9 Ways to Root Your Disciple-Making in the Power of the Holy Spirit
Implications for Missional Living Today
The advance of God’s kingdom through evangelism and discipleship in the first century was clearly grounded in the ministry of the Holy Spirit and prayer. The original disciples, no doubt familiar with the role of the Spirit in Hebrew Scripture, must have marveled at his ministry lived out before them in Jesus’s life (Acts 10:38). But to personally experience the Holy Spirit’s activity working in and through them in such powerful ways must have been absolutely astounding.
But what about today? The miraculous spread of the early church across the Roman Empire seems like ancient history. We may find it difficult to imagine a similar sweeping movement in our modern world. The Great Commission, however, still applies to every single follower of Christ in every generation. Jesus’s command to make disciples of all nations remains just as compelling. And now, when the world population has mushroomed to eight billion people, the scope of the command appears even more staggering. Our minds may quickly jump to tools, methods, and programs. These have their place, but the priority still rests on the one thing Jesus said we need first and foremost—the power of his indwelling Spirit. Jesus’s promise to accompany and empower believers is just as true today as it was for the original disciples. The reality of the Holy Spirit’s ministry is just as breathtaking now as it was then.
Steps toward Appropriating the Presence and Power of the Holy Spirit Today
1. Awaken to the reality that we are sanctuary people. Like the Corinthians, we need repeated reminders that we are temple people, both as a corporate community (1 Cor. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16) and as individual believers (1 Cor. 6:19). Just as in the early church, the Father and Son have taken up residence in the life of every bornagain believer through his Spirit. To be a disciple is to have the indwelling Holy Spirit. As Richard Foster points out, “This dynamic, pulsating with-God life” on display in the pages of Scripture should be the normal experience of every Christ follower.1
Confident Witness
David S. Dockery
Written by scholars from various Christian universities, these essays explore evangelism, discipleship, and apologetics to help educators and students understand the importance of sharing the gospel in every generation.
2. Be filled with the Spirit. We need to consciously obey “the ultimate imperative in the Pauline corpus”: Ephesians 5:18–19.2 This present-tense admonition and its attached participles—speaking, singing, giving thanks, and submitting to one another—indicate that worship and praise should continually well up in the lives of believers. The verb form is passive voice: God does the filling, but we do the yielding. Where we have crammed worthless substitutes into the Spirit’s rightful place, we must repent. We ask him to empty us of our sin, shame, and selfishness; we invite him to fill us with himself—continually.
3. Become a people who display the life of Christ. Because God’s temple is holy, we are called to be holy (1 Cor. 3:17).3 Instead of conforming to the darkness that presses in on every side, we must allow the indwelling Holy Spirit to conform us to the very likeness of Christ. Practicing his presence, we live every moment of every day as if Jesus is right beside us—because he is! Walking in the Spirit continuously allows him to produce in us an orchard of spiritual fruit (Gal. 5:22–23). Our spiritual transformation lends credibility to the reality of our message. As believers, we should radiate the life, love, and hope of Christ before a watching world.
4. Recognize that “with-ness” is for witness. As wonderful as it is to experience the fellowship of the Spirit, we must not think the Spirit-filled life is just for our own spiritual formation and edification. His power is in us for the spread of his kingdom (Acts 1:8).4
5. Pray in the Spirit. Not only is prayer communion with God; it is also partnership in God’s mission. Prayer plays a crucial role in witness. We can ask God to show us where he’s working and make a list of people for whose salvation we will pray on a regular basis.5 We pray that the Lord would soften their hearts and make them curious about the gospel, that the Spirit would convict them of sin and bring them to repentance. We pray that the Spirit would give us wisdom, spiritual insight, the words to speak, and a life that reflects the God who lives within us. We need to develop the crucial habit of asking the Father—daily—to use us to share the gospel.
6. Open our eyes to the harvest. Recognize that people today are just as thirsty as ever, desperately trying to slake their parched longings with everything under the sun. We ask the Lord to give us his love for the lost and ideas about how to serve them. Mourning over the spiritual and moral decline of our day, we plead with the Father for a great outpouring of his Spirit. As Jesus commanded, we should pray for more laborers to join the harvest. Emulating Paul’s prayers, which pulsate with the mission of God, we should ask for boldness; for open doors, open mouths, and open hearts; and for the gospel to advance rapidly throughout the world. We lift our eyes to the horizon, remembering that God’s mission extends to the ends of the earth.
7. Follow the Spirit’s leading. We must be intentional about looking for opportunities to share the gospel with individuals on our prayer lists, but we also anticipate that the Spirit will orchestrate divine appointments with people we haven’t met yet. We request discernment to recognize people’s functional idols and functional saviors; we ask for biblical passages and spiritual analogies that will resonate. It’s imperative that we develop gospel fluency, but we also depend on the Spirit to give us words to speak in the moment. Just as the Spirit magnifies Jesus, our witness should also focus on Jesus—his life and teachings, his passion and his kingdom.
The divine resident living within us will empower us to fulfill his Great Commission, just as he did the original disciples.
8. Remember the goal of witness is “with-ness.” While “with-ness” is, in part, for witness (point 4, above), the ultimate goal is communion with God. Foster urges us not to reduce evangelism and discipleship to “formulas for admittance to heaven instead of a call to a rich, God-soaked life.” In place of a “gospel of sin management,” Dallas Willard commends “discipleship evangelism.”7 In other words, sharing the gospel communicates not only what we are saved from but also what we are saved for: to be a temple of the living God. When we call people to repent and believe the gospel, we need to share that they receive forgiveness and the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). The Spirit gives them eternal life, and the Spirit-filled life starts immediately. We need to teach new believers to walk in the Spirit and equip them to share their faith as they become disciple makers who make disciples. Paul’s prayers are helpful models for how to pray for new believers as they begin to grow and mature.
9. Live as deployed people. At this point we may be feeling a bit overwhelmed, somewhat like the original disciples who received the Great Commission. You may be thinking: Who, me? This isn’t what I signed on for! This kind of work is only for ministry majors! It may help to remember that Jesus’s original disciples were not rabbis; they were fishermen, a tax collector, a political zealot. Jesus intentionally selected ordinary people for his extraordinary mission. You don’t have to change your career plans, but you do need to hold them in an open hand. As Christopher Wright has observed, “We ask, ‘Where does God fit into the story my life?’ when the real question is where does my little life fit into this great story of God’s mission.”8 We need to close the Sunday-Monday gap by viewing all aspects of our lives in light of God’s mission, because that truly is our mission!
So how can you leverage your job, your profession, your relationships for making disciples? The Lord may lead you to explore where occupational opportunities in your field intersect with great spiritual and physical needs around the world. Even our increasingly post-Christian / never-Christian setting in North America calls for an “infiltration strategy,” one that capitalizes on the reality that “believers are already dispersed throughout the culture—embedded in schools, companies, and communities where they study, work, and live.”9 Observing that this army is dispersed but silent, Jeff Iorg argues for their deployment. They must be mobilized: sent on mission to make disciples as they go. We are sanctuary people wherever God has placed us. The divine resident living within us will empower us to fulfill his Great Commission, just as he did the original disciples. Living as deployed people on mission with the indwelling Spirit of Christ is the most challenging and thrilling adventure imaginable.
Notes:
- Richard J. Foster, Life with God: Reading the Bible for Spiritual Transformation (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 7 (emphasis original).
- Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 722.
- Meditating on the somber preparations for the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16) helps us better appreciate the astounding access we have to God’s presence through Christ (Heb. 10:19–22).
- Sometimes believers emphasize one over another: spiritual formation or missional living. The truth, however, is that these two concepts dovetail closely, since the presence of God is the cornerstone for both. See Nathan Finn and Keith Whitfield, eds., Spirituality for the Sent: Casting a New Vision for the Missional Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017).
- Think through specific categories of relationships: family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances.
- Foster, Life with God, 123.
- Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 41, 304 (emphasis original).
- Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 533–34.
- Jeff Iorg, “Prioritize Personal Evangelism” (convocation sermon, Gateway Seminary, Fall 2019), Baptist Press, September 3, 2019.
This article is by Susan Booth and is adapted from Confident Witness: Evangelism and Apologetics for the 21st Century, edited by David S. Dockery.
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