The sermon 'Thoughts On a Discipleship Journey' emphasizes four key components for a successful discipleship journey: transparency, humility, intentionality, and discipling others. Transparency is crucial, as it allows individuals to be open about their struggles and be held accountable, preventing hidden sins from growing unchecked. Humility is vital, as it opens the door for learning and growth, helping individuals recognize they do not have all the answers. Intentionality involves actively seeking wisdom and guidance from those more experienced. Discipling others, when appropriate, enhances accountability and encourages personal growth. The sermon references Biblical teachings, such as 1 John 1:5-10, which stresses walking in the light and being honest about one's sins. Through real-life examples, the speaker illustrates the importance of these principles, emphasizing that being known by others and being accountable leads to spiritual growth and freedom.

So the first area where you can be helped in your discipleship journey is transparency. You can't be helped on a discipleship journey if you're not honest with those closest to you. This was evident to me several years ago. We had a couple of pretty serious church discipline issues in the church. And I remember with the first one, as I sat back and observed what was happening, there was so much being uncovered that no one had any idea of, at least the majority of the church had no idea of.

And I thought, how does this happen? How is this even possible that this could happen? And at least one way that that happens is by lack of transparency. We're keeping that inside and sin doesn't start with the end in mind. It starts with this one thing that you'll give yourself over to, and then it continues to build and continues to build, and as you continue to cover and hide that sin, that lack of transparency doesn't allow others in to help you in that regard.

This doesn't mean that you tell everyone everything. You can overshare. We don't want to do that. But rather that you have a few choice people that God has put into your life that you're completely open and honest with. I heard one pastor say that he's got several in his church that if you came to any of them and said, hey, I've got this dark secret to share about the pastor, they wouldn't bat an eye because they know everything about that pastor's life because he's let them in to keep him accountable.

They know there's nothing else that could be known about him. Our default position as we go about our Sundays at church and our Wednesday nights when we're around one another is this conversation of, how are you? Good, I'm good, How are you? I'm good as well. And then that's pretty much the end of it.

It's just the same way that we talked about the weather when we're on calls at work. It's just what we do. It's how we talk. There's a few ladies in the church who have defaulted to immediately after that, if there's time, you now say, not really, how are you? Implying, I'm one of those ones that you can let me in on the transparency side and I really want to know how your life's going.

Tell them, we've got time now. I think we should look for opportunities like that. Again, with those close few that you let in, look for those opportunities where you can really do that. I so appreciate brothers who excel at this. When you ask them, how are you doing, the first word might be out of their mouth, I'm really struggling.

And then you know there's that interchange about to happen that can be so helpful in helping us on that discipleship journey. In 1 John chapter 1 verses 5 through 10 says, This is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you, That God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His Word is not in us." Now certainly this idea of walking in the light and being in the light brings with it this idea of correct doctrine and truth and moral purity, but it's also the word implies that there's being known, walking in the light is being known by others. There's not a life of secret sin that you're hiding from others, but you're walking in the light. What's to be known is exposed. And then lastly, being transparent with one another, living this life with being known opens up the ability to be held accountable.

We can't be held accountable when we're not transparent with one another and letting one another in. And so by doing so, we can be held accountable. And we'll talk more about accountability in one of the latter points. So that's our first way to be helped in a discipleship journey is transparency. Second is humility.

Simply put, if you think you have all the answers, you can't be helped. If you think you have everything already figured out, you can't be helped. Pride will get in the way of anyone who's trying to teach you. And the tricky part about pride is you usually don't know when you're being prideful. At least that's that's been my example.

When I was in high school our church did a youth led Sunday and they invited some youth to get up and give their testimony And so I got up and spoke to the church about how God had been working in my life and years later I found that my notes from that and was looking at it and the the shorting version of it was Me me me. I hope you figure it out like I figured it out And yes, I was saved God had saved me but a lot of it was my pride. It was what I had done, what I had learned. I had a lot to learn about humility. I've heard a pastor say that, and this ring's so true, with me and I've heard others echo this is that when you're 20 you think you have it all figured out you think you know everything and then when you're 30 you look back on the 20 year old self and you realize how much of an idiot you were and how little you knew and all the mistakes you made and then when you become 40 you look back on the 30 year old self and say wow how much I had left to learn and that continues to go on in life in 1st Peter 5 verses 5 through 6 says likewise you who are younger be subject to the elders clothe yourself all of you with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Humble yourself therefore under the mining head of God, so that at the proper time he may absolve you. So with humility comes the opportunity for us to be exalted by God, but also how terrifying it is to think that with pride that we are being opposed by God. That's an awful awful place to be being opposed by God because of our pride. So the second way to be helped in a discipleship journey is through humility. Third, intentionality.

Once we're coming out of place from humility and we recognize that there's many people around us that can help us, we should be intentional about seeking that wisdom like we've already heard earlier in the day from those who have gone before us. Proverbs 12-15 says, The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice." Proverbs 5 verses 1 and then verses 12 through 14. There's a father giving his son advice on adultery and in verse 1 he says my son be attentive to my wisdom and climb your ear to my understanding so that you may keep discretion and then he goes on to warn about the adulteress and how she can be so tempting how her words are like honey dripping from her lips. And then later he goes on after verses 12-14 to talk about how his son should be satisfied and intoxicated even by his own wife as a means of protection against that. But what we see is he plays this out in a negative way so that we can see the warning of what will happen should we give in to this temptation.

And afterwards what would be said is, in verse 12, beginning of verse 12, how I hated discipline and my heart despised her proof. I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors. I'm at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation. So this is the negative example of what happens when we don't listen to an instruction, when we're not intentional about seeking it. So likewise, we should take the positive inverse of that, like it mentions in verse one, of us keeping discretion or good judgment.

And then lastly, discipling others. This is certainly a comes with a caveat of when appropriate. You should not think that the moment you're saved you're going to rush in and start being ready to teach everybody about what you've learned in the past day or two. This goes along with the great commission that was mentioned earlier of making the cycles of the cycles. So this isn't like I said not Not when you're very young in the faith, you don't have the experience, you don't have the knowledge to do so, but when appropriate.

And there's a few things at play here. You can imagine that when getting up to give a talk like this, that we don't just show up and shoot from the hip of the thoughts that we're gonna share here today. There's intentional time of preparing. You've heard Jim said earlier that, you know, as the days leading up to this, and you know, the weeks leading up to this, we've been meditating on these verses that we're gonna bring, we've been meditating on these thoughts. There's opportunity to prepare and to dwell in the Word and dwell on these things.

And so similarly when you teach or you disciple someone, you dwell on the things that you're going to teach them. And you are putting yourself in the teacher's seat so that you therefore need to learn things that you might not necessarily learn. And on that note, they will also come to you and ask questions. People interpret things differently and think of things differently. Disciples will come and ask you questions that maybe have never even been on your radar and give you an opportunity to pursue things that you would not have otherwise thought of.

And then lastly and probably most importantly there's increased accountability by putting yourself in the teacher's seat it drives more accountability as you're more closely scrutinized and you just don't want to let others down that are around you on the human plane. In Matthew chapter 7 verses 3 through 5 it says, Why do you see the speck that's in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that's in your own eye. Or how can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye when there's a log in your own eye? You hypocrite. First take the log out of your own eye, and then you'll see clearly that it's taken the speck out of your brother's eye.

And so this is front of mind when we're discipling others is how can I possibly try to help them with aspecking as I if I haven't scrutinized and looked at my own life in this regard? And then lastly is this, I'll end with this note is just the idea of not letting others down. This is, I've found this to be incredibly, incredibly powerful in life, of just having the accountability of others. I'll share a story with you. There was a co-worker and we were in a meeting room together, just the two of us with the door shut, and he spun his laptop around to show me something work related, and when he went to click on something, he hit a wrong key and it jumped to another screen on his laptop which immediately showed it showed a pornographic video something that he should not have been looking at.

This was a professing Christian co-worker of mine and so his immediate response was I don't know where that came from, but we're both in IT, we both know exactly how computers work, we know exactly how that where that came from. This was not an accident. And so we kind of just, it was super awkward, we just brushed it off and kind of went back to what we were doing and didn't think a thing about it. And we had plans to go to lunch together that day. And so I called Cami and I said, hey, this just happened, pray for me.

I don't know what to do. Like this is, and this is someone who's above me in a leadership position, which made it more awkward. I said, I don't know what to do. But one of the words I told her was, I don't know what kind of a Christian man would I be if I let this slide. He's a professing brother, he's a professing Christian, and I'm just gonna blow this off like, yeah, that's just okay.

We all do that. That's fine. And so that was the words I said to her as I hung up. We went to lunch and some other people are companying us. Which again made it not possible really to have a conversation in the car.

We eat lunch, time's moving on, it's making it more difficult even thinking about bringing it back up. We're riding back in the car, I think okay well maybe some other people a carpool over here and I can get the car by myself with it. Other people jumped in the car with us. We go back inside, I'm looking for a conference room that we can grab. There's no way for us to sit down and talk.

And so I'm making all the excuses possible in my mind of why God would just sit and allow this to happen. I would have been happy to do it had you lined it up, but you didn't line it up, so I can't do it. And then I kept bringing in the back of my mind what I had said to Cammy is what kind of a Christian man would I be if I let this slide and so just that accountability of knowing I was gonna have to go home to her and give an account of What I had said to her and no I back out I decided not to do it It just didn't work out So I I grabbed him I said hey Can we go back out to your car And we went out to his car and sat down and we talked for probably over an hour. And I tried to really start with a place of humility to not attack him, but rather share with him sin of my own life. And it was a beautiful moment and in that praise the Lord he confessed it all to his wife he to my knowledge has not struggled with that in the same way that he did at that time And going back to my first point, just because now he's known, he didn't choose to be transparent, but he was exposed, and he was known, and that gave him freedom.

What was a sinful, shameful act in his life is now a trophy of God's mercy and a trophy of God's grace. While we were in the car before he wrapped up, he was just dumbfounded that I would approach him as someone higher than me and have the courage to have this conversation. He was like, what made you do it? I was like, I didn't want to do it at all. I was ready to walk away.

The only reason I did it was because I told my wife what kind of man would I be if I didn't do this. And I had that accountability that I knew I had to go back and answer to her if I didn't do it. So at least for me, when it's just me and God, I can talk myself out of so many things. When you bring other people into the circle and have that accountability, it's much, much more difficult to let those down around you. So in closing, the four helps that I've seen, at least in my discipleship journey that I think would be incredibly helpful to you as well as we've seen today in Scripture.

Transparency so that you can be known and be helped and be held accountable. Humility and just knowing that you can be taught, that you don't have all the answers. Young men, the sooner you realize that, the better off you will be. Intentionality, seeking that wisdom from others, then when appropriate, on teaching others.