Paul encourages Timothy to continue in his faith, making disciples of people who will go on to teach others. As Christians, instead, we often think that our job is to teach someone else. Pass it on. Help our brother.
And this is right. We must do this.
But it is also incomplete. Paul says that Timothy must teach others to teach others.
And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.
2 Timothy 2:2
So how can we describe the chain of disciples that we see in this case? We can see it like this:
Paul has already taught Timothy in the presence of many people.
Timothy should now go on to teach others, the “reliable” people.
And those reliable people will be taught to such an extent that they can go on to teach others.
So in all, we see four generations of disciples in this example:
- Paul
- Timothy and witnesses
- Reliable people
- Others
This generational disciple-making is really no different than what we see in other places in Jesus’s teachings as well. For example, as Jesus was praying for his disciples just before going to the cross, he said:
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message
John 17:20
Jesus is referring to his disciples, but he says he isn’t just praying for them. He is also praying for those who will come after them, those who will believe through their message.
Or we could even also look at the Great Commission:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
Matthew 28:19-20
Jesus tells his disciples to go and make disciples, but then he says that they are to teach those disciples everything he has commanded his disciples to do.
And what had he just commanded his disciples to do? To make disciples! So the disciples are not only to make a disciple, but they are to make disciples who are to make disciples. They must not only be disciple makers and make disciples, but they are to make makers of disciples.
Making several generations of disciples is the pattern that we see both in Jesus’s teachings as well as that of Paul, so we should ask ourselves: How does that happen?
This only happens by making disciples in a way that is Biblical and reproducible.
We must follow the teaching of the Bible. The examples that we see in the Bible are both what we must teach as well as a pattern that we should follow. We should seek out both the message as well as the method of teaching. At the very least, we should take principles from the method so that we can do the same.
It must also be reproducible. The teaching that I give must be able to be done, and done fairly simply, by the person that I am teaching. They must be done in the way that the next person can reproduce them with yet another person.
In these ways, ways that are Biblical and reproducible, we can see disciples of Jesus that are made from one person to the next, from generation to generation.