Everyone has problems – money, meaning, marriage, child, work, health, addictions and idols, and so on. People are wondering:

Does God know what I am going through?

Does He care?

Does He have the power to do anything about it?

How does God provide to solve these problems? Making disciples is God’s designated way to release the power of his gospel on each and every problem we face.

So what should we do?

At any given point you and I are either “becoming” or “making” disciples. There are seasons for both, and they often overlap.

Sometimes we are spiritually dehydrated and we need to fill up in our relationship with Jesus. That’s why we need to be actively involved in a church, reading and meditating on God’s word for ourselves, and doing life together with a few others in a small group. That’s how we “become” disciples.

But when we are filled to the overflow in our relationship of Jesus, then it’s time to reproduce. It’s time to “make” disciples.

We don’t have to be scholars or pastors or preachers to “make.”

Consider my friend Victor, an American citizen born in Honduras, who has a burden for Central America. I wrote in How God Makes Men how he went on a missions trip to his native land. His team traveled to several mountain villages, most of which did not have electricity. They had to pack in a generator to run their laptops and projector.

In one Honduran village thirty-four men assembled for a men’s seminar. The pastor was astonished because no one could remember that many men coming together for a spiritual reason in the history of that village. In that region, a church typically has only two or three men and the rest are women.

In those remote villages, men don’t respect women. Fathers routinely abuse their children, both physically and verbally. Against that backdrop, Victor spoke to those men about what it means to be a godly man, husband, and father.

And then something beautiful happened. The very next day, wives came to the pastor and said, “I cannot tell you what a change has taken place in just twenty-four hours.”

Three months later a revisit to that village found the number of men attending its seven smallchurches had doubled, and 150 men were serving God and doing ministry. Many of those men have to walk three hours on dangerous mountain trails to get to the meeting place.

And it all started with a burden. God called Victor to step into a vacuum of knowledge about God and disciple each of those Honduran men how to be a godly man, husband, and father.

Can you imagine how happy those wives and children are going to be over the next several decades because this one man was faithful to not only “become” a disciple, but to “make” disciples?

The greatest mission to which we can aspire is to be a disciple-making disciple. We are the plan.