222
Years ago I was waking up night after night at 2:22 am. It drove me nuts because I knew it could not have been a coincidence yet I didn’t know what it meant. Later God led me to a 222 passage.
2 Timothy 2:2 – The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also
Paul is telling Timothy to continue the pattern set by Jesus of making disciples. I know that we think we have improved on many things today but I am not so sure that is true. The relational method of training others, is still the most effective. Shouldn’t we do ministry the way Jesus did it?
Mark 3:14-15 – And He appointed twelve, so that they would be with Him and that He could send them out to preach, and to have authority to cast out the demons.
The process Jesus used was relational with the disciples learning while being with their teacher. The learning involved being given assignments then the disciples would report back. Jesus also imparted power and authority to them so that their work was not humanly but divinely empowered. Our commission is clearly to make disciples – not converts or church attenders.
Paul’s 222 instructions had a view of four generations of students: From Paul to Timothy; to Faithful Men that Timothy would teach; and finally to others that the faithful men will teach.
We can all apply this vision of 222 in the following way that I learned form Tre Moore, one of the young men in HarvestNet. We should each have the following:
2 mentors who we ask to guide us and form us.
2 peers to walk with who will be our friends on the journey.
2 disciples who we will pour into and mentor.
Making disciples is a command for every Christian that God expects us to follow through on. Suppose you asked your daughter to clean her room and when you returned She said “Well I’m praying about it. I even got together with friends and we are praying that it will happen soon. We had a group discussion about how to clean the room. One of the guys did a word study about the true meaning of the word clean. Another wrote a song about room cleaning. We will hold seminars about this topic. We will cast the unclean spirit out of the room. We blew the shofar and made faith declarations. We are confessing that the room will be cleaned. There will be a supernatural transference of dirt out of the room sometime soon. We’re doing spiritual warfare to remove the dirty territorial spirit from the room.
Eventually we will build a denomination around the teachings of the clean room.
Yes, that is funny, but God still expects us to actually do what he commanded us to do: “Go Make Disciples”. Maybe 222 can provide a simple guide for you to get started.
