2. Practicality

Imagine yourself teaching your group this weekend. Now, in your imagination, write the following question in red paint on each person’s forehead: “So what?” If your students weren’t so polite, they would ask the question out loud. It’s what they want to know: “What difference should this truth make to my Monday morning?” If you do not have a ready answer to that question, go back and study until you get one. Teaching is about application.

Did you provide specific ideas that can be applied to people’s lives during the week? Did you teach for changed lives? People are not interested in accumulating information that does not relate to their lives. We are not out to make smarter sinners. We are seeking to change lives. Disciple-making is about application.

The key is to ask for small, specific, incremental changes. Do not push for monumental changes every week—just try to get a little bit of change each week. Ask questions such as “What is one thing you could do this week to demonstrate your concern for the lost?” When someone says, “I could pray once for my neighbor John,” make a hero out of that person. That is application that begins to make a difference, and it paves the way for further application. The ship begins to turn. The application does not need to be “See ten people come to faith this week.” That is good but too lofty for most people. It is like asking someone to high jump six feet. Most of us need to start with eighteen inches. Get people jumping over the bar before you move it higher. If the bar is perceived to be too high, people will not even attempt to jump it.

“Pray once this week” may be enough. Some application is better than no application at all. Application needs to be specific and have a time orientation. It needs to be something people can do this week. If it is something they are going to do next winter, when the kids are grown, or when they grow old, forget it. Application needs to be small, and it needs to happen this week.

It is also a good idea to ask each week about the application suggested the previous week. For example, you might say, “Last week we talked about praying for our non-Christian friends. Did anyone do this? What other steps could we take?” In an open group such as a Sunday school class or a cell group, accountability needs to be kept pretty simple. If you expect new people to feel comfortable in the group, don’t hold people accountable for the last twenty-five verses they have been memorizing. Those kinds of intense, accountability-oriented discipleship groups are great for creating depth. But they are killers in providing an open place for people to come. Week-to-week accountability, however, will not run people off.

Accountability needs to find the razor’s edge of speaking the truth in love. If we communicate condemnation to those who fail (and everyone fails), we miss the gospel entirely. There is no place for condemnation in the Christian experience. There is, however, a place for truth spoken in love. So when someone says, “I want to have a quiet time five days this week, and I want you to hold me accountable,” we need to do so.

I am familiar with one group leader who was holding a group accountable for daily quiet times. When the group failed in this, he would say, “That’s OK—no big deal. I didn’t have any quiet times this week either.” That kind of accountability will not create disciples. We need to speak the truth in love. We need to communicate that disobedience never cancels grace, that it never calls into question God’s love for us. But sin does have its consequences. We reap what we sow. The difference is that while condemnation says, “You are bad because you sinned,” grace says, “You sinned. That is wrong. But there is grace. You are forgiven. You are accepted. You are loved.”

In addition, there is a fine line between accountability and controlling. Accountability holds people accountable for their goals. Controlling attempts to manipulate people against their wills. The issue is not the goodness of the activity. The issue is: Who gets to decide? Suppose you tried to “hold people accountable” for not watching R-rated movies because you have a conviction about R-rated movies. Suppose you tried to hold them accountable even though they didn’t share your convictions. That is not accountability. That is controlling. Accountability is holding people accountable for their goals. Paul said that “each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” about matters of personal conviction (Romans 14:5).

Bruce Wilkinson gives extensive treatment to the importance of application in The 7 Laws of the Learner. In the process, he tells of reading through and marking the manuscripts of great preachers in order to identify the portions that were application-oriented and the portions that were content-oriented. He discovered that the best preachers, now and in the past, averaged between 45 and 75 percent application.1 Your teaching also should emphasize application.

Finally, application does not always have to involve doing. Sometimes the application might involve believing or feeling. The application of Psalm 23 is to believe that God is my shepherd and that I need not want. I am obedient to the truth of the psalm when I rest in God. On the other hand, the application of Philippians 4:4 (“Rejoice in the Lord always...”) is to enjoy God. Many of the issues of Christian discipleship are issues of the heart. If we do not see this, we run the risk of being Pharisee-makers instead of disciple-makers. The Pharisees had application down to a science, but they missed the issues of the heart.

Evaluate yourself on how well you teach for application. Give yourself a ten if you teach for specific application every week. Give yourself a one if you hardly ever do so.