Date: Tuesday, 10th June, 2025
Text: Romans 12:1-2
Author: Pastor Adedeji Fadehan
Exhortation:
Miracles can attract men to God but it requires discipleship for them to retain such miracles. The devil can still steal a man’s miracle and turn his testimony to prayer point if he does not learn how to retain it.
If an evangelist comes to town and preaches the gospel so powerfully that many give their lives to Christ and receives their miracles, everyone is happy and there is joy everywhere. However, if he leaves the town and there is no pastor to follow up the converts and disciple them, in no time, they will backslide and be like a dog that has returned to its vomit.
Discipleship training is the deliberate teaching of the word of God and the practical demonstration of the same. There is a proverb often shared by my Yoruba elders, they say, “The children you failed to build (through home training) will sell off the houses you spent money building.”
When you concentrate your efforts building church auditoriums instead of investing time and efforts in teaching the converts the way of God, you risk losing the same building. There are so many beautiful but empty church auditoriums all over the world, yet you see football stadiums filled to capacity.
Many parts of Europe used to be Christian dominated in the early days of the church with very beautiful edifices but over the centuries they have been outrun by other religious movements who spent quality time on the discipleship of their converts.
Solomon’s once magnificent building that gulped billions of dollars in modern language was eventually burnt down and deserted because the children of Israel backslid into idolatry despite several warnings from God’s prophets (the disciplers of those days) -2 Kings 25:1-21.
The church is not the building but the redeemed souls; therefore, more efforts should be concentrated on teaching the souls that make up the church so that they know who they are in Christ and not conform to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds so that they will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will- Romans 12:1-2.
Key Nugget: there is no substitute for discipleship.
Bible in One Year: Psalm 28-33