foreign thank you for sitting down I wanted to ask you an important question many people regarding just their spiritual life understand that they need to be in the word of God need to be committed to a local church but I want you to speak to the importance and vitality of having a discipleship relationship or if it's a younger man there's an older godly man in his life that actually observes him that challenges him and this young man gets to watch this older man live as a dad as a husband speak to that importance okay well
first of all um back when I became a Christian and even prior to that the 70s and the 80s there was a lot about one-on-one discipleship everything was one-on-one discipleship in the multiplication of disciples but as I look back on that one of the reasons for the emphasis on personal discipleship was that the pulpits were so weak so we need to have one-on-one discipleship but it's not going to function unless we have expositors in the Pulpit so it's not a replacement yeah it's something that goes along with it and it is extremely important and um
so I don't want young people just to kind of get together with one person they need to be in the context of a local church they need to be sitting under expository preaching and they need to be in a church and this is an important aspect for discipleship they need to be in a church that isn't a Cowboy Church or a motorcycle church or a young church or an old church or a white church or a black church and my point is is that discipleship it can happen on a personal level but it also happens
even when we're not noticing it in the context of the local church so we want to talk about expository preaching absolutely necessary we want to talk about being in a healthy Church where people are all growing spiritually but then there's that thing of also mentorship in which um a person who may be they may be physically Young or they may be just young in the faith and they need to sit with other Christians in a more personal relationship one of the for me one of the most important passages in the scriptures that have to deal
with this um is this He Who Walks With wise men will be wise but the companion of fools will suffer harm we always hear from Scholars you know he who doesn't understand history will have to the mistakes of History will have to commit those same mistakes again and one of the things that you see particularly in the confessions the Westminster in the 1689 and the catechisms that come forth from that is is the handing down of the core of Christianity from one generation to another unchanged and so in discipleship I could go into scripture and
I need to I need to read this scripture as a new believer like crazy I need to eat it I need to consume it but I also need to do that in the context of people who've already tread this path and and it's going to help direct me when I became a new Christian at the University of Texas um people were kind of amazed like when I went home to my mom and her church how fast I had grown in a matter of two years but it wasn't because there was anything special about me when
I became a Christian there was a core group of about six or seven guys who had been Christians much longer who just literally suffocated me they took me in and they discipled me and because of that I grew now you mentioned some of those friends that have come alongside you right in regards to discipleship so would you say that there's both a friend element of sharpening and challenging and pushing towards the Lord and a pure level but then also this need to have someone older than you in your life absolutely um one of the things
that that's wrong today is when we segregate churches you know and even in a church that has older people and younger people we don't see them crossing the aisle and coming together I had those young men who were few years older than me that were discipling me but there was also a man by the name of brother Pittman who was around well everybody seemed old when I was young but I would say he was close to 80 years old yeah and he would talk to me he would seek me out at church and he would
hand me different books especially on prayer and piety and then just in the church setting going over to other people's houses who weren't you know 20 or 30 but were 60 and 70 and sitting down and talking to them about the faith it's very very important um another thing that's important is this you and I there's an age gap between us and there's a real sense in which we were raised in different worlds yeah you need my world but I also need yours and so when we talk about there's a relationship of discipleship between the
old and the young or the more mature and the less mature it's not just that this young person needs this person but this person also needs this person it's mutual it'll always be mutual you know when when um let me give an example you know when Jesus looks at the children and says you know let these little ones these little children come to me um sometimes what we begin to believe is that that's referring to brand new Christians and that you know if we're pastors or preachers or whatever we're in another category now that's not
true the little children he's talking about is everyone who comes to him we are all always little children who need him and so I need the older believer even now there are men that I call who are in their 80s and 90s and I'm 60. there are older men than me that I will call but they're also younger men than me that I will call we need each other and so let's hypothetically I'm a younger man or a younger women and I'm recognizing the need to have someone older in my life what's the best way
to go about this in a church setting would you just approach someone and say hey would you disciple me and what would that even look like I think first of all and you know but I want to bring this up it's prayer God sends someone into my life then I would recommend talking to those people who are already recognized as spiritual authorities because I might see someone in the congregation that appears to me as a young man to be very spiritual when in fact they're not so I would go to the elders and I would
say you know I really want to be mentored I know our church maybe I can't be mentored by an elder but are there is there a list of men that you would suggest that I could put myself under yeah and then lastly Paul you've touched on this already what do even you or what would I Rob myself of by not having these relationships in my life um your growth is just going to slow down and also you're going to commit a lot of errors that aren't necessary you know um when I teach like sometimes just
recently a father brought his son over to my house and said you know my son wants to learn how to shoot a longbow mm-hmm um so that young boy could have gone out into a field or the woods and started shooting a bow and he would never have become a very good Archer bring them to me and I'm going to teach him all kinds of things that he needs to do he doesn't have to relearn it I'm going to teach him about his eyes where his feet should be how his shoulders should be and so
instead of him Reinventing the wheel yeah and probably making a wheel that's somewhat Square he comes to me and in one day I can in in a matter of an hour and a half I could set him on a path that made him a lot better Archer yeah it's the same thing with discipleship that's very helpful thank you Paul for your time thank you
