Chapter 11 Jesus Mentored

Summary

In this episode, Troy Kennedy discusses the concept of Jesus as a mentor and the principles of discipleship. He emphasizes the importance of impactful relationships and encourages listeners to mentor others. The upcoming topic is about Jesus resting and its significance in our identity as followers of Christ.

You can find the book "Hero Worship" on Amazon or christianbook.com to purchase.
Amazon Link
Christianbook.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Recap
04:10 Jesus as a Mentor
09:20 Principles of Discipleship
14:10 Impactful Relationships
17:26 Encouragement to Mentor Others
17:44 Upcoming Topic: Jesus Rested

Creators & Guests

Host

Troy Kennedy

Husband, Dad, Pastor. A disciple of Jesus. Author of new book "Hero Worship: A 12 Week Journey to Become More Like Jesus." https://t.co/Zgr4SrEOab

What is Troy Marshall Kennedy Podcast?

Jesus always has more life for you than you have known. How do we follow him and discover what it is to flourish and thrive in today's complex, challenging world? How do we have the intimate relationship with God our hearts long for? Troy Marshall Kennedy responds to these all-important questions as a veteran pastor, teacher, and author. Join us as we explore rhythms of life and practice to help us love Jesus, become like Jesus, and share Jesus in our everyday lives. Season one episodes will accompany Troy's new book, "Hero Worship: A 12 Week Journey to Become More Like Jesus."

You can find the book "Hero Worship" on Amazon or christianbook.com to purchase.

Troy Kennedy (00:01.174)
Welcome everybody to another chapter, another episode in our journey together called Hero Worship, a 12 week journey to become more like Jesus. I'm Troy Kennedy and we are at our 11th week here right now and I hope it's been a really rich, beautiful time for you because last week we talked about this concept that Jesus enters in. He enters into our hurts, he enters into our celebrations. He's not afraid to.

get our lives all over him. He comes close. He is Emmanuel. He is God with us. And I hope that was rich for you. I hope that it was challenging for you. I'm sure that it was for some people. It's really hard to enter into people's pain. It's hard to enter into other people's hurts. And what we tried to do is give you some incremental framework and how to do this and sort of practical pragmatic

just steps along the way for you to enter into these other people's lives meaningfully in that way and also enter into their celebrations, which can also be a challenge for us. Cause sometimes we wish it was us that was celebrating something in our own world and our own experience. And so, um, anyway, that it, these, these chapters in, in this experience is 12 weeks kind of intentionally get more challenging as you go.

They start off with things that are relatively common and relatively obvious, although they are simple. They are not simplistic. They are profound, they are powerful, but they are, you know, as far as Christian life is concerned, relatively common, right? And relatively well-traversed to territory. But when we get into things like Jesus entered into people's hearts or Jesus loved difficult people, although we kind of know that when we see him in scripture,

and we see the rhythm of his life as it's exhibited in the Gospels, we don't always think about that as being something we would imitate in our own lives. So I'm praying that this has been really challenging for you and just another way, once again, of carving out space for us to walk in greater intimacy with the Savior, to say, here I am, I want to be more like you.

Troy Kennedy (02:17.91)
You are the person most worthy of my worship, most worthy of my adoration, most worthy of my imitation. And so I'm coming to you intentionally to create this space to love you better and honestly to love other people better.

The apostle John writes in his letter of 1 John, he says, you can't say that you love God and hate your brother, your sister. You can't say you love God whom you can't see when you hate your brother or sister, whom you can see. And Jesus connects this idea of loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself inextricably in the great commandment.

So, just to kind of say before we jump in today's topic, that this podcast is meant to be a companion to the book, meant to augment your experience with the book. And you can always find me in all your typical social media places. You can find me on Instagram, on Twitter, you can find me on Facebook at my website, TroyMKennedy.com. And I have a newsletter that goes out every Friday. Just it's called the One Small Thing Newsletter. Maybe that's a good name. Maybe it isn't.

to connote a simple way, incremental way, of becoming more like the Savior. One is one small thing we can do, one small thing we can think about. So it always comes with a quote from somebody else, an idea from me, and some thoughts, or the small things that one can do in the course of your everyday life.

to walk more like Jesus, to become more like him, to be more closely aligned with God's Word as we hear the voice of God through the Scriptures. We're internalizing that and we're saying rewire us from the inside out because we love you. So those are all available to you. So this week we talk a little bit more.

Troy Kennedy (04:10.922)
about how Jesus mentored. This is episode 11. This is the 11th chapter of the book. We're getting almost to the finish line here, gang. Jesus mentored. And I know it sounds obvious, you know, Jesus enters into people's lives, but the concept that Jesus mentored, maybe you would call that discipleship.

was something that Jesus did right out of the gate. You know, Jesus goes into the wilderness and he's tempted for 40 days by the enemy and he comes back after that challenging time. And without getting too deep into that, we can't imagine the cosmic strain that was on the Savior.

And the Holy Spirit leads him in, the Holy Spirit leads him out. And when he comes out, one of the first things he does, he goes and he starts to call disciples to himself and his message is that come follow me, come follow me. And I will make you fishers of men. So come and follow me. Right? That's, that's relational. And I will make you, that's transformational. He is going to change you in this experience of following him. Fishers of men.

Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men. It is relational, it is transformational, and it is missional. And so in the following of the Savior then we learn to know who He is. The more we know who He is, the more we learn to love Him, the more we love Him, the more it is we're going to trust Him. We're gonna assume that He knows things we don't know, that He just flat-out knows better. And when we learn to trust Him...

We learn to obey Him joyfully and to obey Him is to love as He has loved us. This is the transformational journey of the disciple and when Jesus mentors people, He invites them to come and follow Him and He spent 24-7 with these men for three years.

Troy Kennedy (06:04.426)
He was with them day and night. They used to say that the students of a rabbi in the first century would be covered in the dust of the rabbi's seat because it would follow so closely behind the rabbi that he would kick up the dust and it would cover them. The rabbi would get no rest from his little 12-year-old disciples and then he gathers these 12 men around him. And just to say this, these guys were not considered.

to be the sharpest tools in the shed. They were not, otherwise they would have already been active students of another rabbi. When a boy was brought up in the Jewish educational system and they would study Torah, that was like their primary text that they would study, that first five books of the Bible.

They would study that, they would ingest it, they would learn how to read doing that, they would learn how to think by processing the Torah with a rabbi. And as they got older, the students who showed the most promise, the ones who were the most intelligent, the most wise, who had the greatest grasp of the abstract ideas that were coming up in the Torah, and they could memorize it, they could hold on to it, they could hold on to great chunks of scripture in their minds. These were the kids, the smart ones, the sharp ones that showed the most promise that

on to become the students of a specific rabbi. They would become a disciple of a rabbi with the hopes in that they would become leaders and rabbis themselves. We find the disciples doing other things. They're fishing, one is a tax collector, they're just they're doing all they have all these other occupations because they were not chosen because of their position or their intellect or their relationships or how good they were at school.

They were off into the family business. And Jesus calls these men who had been passed over by the other rabbis and he calls them to himself and says, come and follow me. And he directly mentors. He directly disciples them for three years. Now,

Troy Kennedy (08:08.554)
When we say, okay, so Jesus mentored, how are we gonna do that? Are we gonna invite someone into our world to hang around with us 24 seven for the next three years? Well, probably not, but there's some principles there that we can learn as we seek to imitate Jesus in this practice because you and I can invest in other people. You and I can look at someone and say, I see this in you, I see this potential, I see this possibility, I see this gifting in you, and I wanna just, I wanna be your friend,

virtual friend, I want to be an encouragement to you. Maybe some sort of mentor, maybe it's a peer to peer kind of a friendship that is challenging and encouraging. Maybe it is more of a top down. Maybe you're older or more experienced and you're dealing with someone who is a bit younger. Either way, there are some principles here that we see in the life of Jesus and that we have experienced ourselves that are transferable and that are effective when we talk about.

transformational, life-changing, life-altering discipleship. Okay, learning to encourage someone else to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.

The apostle Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 11. He says, follow my example as I follow the example of Christ. This was your memory verse for the week. Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ. Paul is saying, look, I'm following hard after Jesus. And as I am a mentor to you, a discipler for you, follow my example. So I.

I had this group of people who've been going through this journey, just as you have here at my local church for the last, well, last 11 weeks. And we've been processing their experience after they've already done the practice of the week. And this last Sunday, I asked him to talk about, you know, what was your experience in your own personal life?

Troy Kennedy (10:06.878)
of someone, an individual or maybe a couple of individuals who had the most profound effect on your spiritual maturity, your spiritual awakening, on your maturity in your relationship with Jesus. So I asked them to identify that person, talk about it at their tables, and then after they talked about their tables, said, okay, share this with all of us. Pick one word that would describe the nature of that relationship.

that relationship that was so impactful for you and your spiritual growth as a Christ follower. So we had them share that and then I wrote these words up on the board. I took a picture of it so that I could share this with you here in this podcast. So these were the words that they use. It was intentional.

relational, encouraging, Christ-centered. It was scriptural. It was long-term. It was consistent. It was authentic. It was a divine appointment. It was well-timed. It had pivotal timing. It showed up at just the right point in my life. They were invested. It was by example, and it was on common ground.

all these words, he said, these were the things that describe these people who had such a positive impact on me in a spiritual sense. And the interesting thing is they describe these people, they were teachers, they were coaches, they were pastors, they were friends, they were neighbors, they were just from all these different intersections that occurred in their lives. The thing that I found fascinating was not once

Did anyone mention a program? It wasn't like, oh, you know, I had this guy who walked me through this 16 week discipleship program that I got off, he got off the internet, and I'm not against those things, believe me, because I'm doing one with you. But the thing that was so impactful wasn't the program, it wasn't the systematized program that you purchase from the Christian Bookstore, it was...

Troy Kennedy (12:14.91)
It wasn't a 16 week, 12 week, 24 week thing. It was longer than that. We're talking years and multiple years of relationship. It was highly relational, highly intentional, highly Christ centered. It was consistent, it was authentic, it was by example.

And there was enough really a program now maybe programs came and went one gal. She said she had the most, the most impacted happened to her was through her Sunday school teacher when she was a child. And she continued to be in contact with this woman who had been so profound in her life till the woman died at the age of 96. We're talking about long term, long term investment, long term belief in and encouragement of another person. You, you've probably experienced that from someone. It could have been your mother or your father.

I would say my own mother had just the most amazing impact on me because she just was a woman of prayer and she Consistently even though our lives were a mess so much of the time. She consistently sought God She was consistently seeking him and wanting to expose me to the scripture expose me to Jesus to have me in some kind of Biblical community that was going to give me a vision of something bigger Than the dysfunctional microcosm of our own home

So these people have had these impacts on you. For me, it could have been a pastor or a coach or a choir director. Those are the kinds of people that say they saw something in you and they singled you out and they poured into you. And you can do this as Jesus did it for these disciples. In John chapter 15, Jesus says this to these men who are all around him. He says, I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends

for everything I learned from my father I have made known to you." Jesus is passing on the good stuff to these men and he did it intentionally, he did it relationally, he did it along the way as they were serving together. So I wanna ask you this, who is that person that God brings to mind?

Troy Kennedy (14:27.83)
that you could be pouring into. Maybe it's someone in your family, maybe it's someone in your neighborhood, maybe it's the kid that you tutor for reading after school at the local elementary school, maybe, who knows? It's someone who's a friend of yours at the gym, it's someone you know at the coffee house. But prayerfully ask God to bring this person to mind.

and then look for the opportunity. And it doesn't have to be a formalized Bible study. It doesn't mean that you're gonna meet at 5.30 a.m. every Tuesday and exegete the book of Leviticus. What it means is you are on purpose contacting this person to love them, to wish for their good, to wanna see them grow, to wanna see them grow up and mature in their relationship with God. And so it could be as simple as a question.

How are you? What is God teaching you? How can I pray for you? And maybe if you've earned enough relational collateral, you can invite them into something maybe a bit more closely that where you are meeting intentionally every week or every couple times a month, or you are maybe walking through a particular book of scripture, you know, you can say, okay, we're gonna read.

the gospel of John together and every week for the next, you know, whatever, however many chapters are in John, 22 chapters, we're going to get together every week at the coffeehouse and we're going to read a chapter and we're going to talk about what it is that God is teaching us through this and just have that regular dialogue and have that encouragement and encourage them to be in biblical community, encourage them to discover what their spiritual gifts are, how it is that they can serve in the greater body of Christ. So.

Jesus shares all the good stuff the Apostle Paul says hey in first Corinthians I pass on to you all the things that I know but which was given to me of first importance And he's passing it on to the next person So imitate me is I am imitating Jesus. I think there's a few things that we see that are

Troy Kennedy (16:29.43)
very intentional, they're the kind of handholds, right? That this sort of mentoring is centered on Jesus, right? We're Christ followers, he is the beginning, he is the ending, he's the alpha and the omega. He is the model for how the optimal human.

lives and flourishes. It's centered on Jesus. It's born in relationship. Right? We, this is not something that happens at a distance. This is life on life is grounded in scripture as we know that scripture is the loudest, clearest way that we know the voice of God. It's powered by the Holy Spirit. It's experienced together.

And it's given away to the next person because you don't keep the good stuff to yourself. Centered on Jesus, born in relationship, grounded in scripture, powered by the Spirit, experienced together. And given away to the next person.

So that's my encouragement for you today. We're gonna be heading into this next week. It's called Jesus Rested. And I wanna encourage you to, not to blow it off, because it sounds so simple and obvious. Jesus rested, so I'm gonna rest from this whole thing. Please read the chapter on the first day and then.

walk through the practices every day, because it's not just about us being rested and restored. It has everything to do with your identity, it has everything to do with who you are in Christ. And we'll finish up our 12-week journey together. I pray this is a beautiful, rich time. I would love to hear from you. You can email me, Troy, at TroyMKennedy.com, and please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Pass along this experience to your friends, to your family, to anybody.

Troy Kennedy (18:16.276)
who just needs a little bit of that next push into practically following the Savior. I pray you have an amazing week and I will talk to you next time.