Radical Apprentices: Risky and Rewarding Discipleship Rediscovered through the Book of Acts

By Ron Mahler

How can believers today express their commitment to Jesus in a way that is relevant and alluring? Ron Mahler reintroduces the early Church, whose people were so radical in every facet of their faith and ministry, as the ultimate example for Christians to emulate. The trail-blazing testimony of our pioneering Christian ancestors challenges us to imagine a time when faith and fellowship were not just about believing in certain doctrines and doing “Christian” things, but also about living like Jesus lived.

“…a stirring challenge and practical guide…”

—William McRae

President Emeritus, Tyndale University College and Seminary

• Language: English
• Publisher: Word Alive Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781486610822

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Author’s Note

In a time such as ours, when the term radical holds such universally negative connotations, both religiously and politically, the early Christian Church reminds us of a time when being radical about one’s faith in Jesus Christ meant something that was fresh and foundational, risky and rewarding, inspirational and inviting. It was something so bold and beautiful that it has captivated generations of believers for over two thousand years.

Post Modernism: a host of movements, mainly in art, music, and literature, that reacted against tendencies in modernism.1i

Post Christian: Every area of life [that is] steadily divorced from [the influences of] Christianity and re-interpreted in humanistic terms.2ii

Introduction

It was a cold and wintery Friday afternoon as I looked outside the purgatory room, as one customer awaiting news about his car had called it. I watched as the sun sunk slowly in the distance like an orange-pink ball pouching down within the roofs of houses. It had already seemed like a long day for me, as I’d just finished teaching an early morning class, and I had hoped to pick up my van within a half-hour of leaving the school. Yet there I sat, a few hours and a few bad coffees later, with my stomach empty and my eyelids heavy, awaiting the news that my vehicle had finally entered the dealership’s garage bay to be worked on.

Just then, a customer service rep burst in on my boredom, and annoyance, to lay some unexpected news on me. Mr. Mahler! I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to get your van in very soon. Sorry for the delay. The mechanic who was supposed to work on it had to go home. But we’ve put in a call to one of our apprentices, and he’ll be able to come in and do it.

An apprentice is going to work on my vehicle? I thought to myself.

The waiting room I had already been in for a few hours suddenly became my very own panic room. Somewhat concerned, I couldn’t help but ask the representative, who I realize was only the messenger, if this apprentice would be qualified enough to do the job.

Oh yes, Mr. Mahler. No problem there, he answered assertively. They’ll do a good job.

All turned out well. The problem was fixed and I made it home in one piece, and so did my van. I felt I had overreacted after being informed that an understudy grease monkey was going to take apart and then put back together the vital mechanical elements of my vehicle. Good thing for me, this apprentice had learned well.

As I was driving home, the lulling effect of travelling along cushiony, snowy roads was abruptly interrupted by a thought that seemed to barge in through the doors of my reflection. I, too, like the mechanic who had fixed my van, was an apprentice of some kind. I was someone, a disciple, who was learning and studying and training how to be like Christ. I was someone, a pastor, who had been entrusted to put into practice the biblical knowledge, faith, spiritual gifts, abilities, and training tools I possessed in serving Christ and His Church.

Suddenly the thought of being an apprentice of some sort didn’t seem like such an inferior role. In fact, seeing ourselves as perpetual apprentices, as disciples of Jesus, might even help us to remain more teachable as a people of God. The truth is that I spend many days wondering about whether I’m learning well as Jesus’ apprenticing disciple, whether I’m accomplishing enough for Him that’s of eternal worth. Would I be declared good and faithful as His servant if the Lord were to appraise the quality of my apprenticeship today?

The Bible’s Exhibit A, in terms of what committed faith and humble service should look like in the Church, is taken from the pioneering lives of the early Christians. The testimony of Scripture indicates that our forerunners in the faith functioned as apprenticing disciples of Jesus, and that they were characteristically radical in how they exercised that apprenticeship.

The history of Christendom is steeped in the ultra-inspiration and witness of the Church’s martyrs, with its inaugurating casualty of the faith, a disciple named Stephen, breaking new ground in terms of the costs related to witnessing for the Gospel. The account of Stephen’s stoning at the hands of unbelieving Jews, tucked within the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament, demands a reverent, meditative pause whenever we come across it.

Our world continues to be less than Christian friendly. Our culture’s slipping value systems, cracking ideologies, and ever-rising social needs fail to inspire confidence and hope in a better tomorrow. We’re more educated than ever before, yet we feel more helpless and hopeless as a people. This is all to say that a Christian today who truly desires to sharpen the effectiveness of his or her apprenticeship as a disciple of Jesus Christ is called to do so using the whetstone of spiritually dank and dangerous times.

To unabashedly stick out as a Christian in a morally gnarled culture is on par, it seems, with committing a radical act of bravery! To take a stand for Jesus Christ and His Gospel is to move from being a spectator to a participant in the long-running battle between God and Satan.

Too often, God’s people are targeted in the secular telescopes of trigger-happy opponents of Christianity whose bullets of abusive propaganda shoot to silence any sightings of a Gospel conscience. We’re seeing nuances of pagan ideology budding and mutating within secular society today of a kind that thrived when the Church of Jesus Christ was born. We’re standing on the shoreline of an age when those who belong to Christ’s Church—who thus far have been spared from truly suffering for their faith—will begin to experience more intolerant tides of persecution roll over their lives and ministries, with all their rippling effects of hardship. Indeed, the time is coming when we’ll be more like the early Church than we’d perhaps like.

The zeitgeist of the postmodern age makes the Church’s ministry of evangelism appear that much more daunting, for Christians are a people of spiritual absolutes who live under the point of their post-Christian world’s sterilizing eraser of relativism. Essentially, relativism is a philosophy in which varying points of view are thought to hold subjective value, yet no definitiveness in terms of ultimate truth.

Rewind some two thousand years and we arrive back at a time—which interestingly enough seems awfully similar to the spirit of our present day—when God’s people were seen as a peculiar yet seemingly irrelevant group of religious inwards and outlaws huddling secretly on the fringes of society. In reality, however, the believers of Christianity’s early communities were neither antisocial nor civically aloof. The first disciples of Jesus were hardly indifferent. In contrast to such a view, the book of Acts depicts the New Testament Church as being wholly preoccupied with riding the Holy Spirit’s missional wave straight into the darkened arteries of its spiritually flailing and helplessly humanistic culture.

The blunt-force trials experienced by these early Christian assemblies, in addition to the euphoric, spiritual victories they periodically enjoyed, point to the fact that although God’s people absorbed some body shots, they weren’t solely on the defensive.

The first disciples to follow Jesus took a radical approach to living for their Lord by resolving to take their world by Gospel-storm, regardless of opposition. They were thoroughly sold out for what their Lord left them to accomplish: making other disciples. For the early Church, their Saviour’s Great Commission always took precedence over contestations between them and their pagan world.

This is precisely why the early Church communities continue to serve as a plumb line for the twenty-first-century Church of Jesus Christ in terms of testing the quality and vitality of its spiritual mettle, as well as its Gospel-consciousness and capacity to capitalize on ministry possibilities. Simply, the trail-blazing testimony of our pioneering Christian ancestors challenges us to imagine a time when faith and fellowship weren’t just about believing in certain doctrines and doing Christian things, but also about living like Jesus lived—a time when discipleship meant apprenticing under the Lord in radical fashion, for all the world to behold!

1. You Can’t Keep a Good God Buried

Radical Faith

You may have heard of the Mars One mission that’s slated to happen in 2022. Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp has determined this world is too small, so he wants to establish a human colony upon the red planet. At present there are only twenty-four spaces available for this endeavour. Six teams of four people, each from every continent in the world, will live and train together for seven years before departing to Mars to begin living there—which, by the way, is a one-way trip!

At the time of this writing, roughly forty-seven thousand people from all over the world have applied to be a part of the mission through video presentations. All hype aside, however, the trip could prove to be a huge waste of time and money, not to mention in terms of lives lost. Though such a venture has never been attempted before, and has yet to even have a test drive, thousands upon thousands of people are ready to place their precious lives in the cold hands of advanced technology and scientific study.

Now that’s faith. Maybe even radical faith!

We may think it’s a neat idea to fly to a destination such as Mars, but putting our lives on the line in order to make it happen is quite another issue. It’d require a little guts on our part, but even more, we’d have to simply believe that what we’re being told and sold in terms of the risks and rewards of the mission will be well worth it.

Though the early Christians were hardly attempting something as risky as space travel, professing faith in the risen king of the Jews, given what they knew about the powerful Romans and the agendas of all their Lord’s enemies, brought about every conceivable earthly risk, the most costly of them being the realization of their own martyrdoms.

The Birth of Radical Faith

Faith of the radical sort emanated from the disciples of the early Christian Church, as evidenced throughout the book of Acts. This faith was conceived in the spiritual test tube of trial and tribulation. The ministry of Jesus couldn’t help but challenge those who witnessed it to consider not only the simplicity of the Lord’s teaching, but its authoritative profundity. The deal-maker or deal-breaker came in the form of Jesus’ invitation for people to either receive His words (and Person) by faith or reject them at their own soul’s eternal detriment. The disciples of the early Church obviously chose the former—and then some!

The Christian Church’s faith is both founded on and grounded in a complementary balance of spiritual reality and historical fact. The genesis of the Christian faith can be traced back to the decisive events of Jesus’ crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. In spiritual concert with each other, these two historically connected realities—one being natural (the crucifixion), the other supernatural (the resurrection)—poured, mixed, and set the faith of Jesus’ followers like concrete.

Jesus, fresh off His resurrection, appeared to His eleven remaining disciples (minus Judas) while they were still wallowing in an emotional soup of confusion, including the sullen ingredients of sprinkled grief and a pinch of anger. The Lord’s entrance into the room where His dejected disciples were staying, however, was an encounter to make extraordinary apprentices out of ordinary men, a divine visitation that eventually produced a spiritual cavalcade of radicals who by the heavenly leverage their rejuvenated faith afforded them would turn the first-century world on its head.

However, before the euphoria of the first Jesus sighting, there was the hopeless scenery of a closed-off entrance to a newly dug tomb, and everyone bet that its sole resident was the stiff form of the One who had once claimed to be the Christ. The seeming finality surrounding the event of the Lord’s death provided His followers with a What do we do now? reality check. Despite the foolhardy opinions held by those who believe that Jesus only swooned on the cross, but didn’t actually expire, the Son of God looked dead—and was buried—because He really died! No one among the closest followers of Christ, or even among the authorities, believed He was anything but dead.

It wasn’t as if Jesus’ death on the cross was merely a show of divine theatre. The crucifixion was in no way a deceptive act. Our Lord’s physical cessation was a reality. In the recesses of Peter’s mind, the grieving disciple no doubt wondered how the Church His Master had spoken of—and something about the rock it would be built upon—could ever happen now that the invention had died along with the Inventor (Matthew 16:18). Simply, if there was no risen Saviour, there couldn’t possibly be a Church.

We can only imagine the layers of fresh doubt and long-shot hopes that must have intertwined themselves around the hearts and minds of the disciples as a blizzard of untenable circumstances moved in. Stewing in the juices of their collective confoundedness, the disciples would have to sit tight, wait, and see if the Lord would rise from the dead, as He had inferred that He would. This is where the disciples’ decision to hold steady in their hope of an alive and well Jesus would certainly have elasticized the parameters of their faith in Him.

What a difference, however, just a few days made between utter despair and ultimate discovery, between a nightmarish crucifixion and an inconceivable resurrection. The stone covering the entrance to Jesus’ burial tomb was rolled away, and the grave thought to be holding a dead man from Nazareth—or in some people’s estimations, the body of another wannabe Messiah—was not only Jesus-less, but its vacancy warranted at the most a belief in Christ, the Harry Houdini of death, or a fume of faith at the least. The desperate, concocted rumour that the Lord’s body was somehow stolen could do nothing to squelch the reality that a grave without a dead Jesus was the stuff of pure, divine I told you so.

The Lord’s enemies could scrounge together all the hammers of cover-up they desired, but without the nails of truth on their side, there was hardly a way to credibly explain Jesus’ absence from His guarded burial place, nor fully deny the possibility of His resurrection. A little heavenly tomb-raiding had taken place right under the irreverent noses of the Romans and unbelieving Jews.

Jesus predicted not only His own death, but His rise from the dead as well. At times the Lord was clear about these connected events.

…the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death… mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.

—Mark 10:33–34

There were times, however, when Jesus was deliberately cryptic about His eventual resurrection.

Destroy this temple [the Lord’s body], and I will raise it again in three days.

—John 2:19

The Lord gave all who had ears to hear a head’s up that they could seal His body in a tomb all they wanted, but the power of God would ensure He’d be checking out in a matter of a few short days.

There’s Never Been Anyone Like Jesus!

If you’re like me, you often wonder why our world can’t just get over its doubt already and accept that Jesus is not only alive but Almighty God, come to us in the flesh.

Who else could possibly live like our Lord lived (perfectly and without sin) or accomplish what He did (die for the sins of a spiritually fallen humanity)? Jesus Christ has exclusive authority and power over all things seen and unseen, power over creation, over the physical world, over the demonic realm, and even over death itself. Our Lord demonstrated these realties through His words and actions when He walked upon our earth and ministered to people as Imanu’el (עמנואל), meaning God with us.

During His ministry years, Jesus continuously prepped the spiritual soil within the hearts of His called disciples, as well as any extraneous followers committed to the Saviour. He also issued challenges to those who were merely enthusiasts and stragglers, those who had made a habit of hanging off the tails of His tunic. The Lord invited all people to come to Him and repent, and to turn to God by accepting Him, the Son of God, as their salvation.

Our Lord’s teachings turned heads, bent ears, and got tongues wagging. His unique preaching was so vibrantly thick and rich in authority and wisdom, so steeped with spiritual possibilities for the human race, that it couldn’t help but cause the hearts of so many people to beat and stir. Jesus busted Jewish hope out of its funk by renovating that hope, adding to it a salvific dimension and eternal outlook: the Messiah was coming to redeem and rescue God’s people all right, but it had more to do with freeing them from their own sin’s tyranny than from Rome’s.

Ultimately, Jesus’ teaching, and the power behind it, paved the way for people to apprehend not