Now, every one of you that’s a mother, and there’s a number of ladies here, that have had children, know that there is a great joy in mentoring and teaching and loving and nurturing a child, right? Do you know that there is a great joy spiritually in doing the same thing? There’s a joy there. Paul didn’t have physical children, but he talked about his children all the time. He loved his children.

They were his great fulfillment, and so it is with us. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t pray for and think about my two daughters all through the day, every single day. They may not know it.

Sometimes I wonder if they really comprehend how much I love them, and how often I pray for them, but the Father knows. Now, let me ask you this. Do you have people spiritually that you love along these lines?

Every pastor should have time to be training somebody to be the Joshua.  You may not have led that person to Christ. You may have adopted them. That’s what Paul did with Timothy.

Or, you may have led them to Christ, and then it’s definitely your responsibility to disciple them.

In traditional, everyday, normal church life, how does it work? When someone joins your church, however they do that, and says, “I have given my life to Christ,” there should be some counseling. There should be some ministry that takes place in prayer with them, some explanation so they’ll come to a knowledge that they really belong to God and that they can have that peace in their heart.

But after that, that’s just the birth experience. Now comes a whole lifetime of training. You say, a lifetime? Yep.

The relationship is quite structured for the first probably six months, and then after that it becomes a friendship and a colleagueship. Now, I’ve done this with 31 men, and my 32nd is here with me right now, David Shrum. And the 31 men that I’ve done it with over the last probably 35 years, some have stayed with me a short time, some have stayed quite a long time, several years.

But it all depends on what I was training them to do. If I was just training them to be a good Christian and to be an active, on-fire businessman, it didn’t take quite as long. But the ones that wanted to be discipled to be a missionary on the foreign field, or to be a professor in a seminary, some of those men, I took years.

Some of the guys have stayed with me seven, eight, ten years. But when I look at where they are today, and what they’re doing with their lives, it’s the greatest joy I have next to my own children. Are you with me?

You see, God wants us to have children and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren all over the place.  And it comes out of the natural flow of your life, not the institution of the church, as important as that is. Each one of us has an individual ministry within the corporate ministry of the churches we serve.

Every child you have in your home is going to be different by personality.  The genes make it so, right? If any of you had two or three children, you know, you’ll think, how did this happen? How could this child be this way and this child be this way and this child be this way? And I love them all, but they’re all different.

And when you disciple people in the Lord, it’s the same way. There’ll be a new Christian and you’ll think, boy, if you’re a lady, you train this girl, because the Bible says that ladies work with ladies and men with men along these lines.

And you’ll work with this girl and you’ll have this wonderful experience and you’ll think there could never be anything sweeter than this.

And sure enough, somebody else will come along totally different. You’ll work with them and you’ll say, well, in its own way, that was even richer than this, but I guess I just can’t compare them.  Because each discipling relationship is a jewel of its own beautiful, wonderful value and worth.