There are so many promises in the Bible for those who follow God, who not only believe in but also actually obey the Lord, that He will manifest Himself unto them. Jesus said in John 14:21, “He that has my commandments and keeps them, he is it that loves me. And he that loves me will be loved of my father, and I will love him and will manifest myself unto him.”

[This is the text to a talk I gave last week at a Christian retreat in India  to about 85 people.]

That was the kind of Christianity that was presented to me by some young “Jesus people” when I was 21 years old. A few months before this I’d had a series of miraculous experiences, including a very traumatic one where I nearly died and was about to leave my body, unfortunately heading in the wrong direction from what most of us hope will be our final destiny. But this was what it took to wake me up and shake me up enough to fathom that there is a spiritual world and that it is more real and important than the physical world we’re so often enmeshed in.

But I didn’t know who Jesus was. I’d come to know that God was real, I now knew the spiritual world was real and I’d even come to know that the devil was real. But I didn’t know who Jesus was or is. And those teenage, Bible-sharing “Jesus people” showed me through the Bible who Jesus was. So I received Him in prayer as they led me to do.

And as I continued to hang around these new friends, they eventually challenged me to do as the early followers of Jesus had done. Jesus said to some, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matthew 4:19) To others He said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it. But whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same will save it.” (Luke 9:23)

Having already experienced so much of the froth, frivolity and poison of this world, I had an easy time in making that decision. I decided to take them up on their challenge and to commit my life to Christian service, following the Lord and His Word as best as I could.

“So how’s that working for you?” you might ask. My answer would be, “Really, really well.” And that’s what I want to talk to you about this morning. I know that, for most of you here, we’re on the same page when it comes to Christian discipleship. That’s why you’re here at this retreat. Yesterday we talked about Bible prophecy and that can in some ways be a rather long and sometimes steep learning curve. But Christian discipleship can and should be something you are born into when you receive the Lord, like what happened to me.

We could start off talking about salvation in the Lord, like we did yesterday. That’s where it all starts. I assume and believe that all of you here are saved. You’ve received the Lord as your personal savior, you understand the basics of Salvation and you have a personal relationship with the Lord.

And I assume that you’ve all received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I know that’s your shared belief and you understand the importance of the Holy Spirit. Not all churches and Christians do. Some churches teach that receiving Jesus and being filled with the Holy Spirit is the same thing. But in Acts 19:2 the disciples said to ones they met , “Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?” Those ones answered, “We haven’t even heard of the Holy Spirit.” So the Apostle Paul went on and led those folks in Ephesus to be baptized with the Holy Ghost.

These are all basics. It won’t help to talk about following God if you aren’t yet saved and then have received the power that Jesus promised us in the Holy Spirit. But if you have come that far, what’s next? Just go now to heaven? “We’re ok now, we’re saved and filled. What else is there but to go to be with the Lord, right?”

Well, as I’m sure you know, that’s not right. Jesus gave what’s called “the great commission” in Mark 16:15 when He said to the disciples, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” And, as the phrase goes, this is often what separates the men from the boys. Or, much more accurately, this is what has come to differentiate between what has been called “churchianity” and the original Christianity of the book of Acts and the early church.

We’re called and commissioned to “preach the gospel”. Those words sound  slightly funny in our times because we can envision that we are suppose to ascend some pulpit somewhere and “preach”, which nowadays is a word almost only used in a religious sense. Even the word “witness” is pretty much only thought of in a religious sense. But if those words are maybe uncomfortable to you or sound out of style with the times we live in, you could think of it in the way of sharing. Most folks understand and even approve of sharing.

Here’s something in Isaiah that maybe puts the great commission in another framework that is perhaps easier to see yourself in. “If you draw out your soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall rise in obscurity and your darkness shall be as the noonday. And the Lord shall guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought and you shall be like a watered garden and like springs of waters whose waters fail not.”  (Isaiah 58:10 & 11)

Or as Jesus taught when He was on earth, “Give and it shall be given unto you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over. For with the same measure that you give, it shall be given unto you.” (Luke 6:38) That’s an integral ingredient of what our present life should be as disciples of Christ while we are still here on earth.

“But, Mark! I thought you were going to talk about miracles! When are you going to talk about miracles?”

The good answer to that is found just a few short verses after Jesus’ famous ringing words of Mark 16:15. He told them to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” Then, five verses later, at the end of the book of Mark, it says, “And they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming His word with signs following.” (Mark 16:20)

“Signs following”. As they began to obey and get out and do what the Lord told them to do, witness and win souls and share all they had, the Lord was right there with them (since He’s always way out in front anyway), and He “confirmed His word with signs following.” Miracles. The book of Acts is just almost one continual testimony of this, with the disciples, in fits and starts, obeying the Lord and following the leading of the Holy Spirit. If you want to read about miracles happening to disciples, you should read the book of Acts. That’s the blueprint and plan for Christianity yet so few churches really take it seriously for our times.

One of my favorite chapters in the Bible is Acts chapter 10. Talk about following God. Talk about “going” and pioneering. Peter was already “going”. He was up in Joppa, up the coast from the home church in Jerusalem. So he was already obeying and the Lord “gives the Holy Spirit to them that obey Him.” (Acts 5.32) And Peter was even taking things to the Lord in prayer, alone with God on a housetop.

And then the action starts, when the Lord seems to just go completely contrary to what Peter was expecting. God shows him a sheet full of unclean animals and the Lord says to him, “Arise Peter, kill and eat.” What does Peter respond? “Yes sir, Lord! Anything you say, Lord!”? Nope, that’s not what Peter said. In fact Peter directly disagrees with and says no to the Lord, as he had been prone to do from time to time in the past.

The gentle, loving son of God was patient and kind, telling Peter that there were three men downstairs, “unclean” and that Peter should immediately go with them, “doubting nothing”. As you know, sometimes just the “follow God” part of our contract with Him can get to be a little challenging, as it was for Peter here.

But Peter knew the Lord enough, loved the Lord enough and had gone through so many breakings and remakings that he somehow here obeyed, probably with some trepidation since good Jews were not supposed to hang out with Romans, which evidently those folks at the door were.

The result? Cornelius the Roman centurion, leader of 100 Roman troops, got gloriously saved and filled with the Holy Ghost, as did his family and friends who’d come to hear Peter.

“So what?”, you could say. But this was the monumental moment in the history of God’s relationship with man when His Spirit and you could even say His focus turned towards “the gentiles” rather than the Jewish nation within which the Lord had been almost exclusively working till then. (Here’s the link to a blog article I wrote on Acts chapter 10, as well as a recording of a live class on Acts 10 which the article was based on.)

But God had to find a man. God had to have someone yielded enough to obey Him, to physically get up and go, “doubting nothing”. The miracles didn’t precede the obedience. But in this case, it wasn’t just a showy miracle for those folks right there but it involved a major change of direction in the history of mankind, the beginnings of the early church as the Lord got Peter, the leader of the early church at that time to truly go even further into all the world than their Jewish heritage would allow them to go, except by the almost forceful leading of the Holy Spirit.

What does it mean to us in our times? The conditions of discipleship are pretty much still the same today. We still have to do the going. “As they went, they were healed.” (Luke 17:14) But we have to do the “wenting”. The Lord raised the dead. But they had to roll away the stone.

Many of you here understand the fundamental link between obedience and blessings. We are not our own, we are bought with a price. We may not understand but all we have to do is obey. If you can accept those conditions, like the Lord laid out for His first disciples, then there’s still that cup of discipleship to be drunk in our times. There’s a poor sin-sick world that needs his love and truth. The harvest is still plenteous but the true laborers are still few.

But the good news is, the Lord has already spoken in prophecy of these very times we live in. And somebody, maybe you, is going to fulfill those prophecies. It says of the very last days “the people who do know their God shall be strong and do exploits.” (Daniel 11:32)  It says, “They that understand amoung the people shall instruct many.” (Daniel 11:33) It says in Revelation, talking about the ones who are here at the time of the worst of the Antichrist and his forces, “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto the death.” (Revelation 12:11)

It is written. It is ordained. It’s already happened in the eyes of God. There are going to be victors in these final days, a called-out, separated-from-the-world discipleship church of the endtime who will be shining brightly, “doing exploits” and “instructing many” in the last days before the return of Jesus. They’ll be truly following God and the Lord will be working mightily with them, performing miracles on their behalf. I believe that’s the calling and heritage that is there for every person in this room. May the mighty God of Abraham and His Son Jesus help us to be what He has called us to be.