Lesson 1 of the 4 Chair Discipling course
Before the four chairs, a question: did Jesus actually have a disciple-making strategy, or just a message? Your whole ability to teach this framework hangs on the answer.
Most preaching on Jesus covers His message (what He said) and sometimes His methods (what He did, in isolation). Spader’s claim — and the spine of this book — is that there is a third layer most teachers never touch: Jesus had a model, an intentional, chronological pattern for how He developed people from seekers into reproducing disciple-makers.
If you can’t see the pattern, you can’t teach it, and the Great Commission becomes a vague guilt-trip rather than a reproducible process. So this first lesson exists to install one mental model in your head: the two axes on which Jesus worked, and the four challenges that mark the pathway.
Everything in 4 Chair Discipling hangs on two passages. Open both now.
Spader’s framing is the cleanest I’ve found for teaching: the Great Commandment is our motive; the Great Commission is our mission. Notice the order. Love is the engine; disciple-making is the direction. Try to make disciples without love and you become “a resounding gong” (1 Cor 13:1). Claim to love people but never make disciples, and your love is a lie. The two are one thought.
Try preaching this as a single sentence: “Because we love God, we love people; because we love people, we make disciples.” Then ask: which half does your church default to? Most churches excel at one wing of the airplane and neglect the other.
The Great Commission is often mistaught as two commands (“Go and make disciples”). In Greek there is one imperative — “make disciples” — surrounded by three supporting participles that describe how:
| Word | Form | What it actually means |
|---|---|---|
| Going | participle | “As you go” — to work, school, the neighborhood. Not a mission trip; an everyday posture. |
| Baptizing | participle | Public identification with Christ — the outward sign of the inward change (Chair 1→2). |
| Teaching to obey | participle | A lifestyle of obedience, not a completed curriculum. Jesus gave 400+ commands; over half are disciple-making commands. |
And there is a second imperative most readers miss entirely. The little word idou, translated “surely” or “lo” in many Bibles, is a command in Greek. The NLT catches it:
Jesus wraps the Commission with a promise of His active, manifest presence — and commands us to count on it. This is no small thing to preach: any believer, family, or church that commits to doing what Jesus did can claim that Presence. (See the glossary entry on idou.)
This is the single distinction that will make or break how you communicate this material. It’s worth slowing down for.
The mandate is disciple-making, not discipleship.
The word discipleship was popularized around 1850 by Charles Adams, who split Jesus’s single command “make disciples” into two halves: evangelism (bringing people to Christ) and discipleship (growing them up). The result, Spader argues, was a century and a half of turf wars — which wing of the airplane matters more, budgets devoted to one or the other, buildings for one or the other.
Spader’s move (and Southeast Christian Church’s): define the mission as “making disciples who can make disciples,” so that the end-product is measured by reproduction, and evangelism + growth are reunited as two wings of one aircraft. You need both to fly.
A church defines “success” as attendance growth and deeper Bible studies for existing members. By Spader’s definition, what is missing?
Here is the model in one table. Jesus did not issue these challenges at random. Each one marks a deeper investment at a distinct phase of His ministry, and each moves a person one chair over.
| Chair | Jesus’s challenge | Scripture | Moves a person… |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | “Come and see” | John 1:39, 46 | Curious → convinced (seeker → believer) |
| 2 | “Follow Me” | John 1:43 | Infant → growing (learning to walk) |
| 3 | “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men” | Matt 4:19 | Receiver → worker (ministering to others) |
| 4 | “Go and bear fruit — fruit that will last” | John 15:16 | Worker → multiplying disciple-maker |
If you take one thing from this lesson, take this: John 1:39 · John 1:43 · Matt 4:19 · John 15:16. These four verses are the framework. Everything else in the book is exposition of them. A teacher who can quote these four in order can teach the whole model.
Here is the insight that separates someone who has read the book from someone who has understood it. It’s worth getting right, because it’s the most common misreading of the New Testament that Spader is correcting.
Most readers assume Mark 1:17 (“Follow me and I will make you fishers of men”) is Jesus’s first meeting with Peter and Andrew. It is not. By Gospel harmony, these men had been walking with Jesus for at least eighteen months already. At Mark 1:17, Jesus is calling them deeper — from Chair 2 to Chair 3 — into a small “ministry team” of five (James, John, Simon, Andrew, and later Matthew). The Twelve aren’t chosen until roughly 2.5 years into the ministry (Luke 6:12–16).
Why does this matter? Because it shows Jesus strategically deepened His investment in a few before He broadened it. Seventeen times the Gospels show Jesus with the masses; forty-six times with these few. The pattern is intentional.
And the warrant for reading the Gospels this way comes from Luke himself:
Why does Spader insist the events of Mark 1:16–20 are NOT Jesus’s first encounter with the fishermen?
Step back and feel the weight of the model. Spader’s punchline, stated bluntly: Jesus’s mission was not to reach the world — it was to make disciple-makers who could reach the world.
If Jesus had reached all ~250 million people alive in His day but not trained them to multiply, the movement would have died in one generation. Because He trained reproducers, there are over a billion Christ-followers two millennia later. The law of multiplication, not addition, is what He chose. (We’ll do the math on this in Lesson 8, Chair 4 — addition grows a church of 100 to ~1,600 in 30 years; multiplication grows it past 100,000.)
So when you teach this, the pastoral pressure you are applying is gentle but clear: “Jesus started where people were and intentionally moved them to the next level. Which chair are you in — and what’s your next step?” That is a question every listener can answer, and it is the question this entire course is designed to equip you to ask well.
For a single message drawn from this lesson, try this outline: (1) One motive (love) + one mission (make disciples) — Matt 22 & 28. (2) The buried imperative: be sure of My presence — Matt 28:20. (3) The four challenges, walked through briefly. (4) Close with the personal question: which chair are you in?
1. Recite. Say aloud, without looking: the four challenges and their four references. (John 1:39 · John 1:43 · Matt 4:19 · John 15:16.) Do it again tomorrow. This is the load-bearing memory of the whole course.
2. Read the source. Open Chapter 4, “The Method — an Overview” and Chapter 3, “Our Mission and Motive”. These two chapters are the soil this lesson grew from. Read with this lesson’s framework in hand and you’ll see how much more is there to harvest for teaching.
3. Keep the reference open. The master reference page holds the whole map on one screen. Bookmark it; it’s designed to be printed and pinned next to your desk while you prepare talks.
I’m your teacher on this. Anything unclear — the grammar of the Great Commission, the chronology argument, how to pitch the “disciple-making vs. discipleship” distinction without sounding like you’re just arguing vocabulary — ask a follow-up question and we’ll dig in. You can also tell me which chair you most need to be able to teach, and I’ll weight the next lessons toward it.