Many people think that Jesus wanted to preach to everybody and heal as many people as possible before He died. Not so! His ministry was to the whole world and not just to Israel, for every generation and not just the times in which He lived. The priority of His two and a half years of public ministry was to train a small group of disciples who would become His apostles, and pass the gospel truth to every generation until Jesus returns.

So when the crowds came flocking to Him, Jesus moved away from them. As He moved up the mountain the disciples followed: He primarily addressed them. However, the crowds were not far behind, and clearly many more people heard due to the excellent acoustics of the natural mountain amphitheatre (Matthew 7:28-29), Nevertheless it was the trainee apostles' basic course of teaching about how to live in God's kingdom. Although Jesus would do amazing miracles, none of them had any enduring meaning without a divine explanation.

So the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, as Augustine called it, laid out the radically different way in which God saw the world and the church, compared with the religious establishment. Jesus sat down and taught as a Rabbi, making statements, and answering questions (as the sermon proceeds from Matthew 5:3-7:27 you can almost hear the questions to which Jesus replies!). What He said challenged the religious presumptions of the day, even though all the principles were already embedded in the Old Testament text. The trainee apostles needed to understand why Jesus was different, so that they could explain it clearly to others - in order that multiple generations might put their trust in Him.

‘Training leaders who can train other leaders’, has always been God's priority (2 Timothy 2:2); and is essential for the growth of the church in every age. Yet the strategy often seems short-sighted: why invest heavily in a few people when you can reach millions? It is true that media ministries, today, do reach many more people than a single local church, but there is no real accountability. That was the factor which turned Jesus' teaching into discipleship: He had the twelve men with Him all the time and He held them to account for what they said and did. That is the kind of relationship which enables people to change, because they are challenged to be different by choosing a different set of responses. It is easy to make churches popular by giving what people like; it is difficult to make true disciple-making disciples because they have to give up their selfish ambitions and live a lifestyle which pleases God but is despised by the world. Are you a real disciple? If so, are you training others to be accountable to Jesus?