Following Or Cloning by Pastor Dolapo Lawal: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Discipleship is not cloning. Being discipled by someone does not mean adopting their clothing style, their mannerisms, or copying their exact methods. God is objective in understanding but personal in dealings. Moses used a rod, Joshua used his own feet marching around Jericho, and the same instrument does not transfer between callings. Every name of God recorded in scripture was a personal revelation someone received in their own specific situation, Jehovah Jireh, Jehovah Rapha, not a formula meant to be copied word for word by everyone else.

Learning to Contextualize a Sermon

When a preacher says "God will open your eyes," the same principle lands differently depending on who is hearing it, and learning to make that translation is what turns a sermon into something usable.

• To a housewife, it means learning to raise children with grace and firmness, seeing the home itself as a ministry rather than a mere duty, and recognizing unhealthy patterns early enough to change them.
• To a doctor, Acts 10:38 describes Jesus going about doing good and healing all who were oppressed. That same spirit means seeing beyond a patient's symptoms, knowing when to speak life into a diagnosis, and treating the profession itself as a mission field rather than only a transaction.
• To a student, it means genuinely understanding concepts instead of just cramming for a grade, discovering a divine assignment early, and discerning the right friends, mentors, and environments, since Genesis 37 shows Joseph paying dearly for revealing something true in an environment that was not ready to receive it.
• To an entrepreneur, it means seeing opportunities others overlook and knowing which deals are genuinely from God and which are traps, including in who a person chooses to partner with in business.

Run Toward the Problem, Not Away From It

Colossians 1:12

Giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.

The inheritance God gives is described here as light, not simply a paycheck. A job pays wages, but somewhere inside that same work is a problem only that person is positioned to see and solve, and running toward it rather than away from it is how the real inheritance is received. Someone who does careless, shabby work at that problem will not receive the light attached to it. Goliath was not David's assigned battle, it was Saul's, yet David ran toward it and was promoted because of it; the same giant that looked like danger to everyone else looked like opportunity to the one anointed to deal with it. Matthew 5:16 ties this directly to visible good works, and Isaiah 60:1-6 describes people coming toward a light that has risen, not toward the person themselves, they come for the productivity, the good work, not the individual.

How that light is received is described in Colossians 3:22-23: obeying not with eye-service, as people-pleasers, but in sincerity of heart. Whatever attention or promotion follows, follows the work, not the performance of being watched.

Be Careful How You Follow

The focus of true discipleship stays on God's word, not on the person delivering it. Don't transpose honor into hero worship, and don't casualize honor either. Following the wrong leader has real consequences, following Pharaoh leads to the Red Sea, and that was Israel's whole mistake, a bad leader, not a personal failure of their own.

If an encounter with God is genuine, it will typically point a person toward a man or woman God has assigned to disciple them, rather than isolating them in private revelation alone. In Acts 10, angels did not preach the gospel to Cornelius directly, they sent him to Peter. Where an anointing rests in a specific person, that anointing has to be received through relationship with that person; it does not simply transfer on its own.

Grace Is Not Distributed Equally

Numbers 12

Miriam and Aaron challenged Moses over his choice of wife, and God responded directly, distinguishing how He spoke to Moses, face to face, from how He spoke to others, in dreams and visions. Miriam was struck with leprosy for that challenge. God does not distribute grace by birth order, seniority, or credentials; He can put unusual grace in someone who looks least likely to carry it. Moses himself described his own weakness in speech, and it did not disqualify the assignment on his life Acts 7:22.

A gifted but disloyal person is not automatically an asset, and grace favors loyalty over raw gifting. It is one thing for something to grow quickly, and another for it to actually be healthy. When God shows a weakness in someone, that revelation is often less an invitation to judge and more an invitation to intercede. Galatians 6:1 instructs those who are spiritual to restore someone caught in a fault gently, watching themselves, so that they are not tempted the same way. People who condemn others for a specific failure often find themselves walking into the very same failure later, not because judgment is punished directly, but because pride blinds a person to their own vulnerability in that exact area.