What does it mean to truly follow Jesus? Not just to attend church, not just to know the stories, not just to check the boxes of religious activity, but to actually be formed into the kind of person whose life reflects the character, priorities, and mission of Christ? These are not abstract questions. They are the most practical questions a believer can ask, and the answers have everything to do with whether the church fulfills its calling or simply keeps people busy.
The imperative is clear. In Matthew 28, Jesus does not suggest that his followers consider making disciples when it is convenient. He commands it. The mission of the church is not merely to gather people or to entertain them or to provide a meaningful social community, though community matters deeply. The mission is to make disciples, and to make disciples who make disciples. There is a difference between being a disciple and being a disciple who multiplies. Health produces growth and growth produces multiplication. If a church or an individual believer is genuinely healthy, multiplication is the natural result.
A Framework Rooted in the Life of Jesus
One of the most compelling places to look for a model of spiritual development is the life of Jesus himself. The Gospels give us three windows into his life: his birth, a moment at age twelve in the temple, and his public ministry from age thirty to thirty-three. That middle snapshot, the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, is easy to overlook, but it carries enormous weight.
In Luke 2:51-52, after describing the young Jesus remaining in the temple and engaging the teachers there, the text notes that he returned home with his parents and grew in wisdom, stature, and in favor with God and with people. That word “grew” carries the meaning of moving forward, of developing, of increasing. And the text identifies three distinct areas of that growth: wisdom and stature, favor with God, and favor with people.
Now move forward eighteen years. A pharisee approaches Jesus and asks him what the greatest commandment is. His answer simplified the precedent set by the laws that the jews had followed since Moses. The greatest commandment in the eyes of Christ was boiled down to: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Emerging from that response were three relationships, a relationship with God, a relationship with self rooted in an identity only found in Christ, and a relationship with others.
The parallel is not accidental. The areas in which Jesus developed as a twelve-year-old map directly onto the relationships he articulated as the foundation of the entire law at age thirty. Favor with God corresponds to loving God. Wisdom and stature correspond to understanding who one is in Christ. Favor with people corresponds to loving one’s neighbor. What Jesus was shaped into as a young person was expressed in how he lived and taught as an adult. That is the picture of discipleship working as it should.
Three Movements of a Disciple
From this framework, three movements that describe what genuine spiritual formation looks like are found.
The first is knowing Christ. This is upward development, the cultivation of a real and growing relationship with God. It involves lordship, the ongoing surrender of one’s life to the authority of Jesus, and spiritual disciplines, the habits and practices that keep a believer connected to God. A person who is knowing Christ is actively worshiping, shaping their life through those disciplines, and yielding to the direction of the Holy Spirit.
The second is owning faith. This is inward development, and it is the movement that is most often skipped. When Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself, the “as yourself” carries real meaning. It assumes a person who understands their own identity in Christ, who knows who they are before God. Without that foundation, a person cannot defend their faith, cannot stand firm under pressure, and cannot love others from a place of genuine security. Owning faith means understanding and embracing what it means to be a child of God, knowing how to apply Scripture to real life, and being able to articulate and defend what one believes.
The third is making faith known. This is outward development, the movement into relationships and influence for the sake of the gospel. A disciple who is making their faith known is developing relationships that create opportunities for evangelism and discipleship, serving the body of Christ through their gifts, and living with a sense of mission rather than comfort.
The Sermon on the Mount as a Blueprint
Jesus did not just live these movements, he taught others how to apply them to their lives as well. The Sermon on the Mount, his first publicly recorded extended teaching, covers exactly the ground that these three movements require. Character and discernment speak to the formation of the inner life. Lordship and disciplines speak to the upward relationship with God. Relationships and influence speak to the outward call to love and mission.
It is worth asking whether the Sermon on the Mount was Jesus laying out the entire vision of the Christian life at the beginning of his ministry, and then spending the next three years demonstrating it. If so, it is a blueprint that the church has had in its hands for two thousand years.
The Question That Cannot Be Avoided
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7:21-23, Jesus describes people who stand before him having done remarkable things in his name, only to hear the words “I never knew you.” It is one of the most sobering passages in all of Scripture. People who were active, who served, who participated in religious life, who perhaps even led others, and yet were not known by Christ.
The question that passage forces into the open is not “Are you busy for God?” The question is “Are you known by God?” And the follow-up question is equally important: “Are you helping others become known by him?”
That is what discipleship is for. Not to produce church attendance numbers, not to fill programs, but to ensure that every person who walks through the doors of a church is genuinely known by Christ, formed into his likeness, and sent out to multiply that same life in others. Healthy things grow. Growing things multiply. The church that takes this seriously is the church that looks like the one Jesus commissioned in Matthew 28.