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3/3: A Pattern for Faithful Living

Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.

—JOHN 15:9–10

The best way to improve your ability to hear God is to respond immediately and completely when you do recognize Him speaking. God holds us accountable for how we respond to the opportunities and instructions He gives us. His future dealings with us, as well as our future growth and development, are directly related to how we respond now.

God measures value very differently than the world. The earthly economy is based on exchanges. I have something I want (a pastrami sandwich, for example). You have something I want (money). You give me some of your money and, in exchange, I give you my pastrami sandwich. You pay me for what you want. I do not give it away for free.

In contrast, in the heavenly economy, I gain by giving. I profit by what I freely offer. Consider God’s view of forgiveness as an example. In both a parable (MATTHEW 18:23–35) and direct exposition (MATTHEW 6:14–15), Jesus taught that God freely forgives us if we freely forgive others. God has given generously to us. We are to pass it on. We are blessed when we freely give. We gain by giving.

This counterintuitive principle recurs frequently in the New Testament. Jesus says in MATTHEW 10:8, “Freely you received, freely give,” and in LUKE 12:48, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be required.” Paul tells Timothy to pass on what he received (2 TIMOTHY 2:2), and he summarizes Jesus’ teaching as “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (ACTS 20:35).

God gives to us. And we are stewards of what He has given, responsible for freely passing it on to others. The main point of the parable of the talents, in MATTHEW 25:14–30, is that God will hold us accountable for how we steward what He has given us.

The heavenly economy is also prominent in the Old Testament. From the beginning of God’s dealings with His people, we see that He blesses us so that we can bless others. When God called Abram (before He had changed his name to Abraham), He said:

Go forth from your country,
And from your relatives
And from your father’s house,
To the land which I will show you;
And I will make you a great nation,
And I will bless you,
And make your name great;
And so you shall be a blessing;
And I will bless those who bless you,
And the one who curses you I will curse.
And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.
(GENESIS 12:1–3, emphasis added)

God promises to bless Abraham, but He has a clear purpose: that Abraham will in turn be a blessing to others—in fact, to all the nations of the world. In the divine economy, we receive in order to give. Abraham was blessed to be a blessing.

God tells us that He chose Abraham to be the father of His people because Abraham obeyed Him (GENESIS 22:15–18; 26:2–5). This obedience is at the very heart of the spiritual economy and of accountability to God. It deserves a close examination. Abraham was not perfect. For example, he tried to pass Sarah off as his sister, not once but twice. He did, however, repeatedly demonstrate immediate, radical, costly obedience.

God called Abraham to leave his country, his father’s house, and his relatives and go to a place God would show him. He went. He obeyed immediately (GENESIS 12:1–4). This was a major risk. Abraham was leaving a safe, populated, familiar area in favor of wandering in the wilderness through a region full of threatening inhabitants.

Genesis 17 presented another test. God changed Abram’s name to Abraham and commanded him to circumcise all the males in his household as a sign of the covenant. Apart from the obvious physical discomfort involved, there was also a potential security issue to consider. In GENESIS 34:13–31, Abraham’s great-grandchildren would wipe out an entire tribe after its males had been circumcised, because they were unable to defend themselves while healing from the procedure. Abraham, however, did not hesitate. We are told twice, for emphasis, that on the very day God told him this, he circumcised himself, his son Ishmael, every male born in his household, and every male bought with his money (GENESIS 17:23–27).

The stakes increase in GENESIS 21:9–19. Sarah was upset because Ishmael (Abraham’s son through Sarah’s servant Hagar) was mocking her son Isaac. She demanded Abraham send away both Ishmael and Hagar. Abraham was deeply troubled by the prospect of sending his son away. God instructed him, though, to listen to Sarah’s request. Without delay, he rose early the next morning and sent them away.

In GENESIS 22:1–14, Abraham’s obedience faced its greatest challenge. God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac as a burnt offering. Isaac was the son of the promise, for whom Abraham had hoped and waited until he was one hundred years old. Without questioning or pausing, Abraham obeyed. He rose early the next morning and set out for the mountain where God instructed him to do this unthinkable deed. Just as he was raising the knife to kill Isaac, God stopped him and provided a substitute sacrifice in the form of a ram.

Abraham was ready and willing to obey God no matter what the cost. HEBREWS 11:17–19 tells us his willingness came from his faith that God could and would raise his son from the dead. Two things are certain in this story: Abraham loved and fully trusted God, and God was pleased with him. In fact, God promised that his offspring would be a great multitude, like the number of stars in the sky or the grains of sand on a beach (GENESIS 22:15–17).

Why is Abraham’s unhesitating obedience so significant to God? From God’s perspective, love for God is the most important aspect of a person’s life (MATTHEW 22:34–38), and our love is measured by our obedience (JOHN 14:15; 1 JOHN 5:3). In other words, immediate, radical, costly obedience is both the demonstration and the necessary consequence of loving God with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength. This is the sort of person God befriends. This is why Abraham was chosen as the spiritual parent of God’s people.

Abraham is described as the father of our faith, and we are told to emulate him. We too demonstrate our love for God by our immediate, radical, costly obedience. We can expect Him to speak to us. We have the opportunity to love and fully trust Him because of all He has done for us in rescuing us from eternal death and making us His beloved children and coworkers. This is God’s primary measure of our love for Him.

But realistically, we often fall short of this sort of immediate, radical, costly obedience. We often hesitate, make excuses, or simply refuse to obey. Nevertheless, our goal, with God’s help, is to move forward in the direction of complete obedience.

But how? This does not happen by wishing it were so. One key aid is mutual accountability with our Christian brothers and sisters. We hold each other accountable to do what we know God wants us to do. In this way, we help each other grow in obedience, become better stewards of the blessings God has given us, and more fully experience the blessings that God has for His obedient children.

Accountability is often viewed as something unpleasant, especially in an employment context where it may involve discipline for subpar performance. But in a Christian context, holding one another accountable is one of the most loving things we can do for one another. We do it out of a genuine desire that others may know the Lord more deeply and experience the joy and fulfillment of living the abundant life He intends for us. We want them to hear God more clearly and to experience the joy of fulfilling the destiny for which God designed them. We want them to benefit from the spiritual economy by faithfully obeying what they hear from the Lord and passing on to others what they are learning from Him. The best thing I can do for others is to help them establish the life pattern of learning, doing, and sharing what God says. We do this through mutual accountability.

How can we live in such a way that this becomes our natural and routine course of action? I would propose that we look at our lives like a stool with three legs: knowing, doing (obedience), and sharing with others. Just as a three-legged stool with very uneven legs is useless, so unbalanced discipleship is useless. Our knowledge needs to be balanced with doing and sharing. Otherwise, our discipleship is incomplete and truncated, even useless from God’s perspective.

The church often places great emphasis on Bible knowledge and equates it with maturity. That is unfortunate. Knowledge without obedience is worthless. In fact, it is worse than worthless, because it incurs additional judgment. As Jesus says, the servant “who knew his master’s will and did not get ready or act in accord with his will, will receive many lashes, but the one who did not know it, and committed deeds worthy of a flogging, will receive but few” (LUKE 12:47–48). Knowing without doing earns additional punishment. As James says, “To one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin” (JAMES 4:17).

The only appropriate measure of maturity is in terms of one’s conformity to the image of Christ (EPHESIANS 4:13). It is God’s will that we be so conformed (ROMANS 8:29). We err if we compare ourselves to anything other than God’s will for us or if we pursue His will in any way other than by His Spirit.

Maturity takes time. Time does not, however, guarantee maturity. Many are still spiritual infants even though they have been Christians for many years. Instead of maturity, we should focus on faithfulness. That is something even a brand-new Christian can exhibit. A new follower of Christ can be fully faithful to what he or she knows at that point. If we are faithful to God every day, over time God will make us mature. This is a corollary to the spiritual economy. God is a wise investor. He invests in those who are faithful. This is a key lesson from the parable of the talents in MATTHEW 25:14–30.

The most practical way to assess faithfulness is to examine the ratio of the three legs of the stool I described above—knowing, doing, and sharing. Consider the following figure. For simplicity, it represents three people with equal spiritual knowledge. They all know the same amount, but their lives are not equally pleasing to the Lord.

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The first person in this graph is faithful. What she knows, she does and shares with others. The second is a hypocrite. He knows what he should do, and he preaches it to others, but he does not put it into practice in his own life. The third is selfish. He is learning and putting knowledge into practice in his own life, but not sharing with others.

Just as a three-legged stool is useless if the legs are not of similar length, a disciple who does not balance these three aspects is not being faithful to God’s call. In the physical realm, if we breathed in but never breathed out, we would die within ten minutes. But we do the same thing in the spiritual realm when we constantly take in new knowledge without applying it to our own lives or sharing it with others who can benefit from it.

Together with accountability, there are several practical approaches that you can insert into your daily routine to promote balance and consistency in your spiritual breathing. One of them is what I call the three-thirds (or 3/3). The three thirds are as follows:

1.) Look back 2.) Look up 3.) Look forward

These correspond to the three legs of the stool. The “look up” portion represents the knowledge leg of the stool. The “look back” and “look forward” portions are focused on evaluating and planning the “do” and “share with others” legs. In other words, you look back to evaluate your prior activities in doing and sharing, and you look forward to determine how the Lord is asking you to engage in doing and sharing and to plan how to carry out His direction.

We use this structure in our house church. I also use it in my daily Bible study, in follow-up after training events, and in leadership and mentoring meetings. I spend one-third of the available time looking back to evaluate what has happened since the last meeting, especially our commitments to do or share from the previous session. The second third is focused on looking up to God in search of new insights and impressions from Scripture or from the Holy Spirit. Finally, we look forward and make specific plans to put into practice what we have learned and share it with others. The “look forward” component ensures that we never stop at gaining knowledge, but always do and share what we have learned.

Because the 3/3 format has become an ingrained habit, every time I open my Bible, pray, or interact with someone, I am thinking about whether there is something the Lord wants to teach me (knowledge) and have me do or share. This helps to prevent me from becoming a receiver rather than a giver. It also keeps me from becoming hypocritical and heaping judgment upon myself by learning things and talking about them to others, but never putting them into practice in my own life.

As I explain the 3/3 process, I frequently hear two concerns: (1) that believers will fall into heresy because we are encouraging people without formal theological training to interpret and apply Scripture, and (2) that it is works-based legalism to ask people to make specific goals to do and share, and to hold them accountable to those goals. I will address both of these objections in turn.

The concern regarding heretical theology is so deeply and widely expressed that I want to examine it in some detail. In evaluating this concern, we should first ask whether theologically trained leadership effectively prevents heretical beliefs. In 2018, Lifeway Ministries and Ligonier Ministries published the results of a large-scale study on theological knowledge. You can read more about it at thestateoftheology.com. The site has a link at the bottom where you can go to look at all the data from the study.

Part of the study focused on the beliefs of evangelical Christians—defined as those who strongly agree that the Bible is the highest authority, evangelism is very important, sin can be removed only by Jesus’ death, and salvation comes only through trusting Jesus as Savior.

The study found that evangelical Christians hold heretical beliefs regarding at least a dozen major doctrines. For example, fewer than one-quarter believe that Jesus is eternal, recognizing that He was not created. Fewer than one-third believe that the Holy Spirit is a personal being. Just 30 percent believe that the Holy Spirit gives new life only after a person has faith in Christ. Only 41 percent believe that people are not good by nature. Only 40 percent believe that the smallest sin is deserving of eternal punishment. These are not peripheral issues; they are core doctrines. The bottom line is that evangelical Christians in the United States widely hold heretical beliefs on primary aspects of theology.

This is the actual result of a system where theologically trained church leaders are the primary teachers of doctrine. The expectation is that theological training will result in good doctrine being taught from the pulpits, and that this in turn will lead to orthodox beliefs in the pews. The study suggests that this approach has not worked as intended. In fact, it appears that most evangelical Christians have seriously heretical theology. This problem has remained largely undetected until now, mainly because the people in the pews are not called on, in a church setting, to say what they actually believe. It is simply assumed that they understand and believe what they have been taught. That is evidently not the case.

We are treating church members as passive recipients in spiritual matters. They are not trained or expected to be responsible for their own growth and development or to minister to others. For the most part, ministry is viewed as the responsibility of professional ministers. Most Christians are not challenged and held accountable to be obedient followers and active propagators of their faith, but are allowed to be mere spiritual consumers.

So it appears that having theologically trained leadership preaching to passive members is not an effective way to avoid heresy. What about lay-led 3/3 groups? Do they also result in deviant theology? If you are involved in a group of new believers using the 3/3 pattern to interpret and apply Scripture, you will likely hear some heretical or questionable things said. You will hear those things because the members are encouraged to speak. They are being taught to interpret and apply Scripture for themselves.

Over time, the accuracy of what they believe and say will improve, as they become familiar with a greater volume of Scripture and gain facility in interpreting and applying it. This happens in concert with the practices introduced in the next chapter, which result in each member reading twenty-five or more chapters weekly. The resulting pattern is similar to the graph below, which represents a time line moving from left to right. The horizontal line represents accurate teaching or belief. The curved line represents the variance from that accurate understanding.

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With participative 3/3 groups, we observe improvement, over time, in understanding of and adherence to orthodox Christian truth. We don’t see the same sort of improvement over time among people who are sitting in the pews week after week as passive spiritual consumers. We need to question some of our familiar church habits.

When I was serving as a vice president for global strategy with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, one of the departments under my purview was the Global Research Department (GRD). The GRD did a dozen large-scale, formal studies on movements that used the 3/3 approach together with large Scripture consumption. The settings were unreached people groups who subsequently experienced large church-planting movements that grew quickly. In these settings, no mature believers were available because all the followers of Christ were new in their faith. The concern was that patterns of heresy might develop as a result. So as to reduce bias, these studies were conducted by teams of researchers from various organizations. They included in-depth interviews of individuals from a wide range of roles and backgrounds and—when possible, in order to get 360-degree evaluations—Christians from neighboring people groups and even non-Christians in the area.

No significant patterns of heresy were found among those dozen movements. The closest thing was among the Kui people of Orissa, India, who had adopted a pattern of delaying baptism until new believers had demonstrated the validity of their conversion over time. This view is not biblical, but it is a tertiary rather than a primary issue. Certainly the timing of baptism is less central than the heresies held by American evangelicals in the study cited above. I am not saying that heresy is impossible when using this approach; but based on these dozen studies, I can safely say that it is not typical or expected.

As a practical example, when I was working in China, about a dozen students at one university came to faith in the fall semester. All of them came from entirely atheistic backgrounds and had no previous contact with Christianity. In the middle of the spring semester, we had a retreat for these young believers. As a fun activity, we took cards from a Bible trivia game and asked the group a total of 700 Bible trivia questions. We allowed them to work together. Collectively, they answered 698 (or 99.7 percent) of the 700 questions correctly.

Having played Bible trivia many times with believers in the United States, I can tell you that this would not be typical even of longtime Christians here. Keep this example in mind when you read the next chapter as well, because this result was due as much to their large daily consumption of Scripture as their thorough examination of Bible passages together. The point is that they were not simply being taught; rather, they were being trained to teach themselves. As a result, they quickly gained a level of Bible knowledge that we would consider very unusual in our American churches and almost unimaginable among such new believers.

This makes sense from the perspective of education theory. The most effective ways to learn include self-discovery, practicing what is learned, teaching others, and repetition. The 3/3 approach includes all of those techniques. The repetition is achieved when one is teaching others and hearing them respond with their own insights and instruction.

Imagine telling someone who has never ridden a bicycle to sit on a couch for twenty-one days and watch the Tour de France. Your student would have the best riders in the world as models to emulate. At the end of the race, imagine taking the person outside and telling him or her to start riding a bicycle. It wouldn’t work very well! Why, then, do we expect church members to learn to interpret Scripture by watching their pastor do it? To learn to ride a bicycle, you have to get on the bicycle, crash a few times, and practice a lot. That is how we learn any skill. Similarly, to learn how to interpret and apply Scripture, you have to practice doing it yourself (probably poorly, at first) rather than merely watching others do it.

Learning to ride a bicycle usually entails falling down repeatedly. The same will be true of learning to interpret and apply Scripture. Mistakes will be made. But that is not a sufficient reason to avoid teaching people to do it. They will improve with practice.

Therefore, to build strong disciples, we need to have them in small groups where they learn to discover God’s truth for themselves, apply it, and share it with others. Making disciples is an indispensable part of being a disciple, so everyone needs to be engaged in all three legs of the stool (MATTHEW 28:18–20).

The cry of “Legalism!” is the second frequent objection to the 3/3 pattern of making, and being accountable for, specific commitments to do and share. But legalism occurs when person A tells person B what they should do, and criticizes them if they don’t (as the Pharisees criticized Jesus concerning the sabbath). That is not what happens in a 3/3 group. In a 3/3 group, each individual prays and asks God what He wants them to do in response to the passage. Then, each individual shares with the group their personal plan.

At the following meeting, the group checks on how each of its members implemented their respective plans. It is not person A holding person B accountable for what person A thinks God wants. Person B is held accountable for what he or she has heard God say to them and has shared with their spiritual community. The emphasis is not on some external standard of behavior, but on each person’s heart before the Lord. By holding its members accountable, the group is doing its utmost to love each person, because they know that the only path to joy is to do and share what God says.

PRAYER

O Lord, above all You value radical, immediate, costly obedience. Help me move in that direction. And help me help others move in that direction too. Only if I keep Your commands can I abide in Your love. And that’s where I want to be. Wrench out, by the roots, the things that hold me back. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

QUESTIONS

Read the following questions, then pray and ask God what He wants you to learn and do. Listen quietly.

Review your journal. Are there any past commitments you have not completed? If needed, schedule revised completion dates.

1. Am I weakest in knowing, doing, or sharing? How can I strengthen my areas of weakness?

2. Am I telling new believers what to believe, or training them to learn for themselves? How can I do less of the first and more of the second?

3. How can I integrate the 3/3 pattern into my life?

4. What specific actions does God want me to take in response to this chapter? (Note them in your journal and schedule them in your calendar.)

5. With whom (at least one name) does God want me to share what I have learned?

Ask the Lord to enable you to follow through on these commitments and to prepare the hearts of those with whom you intend to share insights.