non-negotiable for followers of Christ. You cannot be a true Christian without being a disciple and you cannot be a disciple without making disciples. Christ’s presence through the Holy Spirit still empowers the Great Commission. The world still needs to hear and see the gospel embodied in your transformed life.
May you embrace the costly grace of discipleship. May you immerse yourself in God’s word, submitting to the Holy Spirit. May you invest in making mature disciples of Christ and so participate in the multiplication that fuels kingdom growth. “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” John 15:8
What Others Ask
Q. "What are Coleman's eight phases of Jesus's discipleship method and which is most commonly skipped?
A. Robert Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism identifies eight principles in Jesus's discipleship method: Selection (He chose a few), Association (He stayed with them), Consecration (He called for obedience), Impartation (He gave Himself), Demonstration (He showed them how), Delegation (He assigned them work), Supervision (He checked their work), and Reproduction (He expected them to do it with others). The most commonly skipped phase is Supervision — the intentional follow-up and accountability after someone is sent to do ministry. Modern discipleship programs are often strong on teaching but weak on sending, and almost entirely absent on supervising what was sent to do. Without supervision, delegation produces orphaned workers rather than multiplying disciples.
Q. What is the mathematics of 2 Timothy 2:2's four-generation vision?
A. 2 Timothy 2:2 encodes a four-generation chain: Paul (1) to Timothy (2) to 'faithful men' (3) who will teach 'others also' (4). If each generation takes one year to disciple the next, and each person disciples only one person per year, the multiplication after 30 years is staggering compared to addition. One person doing all the work themselves and adding one convert per week for 30 years produces roughly 1,560 people. One person discipling one to disciple one — multiplying four-generationally — produces a number that exceeds the world's population in 32 years of uninterrupted reproduction. The math is not realistic at that scale, but the principle is: addition cannot keep pace with the need; multiplication is the only mechanism that can.
Q. Why does Jesus use 'count the cost' language before the discipleship call in Luke 14?
A. Luke 14:25-33 presents Jesus turning to the large crowds following Him and explicitly discouraging shallow commitment. He uses two parables — the builder who calculates costs before starting a tower, and the king who assesses his army before going to war — to make one point: do not start what you are not prepared to finish. The crowds following Jesus were likely drawn by miracles, teaching, and momentum. Jesus does not celebrate the crowd; He challenges it. The count-the-cost language is not designed to drive people away but to produce genuine disciples rather than enthusiastic beginners who fall away when difficulty arrives. Jesus preferred a small, committed twelve over a large, unconvinced crowd.
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