In the winter of 2019, I took my first sabbatical in ministry. For a few days I stayed alone at Lake Tahoe, hoping for rest and renewal. I had been there once before, but this trip was different. I found myself stunned by the majesty of God’s creation. The Sierra Nevada Mountains rose into the crisp blue sky before plunging into the clear waters of the lake. Tahoe is one of the deepest lakes in the United States—1,645 feet, more than five football fields stacked end to end. Standing on the shore, looking into water so clear it seemed bottomless, I couldn’t shake the sense of its vastness.

And then Habakkuk’s words came to mind: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Hab 2:14). He spoke those words to a devastated people. Their kingdom was in ruins. Exile loomed. They wondered: What is God doing? Is judgment the end of our story? Where is this heading? The prophet answers: No. History is not spiraling into chaos. It is moving toward a day when God’s glory will fill the whole earth—like waters cover the sea, like Tahoe’s endless depths. That is where everything is headed. That is the future. And that is the foundation of deep discipleship.

The Why Behind the What

Before we discuss ministry strategies, programs, or best practices, we need to remember the why behind the what. The heart of discipleship is not a plan or a philosophy—it is the glory of God.

Our aim in discipleship is not to build bigger ministries but to know and enjoy God himself. Deep discipleship is about pointing ourselves and those we lead toward the inexhaustible beauty of the triune God. Success is not found in busier calendars or flashier events, but in forming disciples who love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength (Luke 10:27).

Habakkuk shows us that the knowledge of God’s glory is both the goal and the fuel of discipleship. It is the goal, because the whole world is moving toward it. And it is the fuel, because God’s presence alone will carry us there. Programs won’t sustain us. Strategies won’t satisfy us. Only God will.

This is why discipleship matters. It is not ultimately about curriculum or classrooms. Those are tools. The goal and the fuel of discipleship is God himself. As Herman Bavinck put it, “God, and God alone, is man’s highest good.”[1] Discipleship is about the next fifty trillion years in the presence of God, not just the next fifty in ministry. If we lose this vision, even our best practices will leave us hollow. A ministry not oriented to God’s presence is dead. Ministry fueled by his presence is alive.

The Goal of Discipleship

In John 17:3, Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Eternal life is not simply about heaven someday. It is about knowing God now. The Great Commandment presses the same point: love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind (Matt 22:37). The repeated “with all” is intentional. Nothing deserves our whole selves but God alone.

That is why discipleship cannot be reduced to counting small group participation or Bible study completions. True discipleship is measured by whether people are being reoriented to God himself—whether their loves, desires, and imaginations are increasingly centered on him.

John Calvin once wrote, “The final goal of the blessed life rests in the knowledge of God.”[2] Discipleship is about growing in that knowledge—not simply information about God, but fellowship with the Triune God who reveals himself in Christ.

To make that point clearer, Calvin uses an image. He says true wisdom is made up of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. But this is not a call to self-focus. Think of a jeweler who places a diamond against a black backdrop. The diamond’s brilliance stands out more clearly because of the contrast. God is the diamond. We are the backdrop. Our role is not to magnify ourselves but to magnify him.

This is why discipleship must be deep. The good life is not found in self-discovery, career success, or personal fulfillment. The good life is knowing God. Depth is required not because we are ambitious, but because God is inexhaustible. Our people don’t need more of themselves. They need more of Christ. Not more than Jesus, but more of Jesus.

The Challenges We Face

So why do so many churches settle for shallow discipleship? Because two subtle but deadly counterfeits have taken root: self-centered discipleship and spiritual apathy. Both look appealing on the surface. Both can even masquerade as genuine discipleship. But both lead us away from Christ.

Self-Centered Discipleship

We live in a cultural moment obsessed with the autonomous self. From every angle, we hear the same message: Be true to yourself. Salvation, we are told, is not found in knowing God but in discovering yourself.

This is not a new problem. From Genesis 3 onward, humanity has been tempted to grasp for identity apart from God, to believe that self, not God, is a bottomless well of beauty. Our first parents reached for wisdom apart from God, and ever since then, the lie has lingered: true flourishing comes through self-rule, not surrender.

The danger is that the church has often baptized this cultural mantra. Instead of calling people to deny themselves, we sometimes market discipleship as a way to improve themselves. We reinforce the lie that following Christ will simply make you a better version of who you already are. But Jesus could not have been clearer: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt 16:24). Even Peter had to learn this. When Jesus told his disciples he would suffer and die, Peter rebuked him. For Peter, discipleship meant ruling with Jesus, not following him to a cross. But Jesus corrected him: You do not find your life by clinging to it—you find it by losing it for his sake.

John Calvin once wrote that true wisdom consists of “the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”[3] But this was never a license for self-focus. Calvin’s point was that God is the diamond, and we are the black backdrop. The brilliance of God shines most clearly when our own self-sufficiency fades into the background. When discipleship is reduced to self-help, the results are predictable. People know their Enneagram number better than the attributes of God. They can quote political talking points but not the Apostles’ Creed. They are shaped more by digital habits than spiritual disciplines. They may be religious consumers, but they are not deep disciples.

True discipleship turns us away from ourselves and toward Christ. He must increase, and we must decrease (John 3:30).

Spiritual Apathy

If self-centered discipleship is one danger, spiritual apathy is another. Many churches are satisfied if people are not bored with church, even if they are bored with Christ. We measure engagement by activity rather than awe. But boredom with Jesus is impossible. If people are yawning at Christ, it means they have never truly seen him.

The Colossian church faced this very temptation. They were not abandoning the faith outright, but they were distracted by other fascinations—angels, rulers, powers. So, Paul reminded them of Christ’s supremacy: “He is the image of the invisible God . . . that in everything he might be preeminent” (Col 1:15–18). Paul’s cure for apathy was not novelty. It was awe. He held Christ before them until they saw again that everything—visible and invisible—was created by him, through him, and for him.

We face the same challenge today. Our churches are often marked by a version of cultural Christianity that leaves people busy but bored. Cultural Christianity says that God is good to us—he gives us gifts, blessings, and benefits. Biblical Christianity says that God is good for us; he is the gift, the blessing, and the benefit. Cultural Christianity says we should seek God to get his things. Biblical Christianity says we should seek God to get God.

Do you see the difference? A church can have excellent music, a strong budget, and polished programs—and still fail if Christ is not central. Satan doesn’t need people to renounce their faith to make them ineffective. He only needs them to grow indifferent. A domesticated Jesus will never produce deep disciples. The only cure for apathy is awe. The church must show people Christ again and again until they see him as he truly is Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, Lord.

The Invitation

If we want to make whole disciples of Jesus, we must recover a God-centered vision of discipleship. That means refusing to define success by numbers alone. It means resisting the temptation to cater to the self or entertain the apathetic. It means calling people to the one reality that never fails, never bores, never runs dry: the glory of God.

Paul ends Romans 11 with a doxology: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom 11:33). That is the cry of deep discipleship.

1. I. Packer once asked two questions: What were we made for? What aim should we set ourselves in life? His answer was simple and profound: to know God[4]. That is the heartbeat of discipleship. We cannot settle for a vision that makes the church central but leaves Christ on the margins. We cannot settle for strategies that merely keep people comfortable but fail to captivate them.

The foundation of discipleship is not new ideas or clever strategies. The foundation is God himself. He is the goal, and he is the means. He is where we are going, and he is how we will get there. Whether standing on the shore of Lake Tahoe or standing at the edge of eternity, disciples know what they want: not more than Jesus, but more of Jesus.

This is the call before us. Raise the bar, not lower it. Invite people into the bottomless depths of God’s glory. Show them that discipleship should be deep because God is inexhaustible. That is our task. That is our joy. And that is our future.

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[1] Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God (Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2020), 1.

[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 51.

[3] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:35.

[4] J. I. Packer, Knowing God, 20th anniv. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 1993), 33.