How Do We Disciple Lost Persons until They Repent and Believe in Jesus?

It is important for each Christ-follower to be engaged in a lifelong journey of being and making Christlike disciples. Christians need to be highly committed to inviting lost persons to become Christ-followers. Hal Perkins’ book, Walk with Me, challenges us with searching questions like, “In my daily walk, am I ‘baptizing’ unbelievers in Christlike character, actions and words?” “Am I strategic in focusing prayer on a few unbelievers I know?” “Am I listening to, encouraging, and helping unbelievers connect with Jesus?”

Compassionate Outreach

As disciples go where Jesus guides, we are commissioned to be baptizing and teaching others. This implies not only ministering to new believers but also intentionally immersing non-believers in the love of Jesus. As we walk with Jesus and experience His transformational love in our lives, we are called to imitate Him. Because God is love, and we who abide in love abide in God, God abides in us.

Compassionate outreach is one of the core principles of Nazarene Discipleship International (NDI). God’s compassionate and redemptive love is foundational to discipleship and the appropriate motivation for Christian outreach. God is continually reaching out to prepare people’s hearts to receive salvation. It is a disciple’s care for non-believers, both local and global, that gives a human face and hand to God’s grace and love. 

Outreach is every disciple’s calling. Every disciple is to be engaged in nurturing genuine relationships with others. Through a disciple’s prayerful and compassionate action, God is reaching out and preparing hearts to receive salvation. When disciples are in relationship with non-believers, they are obeying Jesus’ command to go into all the world to proclaim the good news (Mark 16:15).

Strategic Prayer

Prayer is an essential part of discipleship and one of the core principles of Nazarene Discipleship International (NDI). In its purest form, prayer is communicating with and responding to God. Prayer was expressly modeled by Jesus, who taught His disciples to pray. Jesus’ disciples were then instructed to teach each following generation of disciples to pray. The Scriptures reveal that intentional and consistent prayer nurtures and develops our relationships with both God and others, enabling us to see and experience God’s activities through His prevenient, saving, and sanctifying grace. 

Prayer is the bedrock upon which all other ministry efforts are built. As we pray, God inspires us to be actively engaged in the world. Through prayer, we participate in the Holy Spirit’s transforming power, both for ourselves and for our neighbor.

Prayer guides us to spiritual success. By deepening our relationship with God through prayer, we experience the Holy Spirit’s guidance and find greater measures of spiritual growth and direction. Through intentional, specific, and consistent prayer, the body of Christ becomes the eyes, hands, and feet of the Savior. 

Listening, Encouraging, and Helping Unbelievers to Connect with Jesus

In The Bible Speaks to Me about My Witness, Charles “Chic” Shaver reminds us that while we are eager to share our faith and build relationships with others, in doing so we have to follow the scriptural mandate to be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. We need to be alert to some common situations and remain above compromise. Many Christians are afraid to witness because they don’t know how to handle the social barriers between themselves and non-Christians.

The Bible calls us to maintain separation from the world (James 1:27 and 4:4) while at the same time calling us to love, witness to, and win the lost to Christ. The implications of the call of Jesus to be “fishers of men” (Mark 1:17) is that to catch fish, you have to go to where the fish are. However, those who need our witness are often found in uncomfortable places. Therefore, we must be guarded, guided, and protected by the Spirit as we witness to those who desperately need God’s love and message. This means that other Christians are engaged with us and praying for us when we go “fishing” in potentially dangerous “fishing holes” and circumstances.

We are all called to witness to other people and help guide them to Christ. Most of the time, this is a long process. Like a plant, the process begins with a seed that is watered, nourished, and nurtured along until harvest finally happens. Most times, each witness has a different role to play in that process. You may be the witness who leads that person to Christ, or you may be the witness who plants the seed.  Remember we are not responsible for the final result; we are responsible for our part. God will take care of the rest.  

Let’s Invest in Others until They Come to Believe in Jesus.

Would you share with us how you are investing in those who still need to find Jesus? Each of us has our particular area of ministry that provides the context of our finding new disciples. Would you share ways you are engaging the lost in your context? Please communicate with me at dstanton@nazarene.org.