The Power of Twelve
… he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles.
Luke 6:13b
The Missions Conference this week has been a wonderful blessing of daily worship in communion with our local and global Christian brothers and sisters. Holly and I had the privilege of hosting Ray and Annette Ronk for a couple of days early in the week, and in discussions with them, we found that they had directly planted six churches and strongly supported the growth of another six churches for a total, of course, of twelve in 36 years of ministry in Brazil.
I can’t help but be reminded of the ministry of Jesus in his short time on earth. Making the very good assumption that Jesus, in living his perfect life of obedience to the will of the Father, did so in the most effective way. He could have performed mass conversions and pushed thousands of preachers into the world, but instead he invested primarily into the relationships with just twelve men (see Luke 6:13b, above). Each of the twelve apostles then went on to fulfill their God-given role in spreading the gospel (yes, even Judas—see John 17:12b).
Twelve. All that is required for you to live the successful Christian life, is to live your life well and to multiply the gospel through twelve disciples. If each of these twelve, then, do the same in their lives, in just one generation there will be 12×12 = 144 disciples. In one more generation, 12×12×12 = 1728, and so on down through the ages for a total of 12n of Christians in n generations. So, just how long would it take, if we had such faithful disciples in each generation, to fill the earth with Christ worshipers? If we say we want to make 10 billion Christians, we start with 12n = 1010 and solve for n, giving n =10/log(12) = 9.3. If each generation is 36 years (as the Ronks had…) then 10 billion disciples could be made in just 335 years!
That’s the power of twelve. In a whole Christian life, it just takes twelve. So, who are the twelve in your life? Count them among your family, your friends, your neighbors, and, yes, in the church, but I encourage you to strive to model Christ in this way. Seek to build relationships that come to gospel conversations, make (and baptize!) disciples, and then pour into these disciples the way Jesus poured into his disciples, and then let’s rejoice over the fields of the harvest to be reaped.
Pastor Aaron
