A new convert needs to know, as soon as possible, just what happened to him when he got saved. Generally, all he knows initially is that his sins have been washed away, he has been spared from hell and that Jesus is now on the inside of him. While these are tremendous truths, simply knowing them is not enough to jump start a brand new Christian into full maturity or even early childhood. He is an infant and he needs to grow on spiritual truth [1 Pet 2:2].
The importance of discipleship is that a more mature Christian will be able to “spoon-feed” this truth to a new convert better than a preacher will be able to feed him “baby food” from the pulpit. The preacher has a flock comprised mostly of Christians who have already grown a fair amount and need to be fed some meat to keep growing. A mature Christian, on the other hand, can hold a new convert’s hand through his early growth and give his new disciple much needed individual attention. The failure in a lot of modern soul winning is that the new converts are left to fend for themselves and they get off track before they ever get started.
So, a good place to start is to teach a new convert a little more about what happened to him when he got saved. He became a Child of God [Jn 1:12]. Literally, God became his Father. Here’s what that entails.
All people have a common ancestry in Adam. According to 1 Cor 15:45, the FIRST man [was] Adam [Gen 2:7]. In other words, we all come from Adam.
In Gen 2:21-23, Eve came from Adam.
So, all human life came from the marriage of these two. In Gen 3:20, we see that Adam called his wife “Eve” because Eve was the mother of ALL living. No one on earth ever came from any other source than the union of Adam and Eve.
The problem with our human ancestry is that in Adam all die [1 Cor 15:22]. That’s why you needed to get saved, so that you could get out of Adam’s family and be put in Christ’s family where all are made alive [1 Cor 15:22]. You needed to become part of God’s family in order to have life [1 Jn 5:12].
In addition to your human ancestry, you were in the wrong spiritual family. According to the Bible, there are only two spiritual families in the world – the devil’s family
and God’s family [1 Jn 3:10]. Here we see the children of God and the children of the devil.
Before salvation, you were in the devil’s family [1 Jn 3:8]. You were of the devil. You were a child of the devil, [Acts 13:10]. You were of your father the devil [Jn 8:44]. As such you were a child of disobedience [Eph 2:2], a child of wrath [Eph 2:3] and having no hope and without God in the world [Eph 2:12].
But after salvation, you became a child of God [Jn 1:12, 1 Jn 3:1-2, 2 Cor 6:18]. You were put into the right spiritual family.
Thank God that you now have a Father who has given you life and a home in heaven instead of the old spiritual father you had who was going to destroy you [Jn 10:10].
Because you are a child of God, you now get to call God your Father [Rom 8:14-16].
And since God is your Father, you can look to him to perform the duties of your Father.
As a good Father, He:
- Provides – Phil 4:19
- Loves – 1 Jn 4:19
- Cares – 1 Pet 5:7
- Corrects – Heb 12:5-11
- Protects – Jn 10:27-29
- Teaches – Jn 14:16-17, 26
Everyday, look to God as your Father for these things and enjoy fellowship with him always [1 Jn 1:3-4].