The Ministry of Multiplication (D)
Isaiah 54:2/59:21 By Daniel Baugh, Jr., Ph.D.


IV. PREDICTABLE POSSIBILITIES

With regard to the multiplication process in disciple-making, there are many degrees of potential, but the possibilities fall generally into two main categories.

First, there is the possibility of failure. This possibility is all too visible in the community of believers. Most Christians have never multiplied themselves in even one generation. Most believers have never even led anyone to faith in Christ, and they surely have not multiplied. The number of soul-winners in embarrassingly small among believers. And think about the tragic failure to multiply!

Why do people fail to multiply biologically? Why do they fail to multiply physically? There are several possible reasons. 1. They never marry. There is no union between the sexes. Thus, children are not born because there are no parents. The spiritual counterpart occurs when a person is not united to Christ by faith, or when a Christian does not practice union with Christ in a vital way. 2. They do not want to multiply. Many married people do not want children. Sometimes they are too selfish in wanting their own private enjoyment. Even so, many Christians simply do not want or intend to multiply. They may be ignorant of the demand and the delight of spiritual multiplication, or they may be indifferent to the process for selfish reasons. 3. They may suffer from disease or impairment to some reproductive part of their bodies. In a Christian’s life, this corresponds to sin in his daily experience. This sin blocks the reproductive process. 4. They are too immature to reproduce. Babies simply don’t reproduce. They may have all the organs of reproduction, but they are not sufficiently developed to allow reproduction and multiplication. The Bible discusses the baby Christian in I Corinthians 3 and in Hebrews 5:11-14. These passages should be studied carefully by every serious Christian.

Every Christian who does not understand spiritual multiplication, or is indifferent to it, or refuses to practice it, cuts the potential for fulfilling the Great Commission in his lifetime exactly in half. Read this sentence several times, and let it sink into your heart. The process of spiritual multiplication begins and ends each time with you, with me. Thus, no delegating of responsibility is allowable.

Everyone knows that Adolph Hitler attempted genocide, or racial annihilation, against the Jewish race. Using the Jews as his scapegoat, Hitler systematically killed at least six million Jews in the gas chambers of Europe during World War II. But he failed. Why? Of course there are several significant reasons for his failure, but we could simplify them into one reason. Hitler failed to destroy the Jews because he started too late. By the time Hitler arrived on the scene, the Jewish race was spread throughout the earth, and he simply could not reach all of them to destroy them. However, if Hitler had been present on Mount Moriah when Abraham was poised over his son of promise, Isaac, with a knife in his hand .... If Hitler could have gotten inside Abraham and controlled his hand for ten seconds, he could have annihilated all Jews forever! Since it was through Isaac that the Jewish race was proliferated, and since it was through Isaac that Jesus, the Promised Seed, came, Hitler could have accomplished his purpose on Mount Moriah with one stroke of his hand if he could have gotten inside father Abraham that day. In one act, he would have destroyed the entire possibility of reproduction and multiplication through Isaac.

Question: On the day that Cain murdered Abel (Genesis 4), and God said to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries unto me from the ground,” could God also have meant that all the potential children who might have been born through Abel’s loins were crying out in protest to Him? You see, when a person fails to multiply, he eliminates the possibility of an enlarging number of offspring, of innumerable descendants, of an inestimable progeny through all future generations. May God help us as Christians to see this tragedy, and repent of our part in producing it! The history of the Christian church proves the possibility of failure in spiritual multiplication.

But thank God, there is also the possibility of fulfillment, or success in spiritual multiplication. Think of this staggering reality: Every time one Christian is used of God to produce another visionary, world-impacting reproducer of others in kind so that they multiply in an enlarging way, the potential for fulfilling the Great Commission in his lifetime is exactly doubled. You see, Galatians 6:7 is a positive promise as well as a negative warning. “Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap. For he who sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting.” But sadly, we are so sin-oriented that we spend our time worrying about the coming harvest of judgment because of the sin-seeds we have sown, instead of rejoicing that the promise of God is true: As we build disciples for multiplication, the harvest will come. Isaiah 60:12 says, “One shall become a thousand, and a small one shall become a strong nation: I the Lord will hasten it in His time.” All God needs is one person with the constraining love of Christ in his heart, a passion for disciple-building in his mind, and a practical strategy for fulfilling his passion --and God is on His way!

I graduated from High School some forty-five years ago. The last High School reunion I attended was fifteen years ago. On that occasion, several questions were circulating among old classmates, questions such as, “Are you married?” “Do you have any children?” “How many children do you have?” “Do you have any grandchildren?” And they might even ask, “Do you have any great-grandchildren?” I firmly believe that Jesus Christ will have greater interest in these question, asked spiritually, when the Judgment Seat of Christ comes, than the questions about sin and malpractice that haunt us in our self-occupied kind of Christianity. “Are you married?” Yes, I am “married unto Another, even unto Him who has been raised from the dead” (Romans 7:4). “Do you have any children?” Yes, by Your mercy and grace, I have had the privilege of leading some people to You. And though they may have many teachers, they can only have one parent (I Cor. 4:15). “Do you have any grandchildren?” What a joy to answer, Yes, I have had the incredible privilege of seeing two, three, four, and even five generations of spiritual offspring, and many of them are funneling out into enlarging numbers as they continue to reproduce and multiply.

A great Argentine disciple-maker, Juan Carlos Ortiz, wrote these words: “Once an old woman in my country introduced me to a young girl. ‘This is my granddaughter,’ she said. I said, ‘Do you really have a granddaughter as old as this?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘ I have great-grandchildren. One great-granddaughter is fifteen. If she gets married soon, I’ll have great-great-grandchildren.’ ‘How many children did you have?’I asked. She replied, ‘I had six!’ ‘And how many grandsons?’ ‘Thirty-six.’ ‘And how many great-grandchildren?’ ‘I don’t know. I haven’t counted them lately.’ ‘How can you take care of so many?’ I asked. “I don’t. I only took care of my six. And each of them took care of their own.” This is precisely how spiritual multiplication works, also.

Question: When truth reaches you, does it become terminal or germinal?

Question: Since the Greek word translated “disciple” (the word mathetes) gives us the root word for our word “mathematics,” and since God’s strategy is a mathematical strategy, could it be that the Christian’s Final Exam will be a math test? And the one question will concern multiplication?

Think carefully about it, Christian. Which would you rather have in the long run, a bouquet of flowers, or a packet of seeds? What do you suppose the Lord Jesus prefers, a self-centered “good Christian,” or a risk-taking, disciple-making, multiplier?

One man awake
Can waken another
The second can waken

His next-door brother.

The three awake
Can rouse a town
By turning the whole
Place upside down.

The many awake
Can make such a fuss
That it finally wakens
The rest of us.

One man up,
With dawn in his eyes,
MULTIPLIES!