Reading for Discipleship: Understanding Prescriptive and Descriptive Passages of Scripture

When I think about the types of verses that I’ve been encouraged to memorize throughout my life, they have tended to be verses that record the teaching or commands of Jesus or Peter or Paul. Perhaps that has been your experience as well, but what I have not spent a lot of time memorizing are the narrative stories of the gospels or the book of Acts; the story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, the healing of blind Bartimaeus, the story of Paul’s time in Philipi or Thessalonica or Ephesus. One type of passage focuses on the teaching and commands while the latter is simply telling the story, narrating what certain people empowered by the Holy Spirit actually did.

This, I have come to learn, is the difference between those passages that are prescriptive and those that are descriptive. There is an important distinction here and I’m increasingly convinced that, as disciples of Jesus, we should sharpen our skills at noticing the descriptive passages to help us better understand how to live out and obey the prescriptive ones.

An example of a prescriptive passage is the great commission, “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:18-20). In this passage, Jesus is prescribing a way of living. He’s asking us to obey him and do the things he commands in this passage. It’s a clear call to make disciples - Jesus is telling us to do this thing. It is a prescriptive passage.

But, what does it mean to make disciples? And how do we go about baptizing them? And teaching new disciples to obey everything Jesus commanded - what does that mean and how do we do it? While His command is clear, when it comes to what we do on Monday morning to obey it, most in the church today have little idea. We tend to fall back on the one action we know to take - invite them to church. That is a good idea but, is that what Jesus meant when he told all disciples to make disciples? Invite them to church and hope that a thirty minute sermon will be adequate to invite them into a life of apprenticeship to Jesus? I think He might have had more in mind.

This is where the descriptive passages in scripture are helpful. In answering the questions above, the book of Acts gives us a front row seat to watch the first Christians make disciples. The twelve, the seventy two and many more had spent three years apprenticing to Jesus as he taught and ministered in front of them and with them and we can watch how they make disciples throughout the pages of Acts. They not only heard the great commission but they had also watched Jesus do it. Because of this I think we can assume that they had a fairly clear idea of what Jesus was expecting of them and so as we watch their lives, we’ll see real time examples of what Jesus meant when he gave the great commission. The description of their lives and actions fill in the blanks of our understanding.

Do descriptive passages hold the same weight as the prescriptive ones?  No. Prescriptive passages tell us truth about God and share the commands of Scripture. The Bible is clear that Jesus expects us to obey his commands. With descriptive passages however, we simply get a front row seat to watching the first disciples live out those truths and obey the commands in their particular time and context. It is important to understand that their time and context was different than ours.

Jesus healed in all kinds of interesting ways. In the gospels we can see examples of him healing others - with a word, with a touch or embrace, by spitting and making mud or sticking his fingers in a person’s ears. These are descriptive passages but I don’t think anyone would say that in order to heal a person we need to spit and make mud. If the Holy Spirit leads us to do such a thing, we sure should but while the Bible does call us to pray for healing, how we do that might not matter so much. There are many examples from the church in Acts that don’t make a lot of sense for Christians living in the modern world and many more that aren’t the only way to do a thing.
 
While the examples in scripture don’t hold the same weight as the clear teachings of scripture, it is vitally important that we regularly hold our methods and ideas up the mirror of scripture and think reflectively why we do one thing when the Apostles and first Chrsitians did things so differently.

As an example, Jesus’ command his disciples (that includes us) to baptize new believers. The example in the book of Acts is of immediate baptism. The longest time between conversion and baptism that I can find is the Apostle Paul who waited in blind darkness for three days before Ananias arrived. In my modern day church experiences, baptism is often put off for months and even years as we wait for the new believer to go through some sort of class so that we, the older more mature Christians, can make sure they are ready. Is it wrong to baptize in our way? I don’t think so but this is why the descriptive passages can be so helpful. They cause us to look at our traditions, the way we do things, and compare them to what those closest to Jesus did. And in this case, it causes me to question why we deviated from the pattern of the Apostles. Are we somehow smarter than Paul and Peter? Do we have some insight that they did not? The fruit of mature disciples seems more abundant in their time than it does in our modern western churches. Food for thought I guess.

Another example is how churches come into being in the book of Acts. I hesitate to use the word “planted” because I’m not sure we can find enough evidence that Paul’s goal was to plant churches and his methods are so apples to oranges different than our modern approach, that the phrase “church planting” ends up being a distraction. To be sure, Jesus intends the church - the gathered body of believers in any one location - to be his outpost in a broken world. He will build his church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. But as we follow Paul, in particular, through the second half of Acts, his method seems to be focused on making disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey the commands of Jesus and then, the church always emerges. But in another mind blowing observation, these churches are immediately led by the brand new believers in each city. Nobody plants churches like this in North America. We generally tend to transplant a group of mature believers with a sizable budget into a new location where the outsiders will lead for the foreseeable future. Is this wrong? Again, I don’t thinks so. It’s just another way to do it. But it is not the example of Paul which should cause us again to wrestle with our assumptions and beliefs about church planting. We often talk about Paul being the most prolific missionary and church planter in history so it is curious why we’ve so readily disregarded his example?

So while the descriptive passages help us understand and apply the prescriptive ones, they also have a way of causing us to reflect on our own assumptions about ministry. But we cannot give them the same weight of authority. To do that would require us to walk everywhere we go and to write letters to communicate with other believers because that is how Jesus and Paul did it. That would be legalistic folly.

It could however be a good idea to add a new bracelet next to our W.W.J.D bracelets, W.D.J.D - What DID Jesus do? Going back to Paul’s church planting method, he seems to have adopted the W.D.J.D model, looking at the example of how Jesus did ministry and then copying it almost to a T.  In Luke 10, Jesus sends out the 72 into new regions which he had not yet entered. They were to enter the city or town, proclaim the kingdom and then, if a person invited them into their home, they were to stay with that person. This is exactly what we see Paul doing in Philippi - proclaim the kingdom down by the river, stay with Lydia - and in Thessalonica - enter the city (the synagogue), stay with Jason. If you study Luke 10 and then follow Paul’s missionary journeys, you’ll see that he is following the example of Jesus. For Paul it seems, if it was the way Jesus did it, he would do it too.

I hope that as you immerse yourselves in scripture you will become more aware of how the descriptive examples of Jesus and the first church help fill in the gaps of the more prescriptive passages. It has certainly challenged me to grow in my ability to recognize what it is that I do that is built more on modern ideas from business or psychology or pop culture. It’s a hard challenge but a good one and leads me to prayerfully begin realigning my beliefs and behaviors with the teaching and example of scripture.​

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