What does the Bible say about disciples, discipleship, and discipling? That is exactly the issue addressed in a "biblical theology" of disicpleship.
We want to find out what discipleship is and how to do it in order to understand what God expects of us. If we do not know what biblical discipleship is or how to do it, then we cannot fulfill our purpose in life, which is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
Our first step in the study of discipleship is to establish a biblical theology of discipleship.Even though the goal of our study is to establish a biblical philosophy of discipleship (to examine and learn the goals and principles governing the making of disciples), we need to start with a biblical theology of discipleship in order to understand what the Bible says about it. And that is what a biblical theology is: it is the observation and analysis of the biblical data on a given subject.
This is precisely where we need to start our study on discipleship: in the observation of what the Bible says about it. Only then can we hope to go further and develop a biblical philosophy of the same.
Our goal, therefore, is fairly simple: we want to learn what the Bible says about discipleship. Our method of learning will be to study the Bible inductively in order to answer three key questions:
However, before we dive into the details, this quick study was given in preparation for the study ahead.