From Servant to Friend: The Intimate Journey into Spiritual Parenthood

There is a Greek word that changes everything about how we understand Jesus’s goal for His disciples. The word is katartizo, translated “fully trained” in Luke 6:40. It means “to repair” and “to prepare.” It is the same word used in Matthew 4:21 when James and John were “preparing” their nets - mending torn sections, making them ready for the next day’s catch. Jesus’s goal was never merely to inform His disciples. It was to repair them from the brokenness of the journey and prepare them for the mission ahead.

Every struggle in Chair 3 - the battles with the flesh, the suffering, the servanthood, the sacrifice - was part of the repairing process. And now, in Chair 4, the repaired nets are ready for the catch.

From Servants to Friends

Something remarkable happens in the progression of Jesus’s relationship with His disciples. In the early days, He invited them: “Come and see” (John 1:39). Then He called them: “Follow me” (John 1:43). During the serving years, He modeled servant leadership by washing their feet (John 13). But in the final hours before the cross, Jesus said something breathtaking: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

Servants obey without understanding. Friends are trusted with the purposes of the Master. The progression from seeker to follower to servant to friend mirrors the entire four-chair journey. And it ends not with a promotion but with an intimacy that changes everything.

Spader describes his own experience: “No longer striving or trying hard to win God’s favor - I have learned that I have His favor due to the Cross. I can be myself. I love to meet with the Lord. I long to be in His presence. We are friends, and I marvel at that privilege.”

The Only Time Jesus Was Full of Joy

Three times in the Gospels, Jesus wept. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). He wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). He wept in the garden (Hebrews 5:7). But only once is He described as “full of joy” - and the Greek word means a deep, Spirit-wrought exultation. It happened in Luke 10.

Jesus had just sent out seventy-two disciples - the next generation of workers - and they returned with joy. “At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth’” (Luke 10:21). Why this explosive joy? Because after three and a half years of pouring into a few, Jesus now saw them investing in others. His movement of multiplying disciples was beginning to bear fruit. He knew that two thousand years later, you and I would be Christ-followers because His plan worked.

Jesus’s mission was not to reach the world directly. It was to make disciples who could reach the world. That is multiplication. And it started with one Teacher and a handful of friends.

Addition or Multiplication?

A church-planter in a remote Javanese village has spent years faithfully serving. Twenty people have come to Christ through his ministry. That is a reason to rejoice. But if none of those twenty has led anyone else to Christ, the growth is addition, not multiplication. The church-planter added twenty people. Multiplication would mean those twenty each reached others, and those others reached still more. One becomes two, two become four, four become eight.

The math is staggering. A church of one hundred that grows by ten percent per year through addition reaches roughly sixteen hundred after thirty years. But if one hundred people each disciple one person every three years, and each new disciple does the same, the number after thirty years exceeds one hundred thousand. That is not clever arithmetic. That is Jesus’s strategy.

The Journey Ends with a Question

All of this - the repairing, the friendship, the joy, the multiplication - comes down to one question: Who is your one? Who is the person you are personally investing in to become a disciple-maker? If you can name someone, you are on the multiplication path. If you cannot, today is the day to start praying for one name. Because one name, invested in well, can change an entire region.