The Verse Behind Everything We Do
“and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”
2 Timothy 2:2 · ESV
Paul wrote this from a Roman prison. He was near the end. He had planted churches across the empire, most of his friends had scattered, and he had every reason to spend his last letter defending his record.
Instead he gave Timothy a sentence about handing things off.
Read it slowly and you will find four generations stacked inside it. Paul is the first. Timothy, who heard him, is the second. The faithful men Timothy entrusts are the third. The others those men teach are the fourth. One sentence, and the chain runs out past the horizon of Paul’s own life.
That structure is the whole reason DiscipleMaking Mission exists, and it is worth noticing what Paul does not say. He does not say teach a class. He does not say build a program. He says entrust — a word that belonged to banking, to the handing over of something valuable to someone who will keep it safe. You do not entrust a deposit to a crowd. You entrust it to a person you know well enough to trust.
And notice the standard for that person. Not gifted. Not educated. Not impressive. Faithful. The qualification is reliability over time, which means most of us qualify and almost none of us qualify quickly.
Here is what that costs. Addition feels productive. You can teach a room of two hundred and go home satisfied. Multiplication feels slow and looks like failure for a long while, because for the first several years you have almost nothing to show but a few names and a lot of breakfasts. But addition ends when you do. Multiplication does not.
There is a quiet mercy in this. If the standard were brilliance, most of us would be spectators. Because the standard is faithfulness, the work is open to any believer willing to show up on the same morning, at the same table, for longer than it stays interesting. That is a qualification you can begin building this week.
Paul knew he was dying. He answered by investing in one man who would invest in a few more. Twenty centuries later you are reading his mail.
That is the math we are counting on.
From the Field
Roughly ninety Paul teams have been commissioned at Walker State Prison. When those men are transferred, they carry the disciplemaking process with them — DMM disciplemakers are now present in sixteen other Georgia prisons as a result. Nobody planned that expansion. It multiplied.
This Week
Write down the name of one person you could meet with for the next year — and then write down the name of the person who did that for you.
Go Deeper
Fruit That Won’t Spoil
Roger Erickson, DMM’s founder. More than seventy “intangibles” of one-on-one disciplemaking, written to be worked through in a discussion group of four to six. Start here if you start anywhere.
The Master Plan of Evangelism
Robert E. Coleman (Revell). Traces how Jesus deliberately chose and trained twelve men rather than working the crowds. Short, and it has reshaped ministries since 1963.
Operation Timothy
CBMC. The three-book relational curriculum DMM uses in prisons and churches. Book 1 is free after registration, and it gives you something to actually open when you sit down together.
Next week: why “disciple” is a noun before it is a verb — and why you cannot hand off what you have not received.
Lee Truax
President, DiscipleMaking Mission
