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"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I commanded you" (Mt.28:19,20). If we just preach the Gospel to people and get them to believe in Jesus, have we completed our responsibility? Can we think that once God gives them the new birth and the Holy Spirit starts dwelling in them, then God will cause them to grow and make them to become more and more like Jesus? No. Here itself it says that it is not sufficient to make them believers but disciples. Disciples are those who have chosen to follow their Master in order to do whatever He says and to become like Him. Will the Holy Spirit do that automatically for them? Just for clarity, just take a look around at ourselves and others to see if this has happened.

Yes, God is keen to sanctify us, set us apart to Himself more and more, and He is at work in us daily. But it is one thing to have a great teacher but another for the student to be distracted with so many things in his mind! If we are honest, we will have to admit that if only we had listened to and cooperated with God better, how much closer we could have become with God and what all He could have accomplished through us. The problem is that while God is at work in us, it is our submission to Him that has been lacking (Php.2:12,13).

"Everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure" (1Jn.3:3). This is the part of sanctification that we need to focus on from our side, because this is our responsibility. There is a need to depend on God to give us the strength and also to ask for it in prayer. But having prayed, we cannot afford to think that now God will take care of it and we just have to wait for Him. With such a wrong mentality, what we are doing is to 'pass the buck' to God, absolve ourselves of our responsibility and take no action from our side.

A part of the Great Commission tells us to teach people to keep (do) all that Jesus has commanded. A part of our responsibility after we have become His disciples is to learn what all He has taught, and then to make sure that we carry them out in real life. Bible study is good, but if it only gives us more information and we are not making any effort to obey what we have learnt, it will only make us believe that we have become better people just because we have more knowledge. No. Greater knowledge gives us greater accountability before God, but also, it gives us greater opportunity to practise things and become more like Jesus in reality.

Some churches focus on preaching the Gospel and bringing people to Christ, some others on teaching people from the Bible. But if we do not focus also on 'doing' what we have learnt, we will just be as foolish as the man who built on the sand. His problem was that even though he had heard the truth, he did not actually obey it (Mt.7:26). What he learnt did not really help him!

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