Month: October 2018

 

Hello again friends. I feel like it’s been a while. Though I try to post weekly, I just wasn’t up for writing last week because I was on the tail-end of the stomach flu. Ugh. It hit three out of four in our household (including the 18-month-old) and suffice it to say, with fevers up to 103 degrees, it was a rough week. I’m sure you can imagine. Thankfully, we are all just about back to normal.

In my last post, The Buts and What-ifs of Discipleship, I shared a theory I have about the topic of discipleship. My hunch is, while many believers would say they agree that they should make disciples, they may also have questions about the how part of it and could even feel ill-equipped. Others just might not know where to start, and as a result, they haven’t yet made discipleship a priority.

If that describes you, or someone you know, I’d love to share some ideas from Jesus’ life and ministry as well as my own personal experience.

My hope is that we would intentionally and actively pursue a lifestyle of discipleship for the purpose of spiritual growth and ultimately, to advance the truth and heart of the Gospel.

I know discipleship can sound daunting. At least, it did to me. My first experience with discipling someone was shortly after I accepted Christ as a teenager. I would meet weekly with a friend of mine from school and we went through little booklets that were designed to help us know and understand the fundamentals of our faith.

To be totally honest, I had no idea what I was doing. I had never been discipled, so I didn’t know if I was doing it “right” or not.

Years later, when I lived and served in Costa Rica, I began to understand discipleship at a whole new level. My team leader regularly spent time with my roommate and I, studying the life of Christ. As we did so, we started to see how He called His disciples, spent time with them and ultimately trained them to go out into the world after His death and resurrection.

Whatever we learned, we would then share with the girls we were discipling. Those girls would then share it with girls they were discipling. Multiplication.

If you want to see discipleship modeled, you can’t go wrong reading through the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Note how Jesus invited specific men to “come and follow me,” (Mt. 4:19). Note also that later, we read in Luke 6:12, Jesus spent the night praying to God before choosing the twelve apostles.

As you consider making discipleship a part of your life (if you’re not already discipling people), the best thing you can do is pray. Ask God to bring to mind a person or a couple of people with whom you can begin a formal discipleship relationship.

I say “formal,” because the kind of discipleship I’m referring to is going to require some commitment, not just on your part, but on the part of the person you are discipling.

Some people would define discipleship a little more broadly and see it happening in a more organic, circumstantial kind of way. For example, maybe you have someone in your life who prays regularly for you, contacts you often to see how you are doing, and speaks words of wisdom into your life. That person is investing in you, and their impact in your life is truly valuable.

However, for “formal” discipleship, I would include a few other things:  1) time studying the Word together, 2) regular and consistent time together, 3) meeting for the purpose of growth and multiplication.

When we look at how Jesus spent time with the disciples, we see that he spent time teaching them (Luke 11:1). Sometimes that teaching was actually a better way of understanding something they had already been taught (Mt. 5:21-23).

Jesus spent a ton of time with the disciples. They traveled together (Lk. 8:22), ate together (Mt. 26), and experienced the miraculous together (Mt. 17). They did life together and in so doing, the disciples were able to learn, grow and later to share what they learned with others.

If you want a simple step-by-step guide to getting started with discipleship, here’s what I would suggest:

1. Pray that God would bring to mind the name of one person you could approach about starting a formal discipleship relationship.
2. Approach that person and ask if she would want to get together regularly for the purpose of mutual spiritual growth. This will include time to share one another’s joys and burdens, time to pray and time to be in the Word.
3. When the person says yes, set a time to meet (ideally weekly).
4.  For your first meeting (maybe at a coffee shop or a good place where you can chat freely), talk through the idea of a mutual commitment to meeting regularly, praying for one another and keeping confidential that which is shared between you. Have the person self-assess where they are spiritually and determine if it would be best to start with the fundamentals of the faith or if there is a particular book of the Bible they’d like to study with you.
5. Bring a notebook where you can write down prayer requests and praises and where you can write notes of things you might want to share.
6. Trust that God is going to use these divine appointments to help both of you grow spiritually.

Don’t let excuses stop you. Give it a try and see what God does. You don’t have to be formally trained in Theology. You don’t have to have the gift of teaching. You don’t have to be an extrovert. Be who God made you to be and know that’s enough 🙂 He will be with you!

I would love to hear your thoughts. Please comment below.

Until next time, let us go be radiant this week!

 

 

 

 

Pastors preach on a passage out of Matthew 28, often referred to as, The Great Commission. They charge their parishioners, as Jesus did the disciples, to go and make disciples!

When some people hear the admonishment to go and make disciples, they might mentally assent to it. Theoretically, it sounds good. Theologically it sounds even better. After all, discipleship has played a catalytic role in the development and growth of the Church around the world.  So, we should continue on in that same vein and make disciples today. Right?

Well…here is where the “buts and what-ifs” begin.

Someone hearing the charge to make disciples might think, “but I’ve never been discipled before. How can I make disciples? Where would I even start?”

Someone else might think, “what if I’ve never received any formal theological training? What if I try to make disciples and fall flat on my face because I don’t have answers for their questions?”

Others might think, “what if I don’t have the gift of evangelism or teaching?”

Before we begin to address these very valid and more-common-than-you-might-think questions, I would like us to work through two other fundamental and foundational questions.

1. When does someone become a disciple?
2. What does it mean to “make disciples”?

What do you think? When does someone become a disciple? My husband and I had a really thought-provoking discussion about this very question. In fact, he is the one who posed it to me.

I chewed on the question for a bit and then said, “someone becomes a disciple when they begin to follow Jesus.” I really do think it’s that simple. I think someone becomes a disciple when they choose to accept the gift of salvation found only in Christ, by grace through faith.

Now, I will say, I have been discipling someone for a few years now and I was tempted to say she became a disciple when she and I first started meeting together. But really, that’s when she became my disciple, not a disciple of Jesus.

If my assertion is true, that someone becomes a disciple when they begin to follow Jesus, that brings us to question #2:  what does it mean to make disciples?

Think about that for a minute. What do you think Jesus wanted the disciples to do when He said in Matthew 28, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ 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, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”?

What if “make disciples” means essentially to, “make converts”? I don’t mean that in a project kind of way. I mean it in the life-changing, best-thing-that-ever-happened kind of way.

Wouldn’t it make sense that Jesus would want the ones He invested in for over three years to actively and intentionally make the Truth known, that others might know Him and choose to follow Him?

Once those people chose to follow Christ, they could be baptized, thus following the order of the Great Commission. Baptism is an outward sign of what has already happened internally, i.e. the washing away of one’s sin. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here.” (2 Cor. 5:17).

If we, like the disciples of long ago, have accepted Christ, we too are disciples. Knowing the powerful work God has done in us and beginning to grasp the abundant and unconditional love He has for us, we can’t help but want to share it with others.

Here is where the buts and what-ifs of discipleship come back into the picture. There is a conflict between our desire to share with others and our perceived ability (or inability as the case may be) to do that.

We might wonder how the whole discipleship making process works if we, ourselves, were never discipled. Where do we start? What if we’ve never had formal theological training? What if we don’t have the gift of evangelism or teaching?

My husband and I have a theory that there might be an awful lot of Jesus-followers out there who hear the strong, compelling words of the Great Commission and yet feel woefully inadequate to carry it out.

We asked our small group how many of them actually felt equipped to disciple others and very few said they did. Why? Possibly because too many church leaders make the mistake of telling people to “go” before they help their parishioners to “know.”

Why do you think Jesus told his guys to “go and make disciples…” at the end of three and a half years with them? Because they weren’t fully trained or equipped until then.

Now, I’m not saying someone has to be discipled for three years before they can disciple someone else, I’m just making an observation that Jesus was very strategic in His timing.

Making disciples has a lot to do with friendship, love and intentional investment. It’s about exposing others to the Gospel and praying they will accept the gift of salvation.

Discipleship is about helping others grow in their faith. The one who is discipling is not better than the disciple, but he/she might have more or different life experience and/or Biblical knowledge and practice.

If you are someone who wants to go and make disciples but you feel ill-equipped to do so, can I give you a little encouragement?

Like many in my small group, I think you know more than you think you do. Your knowledge of the Bible, the power and work of the Holy Spirit, along with your personal testimony and lifestyle, can go a long way in helping others see, know and understand Truth.

We’ll spend some more time talking through the “what’s” “how’s” of discipleship in upcoming posts.

In the meantime, I would love you hear your thoughts about your approach to discipleship or if you have felt the tension between wanting to make disciples but not knowing how. Please share your comments below.

Thanks for joining me today. Let us go be radiant this week!

 

 

 

 

Do you ever feel like some aspects of your life (work, home-life, emotions, etc.) are in chaos? Maybe you start dropping the ball here and there, forgetting things, saying or doing things you regret.

I have had moments like that. For example, there are times when both my kids are melting down simultaneously (with no end in sight), the phone rings, and I’m trying to get a meal on the table. It’s as if my brain is stretched in four different directions and I have absolutely no idea which issue I should address first.

The combination of chaos and cluelessness make me want to cry but I try to muster up enough strength to handle the situation by saying to myself, “get it together, Suzie!”

However, what I need in that moment isn’t more of me, it’s more of Jesus.

Oh how humbling are those moments.

Maybe for you it isn’t so much the chaos of children at home, maybe it’s making a mistake at work or messing things up in a relationship. Maybe you said something you wish you hadn’t and you think to yourself, “get it together!”

I wondered if perhaps there were any people in the Bible who might have said something similar to themselves. An idea came to mind as my husband and I were talking about the topic of love, specifically as it pertains to the passage in John 21, where Jesus reinstates Peter.

In this passage, Jesus asks three times if Peter loves him. The first two times, Jesus uses the “agape” word for love, which is more like the unconditional kind of love. Though Peter replies that yes, he does love Jesus, he uses a different term (phileo). That kind of love is more along the lines of brotherly love or feeling affection toward someone.

My husband and I wondered why Peter didn’t respond with the “agape” word for love. I have a hunch. I’m going to take a little liberty here because it’s not specifically in the text.

My hunch is that Peter wanted to “agape” Jesus but that he was ashamed for having denied Jesus three times prior to His death. Maybe Peter didn’t feel like he exemplified “agape” love and therefore couldn’t bring himself to declare that kind of love for Jesus.

Can you imagine what kind of shame and regret you would feel if you had done something like what Peter did in denying his association with Jesus? Scripture tells us that Peter “wept bitterly” when he realized what he had done and that Jesus’ prediction about his denial had come true.

He regretted it immediately and tremendously. I wonder if he thought to himself, “Peter! How could you do this? Come on man, get it together!” After messing things up so badly with Jesus, how could Peter then tell Him that he “agape” loved him?

And yet, each time Jesus asked Peter if he loved him and Peter responded, Jesus had a job for Peter. “Feed my lambs, take care of my sheep, feed my sheep.”

It was almost as if Jesus was saying to Peter, “don’t let your feelings of shame (the deeds that led to which, I have forgiven), keep you from doing the work I have for you.”

Is that something you, or someone you know, needs to hear today? Are you letting your feelings of regret, guilt or shame keep you from joyfully doing the work God has prepared in advance for you to do?

When we mess up, when we make mistakes, when we melt down, it’s easy to want to just try to well it up within ourselves to “get it together.” But friends, that’s not the answer.

It’s not about getting it together, it’s about doing it together with Jesus.

When we tell ourselves to “get it together,” we become the focus. We look to ourselves for strength. Instead, Jesus should be our focus and He should be our strength.

It is only with Jesus that we can do anything. Apart from God we can do nothing. We are to abide in him (John 15:5). That’s what produces fruit. That’s what gives us the strength to handle the sometimes chaotic circumstances around us.

Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice, His death and resurrection are what allow us to let go of the shame and the guilt. We are forgiven and set free and the one who did that for us wants to be in relationship with us. So we do this life together with Him.

As we seek to go be radiant, one of the best ways we can do that is by abiding in God. That’s how we will reflect His glory, even amidst the chaos, the mess ups, and the mistakes.