Ankerberg Show

Guest (Male): Welcome to the John Ankerberg Show Classics Edition. For decades we've been privileged to host esteemed scholars discussing a wide range of topics, from apologetics and science to biblical prophecy and beyond. Join us as we revisit these timeless conversations and make them accessible to you wherever you are.

What do you think is the main thing, the number one thing that Jesus wants every Christian in America, Canada, Central America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Philippines, and Australia to do? Jesus said, go and make disciples.

What is a disciple? How do you make a disciple? My guest today, who will tell us, is Robbie Gallaty, a man who pastors a church of 3,200 members and has four morning services, yet personally disciples seven or eight people each year. They, in turn, have gone on to disciple others. Now, if you have never discipled anyone, is it really possible you could do this? What are the practical things you need to know? Today, you will find out on this special edition of the John Ankerberg Show.

John Ankerberg: Welcome to our program. We are talking about the astounding facts of the world population and the folks that know Christ. Statistics say there are over seven billion people in our world today, and four and a half billion of those folks do not know the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ in scripture has given us as Christians today a plan for reaching all of those folks. It's called the Great Commission. We're to go and make disciples of all the nations. What does that mean? How do you carry it out? How do you do this in everyday life? We're talking about the practical aspects as well as the promises that are attached to this Great Commission.

I've invited one of the premier Bible teachers in our country, Robbie Gallaty, and I've asked him to explain these things from scripture. Robbie, today we want to talk about this thing. Jesus said, "Go and teach them to observe all the other things I've commanded you." Sounds like a tall order. How do you do that?

Robbie Gallaty: It's a good question. In the world, people obtain knowledge by filling their minds with intellectual information. But from scripture we see something very different. In scripture, we not only learn to know, but we learn to do. In the scripture, Jesus is always saying you need to know and do, you need to hear and heed, you need to learn and to live.

Now, the question is, what does Jesus want us to learn? He says it in the Great Commission: know it all. Think of the task here: know all that I've commanded you to do. What I'd like to do in this program is segment it into three progressions: the first one looking at Paul the teacher, secondly, Timothy the student, and then thirdly, the training of us. What does God call us to do and how do we observe all that he's commanded us to do?

First of all, the Apostle Paul is the greatest example of a teacher. Paul was radically converted, if you know Paul's testimony. Acts chapter 9, he's persecuting Christians. He's even at the death of Stephen, it says. And then in Acts chapter 9, he's on the road to Damascus. He sees a light, he hears a voice, the Lord Jesus Christ says, "Paul, Paul, you're persecuting me."

And then Paul goes blind. Ananias meets him later in Acts chapter 9, prays over him, the scales fall off his eyes. Paul can see now, and then it says he goes into Tarsus and begins to speak a little bit about the Lord. But the question is, what does Paul do after he's radically saved? You would think he'd go evangelizing or go preaching. But listen to what he says in Galatians chapter 1.

In the book of Galatians, we see early on Paul giving a testimony of his own life. Listen to verse 16: "I did not immediately consult with anyone," he says, "nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him for 15 days."

The natural question is, what did Paul do for three years? He went away into Arabia and I believe, and many commentators believe, he was discipled by the Lord Jesus Christ. He spent time with the Lord. Jesus would mentor him, teaching him the doctrines of the faith, teaching him all the things that he's commanded him.

The Bible Knowledge Commentary, I think, gets it right. Listen to the words of the commentator: "It is doubtful that he went there to evangelize, but rather to be away from men and alone with the Lord for personal study, meditation and to receive further revelation. This zealous student of the law now pondered the meaning of his conversion and looked for the things concerning Christ in the Old Testament. The product of these days in Arabia is the Christian theology that Paul explained in his epistle to the Romans."

Now, think of the similarities, John. The Lord Jesus Christ called 12 men to follow him, and Jesus spent three years discipling them. The Apostle Paul, even by his own admission, says, "I was one untimely born," but yet God, after calling him, sent him to Arabia and there it was that Jesus mentored him for three years, just like he mentored the disciples.

John Ankerberg: And that brings up the question, what did Jesus tell Paul that he passed on to us as well as lived out himself?

Robbie Gallaty: I think he told Paul to go live what you know. It's one thing to know things, but it's important for us as believers to put those into our life. The word in the Great Commission I want to focus in on is "observe." Jesus said, "Teach them to observe all that I've commanded." That word "observe" is an interesting word. It means to preserve, it means to watch over, but it also means to guard, to protect.

In the Bible, it's different than in the world. If I'm protecting something, normally you would think I'm standing guard and keeping people out. But the Bible's different. When a person preserves something or protects it, you protect that information by giving it away to someone. And that's what Paul was learning from the Lord Jesus Christ.

We see that all throughout scripture. Paul shows us in scripture the connection between learning and doing, or learning and living. Listen to what he says in Philippians chapter 3 verses 15 through 18: "Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that to you also. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Brothers, join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. For many of whom I've often told you and now with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ."

What he says is something interesting. He says, "Hold true." That means we need to abide and listen, not only to learn and know, but we need to live out what we know of the Lord Jesus Christ.

John Ankerberg: And he also said to walk. What does that word walk mean?

Robbie Gallaty: Walk is an amazing word. It's used all throughout the scriptures. In fact, when Jesus says, "Come follow me," what he's saying is "come walk after me." To walk after the rabbi not only meant that you knew what the rabbi knew, but you wanted to do what the rabbi did. This kind of walking is faith in action.

There are a lot of people who say, "I know about God" or "I know of God. I have faith of God or faith of Jesus." But even the devil would say that, and we know that from scripture. Did you know that the devil actually knows the doctrines of the faith better than most of our church members? In fact, he knows all the things about God. He was in heaven at one point. But the problem is he doesn't have saving faith.

James tells us that in James chapter 2 verse 18: "But someone will say you have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I'll show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God; you do well. Even the demons believe and they shudder." See, the difference between saving faith and the faith of demons is that saving faith always goes into action.

John, we don't work to be saved. We're saved by grace through faith. It is not of ourselves, according to Ephesians 2. It is a gift of God, so that no one can boast. We can't work to be saved, but once we are saved, we will work from our salvation.

John Ankerberg: As a result.

Robbie Gallaty: It's one thing to know grace; it's another thing to extend it. It's one thing to know mercy; it's another thing to show mercy. It's one thing to understand love; it's another thing to love the unlovable. And that's what Paul shows us all throughout the gospels and the Bible.

John Ankerberg: Also Jesus must have told him, "Listen Paul, you've got to share this with somebody else" because he started giving this knowledge to Timothy and he modeled what it is to be a discipler of somebody else. Tell us about Timothy.

Robbie Gallaty: You hit the nail on the head. Paul finds this young man named Timothy, probably at the age of 16. Timothy has a mother that's influential in his life and he has a grandmother, but his father's a Greek. We can deduce that Timothy was not influenced by his own father.

We get that from Second Timothy chapter 1 verse 5: "I'm reminded of your sincere faith," this is Paul talking. "A faith that first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and I am sure of this that dwells within you as well." Paul says, "Listen, I know that the reason you are the person you are, it's not from your father, it's from the investment of your mother and your grandmother."

Just an encouragement to moms at this point. There are a lot of single parents raising kids in this world. Just an encouragement if you are a single parent right now: it may be because of your faith and your desire to bring your kids to church that you may produce one day a Timothy.

John Ankerberg: I think that's fantastic. Paul also says to Timothy, "Guard what has been entrusted to your care." What does that mean?

Robbie Gallaty: He says guard the good deposit entrusted to you. Isn't it any wonder that Jesus Christ at the end of his life uses this same terminology? Jesus tells his followers, "Remember these things and observe all that I've commanded you." Same word, observe. It's the same concept. Paul tells Timothy, "Guard the good deposit entrusted to you."

Guarding it is to give it away, and Timothy understood this concept well. Paul says in case you missed it, let me tell it to you again. "You therefore my child," chapter 2 verse 1, "you therefore my child, be strengthened in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and which you've heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who are able to teach others also." Timothy knew from Paul that he not only needed to learn these things, but he needed to live this out in the lives of others.

John Ankerberg: One of the ways that Paul also taught Timothy was he took him with him on missionary trips.

Robbie Gallaty: You know John, I mentor nine guys and I try to teach them different things. We learn doctrine and theology and a couple months ago we were studying providential prayer: the connection between God knowing all things and God controlling all things, but yet he commands us to pray as believers.

They began to ask me the question, "Well if God knows all things, then why do we pray? If God controls all things, why do we pray?" I began to share with them that yes, God knows everything, but he's commanded us to pray. I showed them ways to pray and prayed with them in the office. Then I got an opportunity to go speak at a prison. I brought my three disciples with me, on-the-job training if you will. We took a field trip together.

As we went out, I began to preach and at the end of the message I gave an invitation for the inmates to respond to the gospel. Sure enough, by God's grace, men and women came to the front of a yellow line in the middle of this prison. The chaplain grabs me and says, "We have to go pray with these men." So naturally, I turned to my guys and I said, "We're going in." They said, "Me?" I said, "You better believe it, we're going in."

These men had been talking about prayer for weeks. In the middle of praying with men to receive Christ, I looked up about five minutes into it and I heard one of the guys I was mentoring weeping before the Lord, praying for a man. I looked to the left and I saw another guy who was bashful to pray, praying with inmates to receive Christ, weeping before the Lord. We got in the car and they began to high-five me and say, "Pastor that was unbelievable. We learned more about prayer today on the job training than we ever did in the office."

John Ankerberg: We're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about three great truths that every Christian needs to know and also pass along. Stick with us, we'll be right back.

We're back. We're talking with Robbie Gallaty, who is a great Bible teacher, and we're talking about the Great Commission. How do you carry it out? There are things that we need to learn, all right, and what are they, Robbie?

Robbie Gallaty: Up to this point John, we've seen in the life of Paul as a teacher that he learned from the Lord Jesus Christ and then he lived it out. He began to learn and to live out what he knew. Then we saw Paul investing in the life of Timothy. Timothy learned and now he lived it out. The question we need to ask ourselves is, what does God expect of me to learn?

Charles Spurgeon said this quote: "A Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who's not." We need to get into the word of God until the word gets into us. I've summarized this into three different doctrines. Within these three doctrines flows out all the other doctrines, but these are the three important doctrines that every believer must know.

The first one is justification. Justification is the legal declaration that God pronounces on the life of a believer. We see that in Romans chapter 3 verse 28: "For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law." This is a legal term. It's the idea of walking into a courtroom and the judge slams the gavel down and there's only one or two decisions: guilty or innocent.

When we come to the Lord Jesus Christ apart from works of the law, what that means is we can't do anything to be saved. We are desperate, we're in need of a savior, we are dead in our trespasses and sin. We did not choose God; he chose us first. Jesus said, "You didn't choose me, I chose you. You didn't love me first, I loved you. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son." So when we repent of our sin and we put our faith in Christ, God sees us as his own and we are justified in his eyes.

Secondly, not only justification but sanctification. Sanctification begins at the moment of salvation. What this means is the believer begins to be conformed into the image of Christ. We begin to listen to the word of God and to live out the word of God in our life.

There are two sections to sanctification. First of all, there is progressive sanctification. This is the process in the life of a believer where he's continually conformed into the image of Christ. We see this from Hebrews chapter 10: "For by one sacrifice he has perfected for all time those who are being made holy." The idea is we are constantly being conformed into the image of Christ.

There's also positional sanctification. We always talk about the process of being like Christ, but we forget that before the foundation of the world, God had chosen to make us holy. We get this from Hebrews 10 again in verse 10: "We have been sanctified," or have been made holy, "through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all." So we have justification, we have sanctification, which is the process that we look more like Christ.

Don't forget this: there's glorification. This is understanding the end times or future things. Understanding heaven, understanding hell, and understanding that one day we'll have a glorified body. We're going to leave this corruptible body and we will receive an incorruptible body.

John Ankerberg: In our sanctification we're growing more and more like Christ, but while we're here on earth we're never going to arrive. Some people are holier than the other guy because we're all growing at different paces in our life as the Lord opens up information to us. But when we get to heaven, there'll be no more growing. We'll be given glorified bodies and the fact is we won't be able to sin. There'll be no more temptation. Our tears will be wiped away. We'll be given these bodies that do not disease and decay and break down and hurt.

All of that will be gone. That's glorification. So you've got justification where we're declared righteous, progressive sanctification, or that one verse that you said: "By one sacrifice he's made perfect forever those who are being made holy." You've got them both in the same verse and then the end result will be glorified someday because Christ does that, giving us a new body.

Robbie Gallaty: We're going to talk in the next episode about the Christ life. It begins by faith, faith keeps us through the process as God works in us to work through us, and God will finish the process as Jesus said and as Paul said: "This work I began in you, I will bring to completion until the day of Jesus Christ."

Now here's the question: how do we live that out? I think that's what people are asking. It's doing what you know. Knowledge in the Bible is not power. In the Bible, knowledge is power when it's put into action. Believers, we know what to do, but the question is: are we living what we know?

There's a story I was told recently about someone parenting their child. John, you know that I have an almost two-year-old son and he's teaching us a lot about parenting and patience. He's cute as all get out and he's a handful, but he's incredible and he teaches us patience. I was talking to somebody about parenting and they said, "Robbie, this is the difference between disciplining someone based on rebellion and teaching based on ignorance."

Think about parenting. If the child acts up or acts out, you go to the child and you say, "You didn't know what to do." Now if the child responds and says, "Yes I did know what to do, Dad," you say, "No you didn't know what to do, because if you knew what to do, you would have done it. And because you didn't do it, it shows me you didn't know it." Now at that point you have a choice as a parent: do I discipline because it was rebellion or do I teach out of ignorance?

The question for church folks is this: are you not following the Lord out of rebellion or out of ignorance? Because if it's ignorance, it's one thing. But if it's rebellion, it's a whole different thing.

John Ankerberg: And then the Lord disciplines those who are in rebellion.

Robbie Gallaty: Yes. The Bible says the Lord disciplines those he loves. There are people today that have to make a decision whether they're going to rebel and ignore God's word or if they're going to start following it. You've got some great illustrations here of two men that made a decision and it really changed their life as well as the people around them. Who were they?

I want to tell you about two men, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. Sigmund Freud actually was raised in a family with a devout Jewish father. He was born in 1856 and he even had a Catholic nanny as a child that would take him to church. He even had a love for the Lord at a young age. But something happened in the life of Sigmund Freud: his father had to file bankruptcy. So instead of going to church and learning about God, he was forced to go into the world and make money for the family.

He would go on to college and in the 1870s he heard about Darwinism and started to read the writings of Darwin and turned from a casual following of the Lord to a full-blown atheist. One quote from him shows where he was at the time: "Religion may altogether be disregarded. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they were originated, the ignorant childhood days of this human race."

Freud believed that humans could create their own future, their own structure, and they shouldn't rely on religion to do that. In the 1930s he took his life in his own hands, he injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine and he committed suicide.

On the other hand, a man named C.S. Lewis had sort of a love for the Lord as a young boy. At the age of 10, he even prayed for his mother's healing. His mother was in the hospital sick, but he turned his back on God when God didn't answer that prayer. What's coincidental is that 42 years later, Freud began to influence C.S. Lewis. He began to read some of his writings and even went to study psychology in college.

But something happened to C.S. Lewis: someone gave him a copy of a New Testament in Greek. He began to read it in Greek and he began to be influenced by men like J.R.R. Tolkien and Barfield. He began to turn to the Lord. He made a profession of faith to God and God radically changed his life. Then he would go on to do a 15-minute broadcast around the country. People fell in love with this broadcast where he would take issues of faith and religion and explain them to people.

This became so exciting and so popular they put it into a book that we have today called *Mere Christianity*. Lewis has written a lot of books. He wrote *The Four Loves*, *A Grief Observed*, and *The Chronicles of Narnia*. What's interesting about these two stories, John, is that one man actually started with the Lord and with the word and turned away, and then another man had a casual belief in God, turned his back on the Lord, but at the end of his life came back to Christ. Two men, two paths, two destinies, two outcomes.

The question is: where are we going to wind up? I just want to say a word of encouragement to the one who's watching who maybe followed the Lord one time and has strayed away from God now. Maybe they had a relationship with God and have grown callous to the church or maybe grown numb to the commands of Christ. I would just encourage them by saying you can start today. How do I do that? You start with what you know. You start with the commands of God, you start with the word of God. A lot of people say, "I wish I knew what God was telling me to do." Well, you already know. He's already given it to us in his word. We can be encouraged today to know that we can start what we already know and we can do what we know.

John Ankerberg: All right. Next week we're going to continue this and we're going to continue with the promise in the Great Commission. Jesus says when you obey him you start to live out the Great Commission and you go and you teach and you make disciples of folks, he gives this promise: "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the earth." We're going to talk about all the great promises that are in that one promise next week, so stick with us.

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