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0:02 - Participant 1 as a pastor of a church, but actually just personally as a pastor of a church, and then to challenge you to do it. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about my struggles with it. I'll tell you a little bit about what I've been learning and getting more and more right. And then I think the benefit of you doing that too. So I'll tell you some stories. I grew up in a small, medium-sized Southern Baptist church East Texas, Tyler, Texas, anybody know Tyler? And yeah, it was a good church, that's all I knew. My parents were believers, and my uncle went to Baylor University, came home on the weekends and used to be a youth director at this little New Baptist church. And so my grandfather told the other kids, if you want to stay in the will, go to church on the weekends to support your brothers so we would. I was five before I ever went to church. 0:50 - Participant 2 He left, my parents stuck, they became believers. 0:53 - Participant 1 Later, maybe, not sure, My dad died last year, never really walked with Jesus much after that. He fell away from the Lord. I never had my parents read the Bible to me, never talked to me about that. We never prayed. 1:09 - Participant 2 I didn't grow up in a home that ever, I never heard the word discipleship. 1:14 - Participant 1 Even in my church, although I went to Sunday school, Sunday morning, went to church, went to youth choir at four, youth Bible study at five, and church at six, because I wanted to go to heaven. 1:25 - Participant 2 I also went to Tuesday night visitation and Wednesday night church. 1:28 - Participant 1 Like, man, I just did it all. And I learned the Bible that way, and I'm so thankful for people who taught me. 1:34 - Participant 2 But I didn't know what it meant to be a Cycloid. 1:36 - Participant 1 I literally had never heard that word. I knew the word Cycloid, but I'm like, oh, what does that mean? But I went to church, and I learned the Bible. And somehow, I mean, the Spirit of God, by the grace of God, you know. I never took a vacation from Jesus. I kept walking with Jesus all through high school, all through college. I started learning how to pray. I stole a little, I went to the, like, senior adult Sunday school class at my church, and they had a little thing called My Daily Bread. It was a devotional. And, like, I stole it. And I took it home, and I started reading my Bible every night. My parents got divorced when I was 14. I lived with my grandparents when I was 15. They were wealthy. They built like a wing of their house, and that was cool, but I was so lonely. 2:17 - Participant 2 Every night, I listened to the radio, because on their TV, they were watching, like, Golden Girls, you know? 2:23 - Participant 1 And so I'm like, I'm going to do that. 2:26 - Participant 2 So I listened to the radio. Anybody know what a radio is? 2:29 - Participant 1 So I listened to the radio. I listened to Chuck Smith, the President of California Catholic Chapel. 2:33 - Participant 2 And then I listened to Tony Evans every night on my little Christian radio station. 2:39 - Participant 1 And they taught me how to read the Bible. So I would read the Bible, then I'd listen to the sermon, then I'd read it on my own. And then I'd get the little My Daily Bread thing, I'd read like the half of a verse it had in there, the little story that was not well written, but somebody's gotta have a place to write something, and then I'd question at the end. So, you know, it was like a passionate publication, you know? 3:00 - Participant 2 And so I started writing in a prayer like that on my own. 3:05 - Participant 1 And I'm like, man, I just, I wish that I would have somebody sort of walk with me through this. I had great new pastors and great school teachers. But I started learning about disciple-making. And even through seminary, another seminary, being a pastor of a church, I still didn't learn. So it's things like discipleship.org that helped me learn that I needed a making of a disciple personal. I got to tell you, I've been a Greek pastor a long time. Small, medium, big-sized churches, building student ministries. And do those things, and I still had never really personally discipled anybody for years. I had to learn how to do that. I'm still learning. I'm still growing. And I got into a thing where I'm like, I really want to build contexts, like in churches, where the entire context is about discipling. And so I really spent my life doing that, like thinking, praying, studying, working, like to build a context Like, I want the whole context of everything we do to be about the discipleship. 4:11 - Participant 1 And so we, like, created, like, church projects, this idea of diverse discipleship communities. 4:17 - Participant 1 And, like, we went hard at it now 16 years. It's been hard. It's been beautiful. It's been brutal. It's been all those things. But we're just trying to figure that out together. And still on the side, I'm like, I've got to get better at this. So here are a few things. That I've wrestled with. I've had to believe this, and I didn't used to believe this, but I know it's true. I mean, go and make disciples, baptizing them, like, as we've read that verse now, we know discipleship actually happens pre-conversion. Which is something I never thought of 4:52 - Participant 1 I thought discipleship happened before conversion. 4:54 - Participant 1 And let me tell you how that's changed me. It taught me that it's very important for me to not separate and pre-conversion from the conversion aspect to the cyclist thing. But I didn't know how to do it. I mean, I had like my old, baddest F-A-I-T-H stuff, but that didn't really work with real lost people. 5:12 - Participant 2 You know, the bridge thing, I didn't know it. Hey, can I draw you something? 5:15 - Participant 1 You know, a bridge here and a bridge here. And so, I'm like, how does this work for me in a real conversation with people? So, I had to build something for my pre-conversion conversations. 5:27 - Participant 2 I had to build it for myself. 5:28 - Participant 1 So, what I have done in my own personal discipleship of people, pre-conversion and post-conversion, has now created tools that thousands of people use. So I'm gonna tell you a tool, for example, that I use for my own pre-conversion discipleship, and it would be what we call good God gospel. I'm like, how in the world do I have a conversation with somebody who doesn't care about Jesus? I'm gonna give you two examples of this. One is a guy whose restaurant I would go sit at every week I do that now. 5:57 - Participant 2 I sit at the same table at the same restaurant on almost the same day of the week when I'm having all my meetings with people, and I get to those services. 6:05 - Participant 1 So this one guy, I sat in his section pretty much every Tuesday for my lunch. So I'd be rotating with different people. When I'm beside with people, I'll do it over lunch, or I'll do it over coffee, or do it over...sometimes I just go out, you know, dessert somewhere and sit there. I'll have like three, four, five individual meetings a day with people. And in addition to the I would call him Jay, I would sit there, and I got to know him over weeks and then months, and we got to be friends, and finally one day, he said, what do you do? And I said, what do you think I do? 6:41 - Participant 2 And he said, are you an attorney? 6:43 - Participant 1 I said, I shouldn't have been. I said, are you working oil and gas? I said, I wish I did. And he said, what do you do? And I said, I'm a pastor. He said, no, blanky blank what? Which was a great compliment. He didn't think I was a blanket-eating pastor. Because if you give yourself away as a pastor too early, it ruins everything. There's another guy at a place where I shop, a store I go to, my wife and I, every Friday we do pretty much the same thing together. It's my favorite day of the week. My kids not know his name and pray for them. He's on my 247 prayer list at now thousand people in our church. I'll be meeting some types of people. Hopefully they're a long store off of 247, because we pray on the weekdays, Acts 247, Lord added their number to their number daily, those who are being saved. 7:54 - Participant 2 So on my 247 prayer list is this guy's name. 7:56 - Participant 1 I pray for him. But I need to give a pre-conversion conversation with this guy. So how do I do it? I looked at the ways of Jesus, and he would always have a good conversation that then turned into a God conversation that turned into a gospel conversation. Like, Jesus was so good. 8:10 - Unidentified Speaker What did he do? 8:12 - Participant 1 Good God Gospel Conversation. 8:14 - Participant 2 So now we have goodgodgospel.com. 8:16 - Participant 1 We built these icons here, and see, this is how I have a gospel conversation with people. I just tell these people, look man, everything was beautiful. Why'd we see all this beauty? But everything got broken. 8:27 - Participant 2 Because the guy that I'm talking with, while my wife is shopping somewhere, we start talking about life and good stuff, and then he's like, why do bad things happen to people? 8:36 - Participant 1 Why did my nephew, why did this just happen? And I'm like, Jess, he's like, why would God let that happen? I'm like, do you see any good in the world? And he's like, I do. I'm like, where did that come from He's like, I don't know. I'm like, if you're going to attribute the bad to God, where are you going to attribute the good? I'm like, let me tell you. So I'm like, God made all this good stuff, and then it got cracked, man. The world got broken. And it infected all of us. And we didn't know what to do about it. 9:02 - Participant 2 And so we tried to fix ourselves, but that's not working. We tried to fix the world, but it's not working. To climb our way up to God and fix it, but it's not working. Since we couldn't get to God, He got to us. 9:13 - Participant 1 He came down to us, because we couldn't get to Him. And that's the crib. That's Christmas. That's what I'm telling God. God came down to us. And dude, just like with that new suffering, and I suffered a new suffering, He suffered too. He was born because we're born. He lived because we lived. He suffered because we suffered. He died because we died. And you know what he did that we couldn't do. He rose back to life, because we can't defeat death. But he showed us his life is more powerful than death. And I just tell him this story, and I'm like, I need to create something so I can show him the story. So now we've got people with these tattoos. Is that where a zoo tattooed in Jerusalem, by the way? No, it's just there, I just got one. So I saw his wrist, it was a zoo tattoo. I saw, look, they were good tattoos. I had to create tools for this. 247, Good God Gospel. Now somebody becomes a believer. I'll tell you another story of a man in our city, pretty well known. He's a chef. Joe Rogan said it's the best meal he's ever had. He has a restaurant right here in the Willis. I baptized him in our foyer this year. And the dude, you know, doesn't know what to do. 10:16 - Participant 2 Doesn't know how to pronounce Bible names. Doesn't know, but he sits in our church and he loves it. 10:21 - Participant 1 So let me tell you what I do. So we meet. 10:23 - Participant 2 He wants to meet for breakfast. I don't like breakfast. I hate getting up early. I'm never going to come to your 7 o'clock meeting. I'm sorry. 10:31 - Participant 1 I hate getting in cold water with my kids, but I do it because I love them. I hate going to breakfast, but I did it for this guy because I love him so much. We had breakfast, and then I sent him this text. 10:42 - Participant 2 Here's what it said. Hey, buddy. I super enjoyed the time I talked today. 10:46 - Participant 1 I'm really encouraged by the way you're living your life. All the changes that I've seen, the new direction, it's awesome. 10:52 - Participant 2 Here are the three things we discussed today. 10:54 - Participant 1 A long obedience to the same direction, man. This is a life. 10:57 - Participant 2 Let's just keep walking together for a long time. 11:00 - Participant 1 You just got baptized. You're on a high. But let's keep walking this out. I want you to have rhythms of rest. And I'm worried about you being able to sustain this life that you're living. Big stuff's happening. Just cooking the masters for all these pro golfers. But I want you to rest for your marriage sake, for this sake. And then I want you to spend time with God every day. And then I timed out time with God every day for him. 11:21 - Participant 2 I said, here's what time I got every day. I want you to start five minutes of silence. No phone, no music, no computer. 11:26 - Unidentified Speaker No talking to God. 11:27 - Unidentified Speaker Just be still. 11:28 - Participant 1 Then five minutes of prayer. I want you to talk to God about honesty, where you are, what you need from Him, and who you think He is. Then I want you to read a psalm. Start with this one. 11:37 - Participant 2 Read slow. 11:38 - Participant 1 Then I want you to read a proverb. I want you to do the one for the day. Here's how you think about a proverb. Then I want you to read through the gospel, little by little every day. Start with this one. Read low and slow. And then I want you to do a final prayer, and here's what you say. Like, I just want to help these people wherever they are. It's my greatest joy. I like that more than I like this. I just like it more. And it's not always like that. I can read you another text from a guy whose first name starts with L, so I call him L. I had breakfast with him. And I hate having breakfast with people, but if I can have a second, maybe I'll do it. He talked 96% of the time. I told him, if I meet with you again, you cannot talk 96% of the time. 12:24 - Participant 2 He said, I think maybe I talk like 70%. 12:27 - Participant 2 I said, no, maybe I'll give you 94.5%. 12:29 - Participant 1 But you talk so much, you didn't dance too much. This is the text that I sent. Here's the text I sent. He's super wealthy. Nobody talks to him the way I do. 12:41 - Participant 2 But I said, I don't need anything from you, man. I just love you. 12:45 - Unidentified Speaker Here's the text. 12:46 - Unidentified Speaker Good morning. 12:47 - Unidentified Speaker Hope your week's off to a good start. 12:48 - Participant 1 I'm making some notes for you to frame the direction that we're going to walk in together. That we agree to. We want all of our thoughts to be based on truth, so we're going to reframe the way you think about everything. It's not how much of the Bible you know, because you know a lot, and that hasn't helped you a lot. It's about the way you've been thinking about life and God and others and self, and you need to be completely changed in the way you think. Rethinking is going to start with an ambition that you need to change the way you've been thinking, and second, a willingness and a wanting to do that, and then a commitment to do that. Like, I'm meeting with people. I'm following up with them. I'm having breakfast with them. I would rather do that. It energizes me more than speaking to thousands of people on a Sunday morning. I just love it. So frankly, I do all this so that thousands of other people will be doing what I'm doing. I don't care so much about what happens in this room on Sunday if it's not translating to Everybody that comes here is going to go pray for people on their 247 list, learn how to share the gospel through goodgodgospel.com, have seven of seven things that people need to know and grow so I can help these people walk through this. If it's not translating beyond this room into them doing it, it's not working. And that's all I care about. And so if it's not working, I want to fix it. So we got stuff to figure out. But I just want to challenge you. I don't know your church context. Maybe you didn't plan it. I got a little freaked because I did. Maybe you don't have a lot of room to wiggle, but we do because we're a little bit different. But I just want to challenge you. If whatever you're doing is not translating to people out there doing the same thing, I think you've got a problem. And I think what's worth giving our life to is that we practice this on our own. We go really do the work. Sit down at tables with people, we help them take their next step. 14:47 - Participant 2 We know the obstacles they have in their life. We sort of even know the tool they need to move to the next step, the text they need to move to the next step. 14:55 - Participant 1 Like, the more we do that on our own, the more we understand the struggles that our people in our seats have with that. Man, this is worth giving our life to. I just want to tell thinking about, how can I get whoever comes into the room to do what I'm doing on my own personally in their life? I had a call one time, somebody was through some podcast, they heard me in Australia, and they're like, hey, I know what you're doing, you're making these discipleship podcasts, what's your approach to evangelism? And I knew what they were asking, but I'm able to say it, and he was saying, since you don't use Sunday as a big evangelistic thing, it's about discipleship, what's your approach to evangelism? And I said, evangelism. Would you pray with me for a moment? This is what we do every Sunday. 16:08 - Unidentified Speaker Would you just take a second to be still? 16:10 - Unidentified Speaker We ask our people, we give them a minute at the end of every sermon to go, what will you do with what you've heard? 16:22 - Unidentified Speaker What will you do? 16:36 - Unidentified Speaker I mean you. 16:49 - Participant 2 Did they leave you breakfast? 17:27 - Participant 1 Maybe today he says, God, help me be an incitement maker so that I can help other disciples. Jesus, thank you for your grace in the nine of us. There, yes. We all have so far to go, but I pray that because of being here, because of this day, this moment, that we would just maybe start to dial a little bit more to the next step, the next surrender, the next obedience, the next decision. 18:16 - Unidentified Speaker Help us make disciples so that we can help others. 18:20 - Unidentified Speaker We love you Jesus. 18:23 - Unidentified Speaker It's all about you. 18:26 - Unidentified Speaker You're the gift. 18:27 - Participant 1 We pray this with your great name. Amen. 18:37 - Participant 2 Would you join me in singing this to the Lord together? ♪ My Jesus, my Savior ♪ there ♪ is not like you ♪ ♪ All of my days I've lost in faith, wonders of my heart ♪ I am. Never cease to worship You. We shout to the Lord, all the earth, let us sing. Power and majesty praise to the King. Mountains bow down, and the seas will. I just want to live today. Let me know, and what the bond is worth. Year. Good.