The Essential Call
Recovering the Ancient Practice of Making Disciples
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The Call Is Not Optional "Now large crowds were going along with him, and he turned and said to them, 'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.'" (Luke 14:25-27, ESV) Notice the setting. Large crowds are following Jesus — He is popular, likely drawn by the healings and miracles of the preceding chapters. And what does He do with an enthusiastic crowd? The opposite of what any modern church-growth strategy would recommend. He turns and thins the herd. This is a consistent pattern in Luke's Gospel: whenever the crowds swell, Jesus raises the bar rather than lowering it (see also Luke 9:57-62, where three would-be followers meet three increasingly demanding replies, and John 6:60-66, where "many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him" after a hard teaching, and Jesus lets them go rather than soften His words). He is not interested in numbers for their own sake. He is interested in genuine disciples, even if that means walking away with twelve men instead of twelve hundred. The word translated "hate" here (Greek: miseō) requires care. It does not mean malice or emotional loathing. It reflects a Semitic idiom for expressing relative priority — the same construction found in Genesis 29:31, where Leah is called "hated" simply because Jacob loved Rachel more, and in Malachi 1:2-3, where God's sovereign preference for Jacob over Esau is described in the same terms. Matthew's Gospel gives the divinely inspired commentary on Jesus' meaning in Luke 14: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matthew 10:37, ESV). Jesus is not commanding literal hatred of family. He is declaring that every human relationship — even the most sacred and legitimate ones — must be subordinated, not eliminated, to allegiance to Him. And He does not stop with other people: "yes, and even his own life" extends the same subordination to a person's claim on themselves, a demand Jesus repeats almost word for word in Matthew 16:24-25: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 16:24-25, ESV). This is where verse 27 lands the full weight of the demand: "Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." We have domesticated that phrase into a metaphor for minor inconvenience — a difficult coworker, a bad commute. That is not what a first-century Jewish crowd standing in Roman-occupied Palestine heard. They had watched condemned men carry the crossbeam to their own execution through a jeering crowd. To take up a cross was not a figure of speech for enduring hardship. It was a picture of a person who had already died to his right to himself — the same reality Paul later states as settled fact for every believer: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20, ESV).
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About the Book
Ask any number of believers to define the word “Christian,” and get a room full of different answers. From “someone who believes Jesus rose from the dead” to “someone who attends church” to “a good person who tries to do the right thing”. Each answer holds a fragment of truth but none capture what Jesus Himself meant when He called people to follow Him. This book starts with this uncomfortable point: much of Western church has substituted the word convert for the word disciple. We have built a new Christianity that asks for a decision but not require a life — a single decision rather than a lifelong way of walking. But the risen Christ never once commissioned His followers to make converts. He commanded them to make disciples (Matthew 28:19). That is not a semantics. It is the difference between a transaction and a transformation, between signing a card and taking up a cross. This vocabulary gap is worth pausing on. The noun “Christian” occurs three times in the entire New Testament (Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16). The word “disciple” or “disciples” occurs more than 260 times in the Gospels and Acts alone. The earliest believers called themselves disciples, and before that, simply “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 24:14, 22). This book exists to recover what that difference actually means, and then to put it back into practice.
About the Author
I was born again on June 7, 1991, saved out of a background steeped in the occult and brought into the light of Christ by nothing other than grace. In the formative years that followed, I was given something increasingly rare even then: I was actually discipled. Someone took the time to walk with me, to answer my questions, and to show me — not just tell me — what it looked like to follow Jesus. That investment shaped everything that has come since, including this book. I have had the privilege of serving the church in a number of capacities over the years: as a Bible teacher, a worship leader, a deacon, and a music minister at coffeehouse outreaches. I have helped plant three local church assemblies, and in 2018 I was ordained as a pastor. Over the last thirty years I have watched discipleship, and face-to-face relationships in general, decline across the American church. I have also, more than once, met real resistance simply for suggesting that discipleship — and the accountability that must undergird it — belongs at the center of church life rather than the periphery. My prayer for this book (and a soon to follow bible study for same material) is simple: that it would inspire and motivate you, the reader, to step up and step into the discipleship model God ordained for His church. That’s us, by the way. Be blessed. My thanks to the men who discipled me: Pastor Gene Giguere, who showed me how to read and understand my bible. Pastor Rick Bringhurst, who showed me how a man serves others. Paul Hill, who showed me, with great investment, what a husband and father ought to be like. Pastor Dave Brooks, who spent exhaustive time with me showing me how to love a local assembly, and Pastor Phil McGlauflin, who showed how Jesus ties all that together in each man’s heart.