Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…
The Lord has been teaching me so much about being and making disciples. I’m amazed how simple, yet difficult it is. It’s so simple that all across the world the front line leaders of gospel movements are people who didn’t go to seminary. In fact, many of these people aren’t college educated professionals but rather people who maybe have a high school level education. Most are rural; many are illiterate and in oral cultures. But they are changing the face of the world like we have never before seen in the history of the church and its mission. We have seen exponentially more missionary advances in the last 10 years than we have seen in centuries of work. Millions have come to faith in countries like India and China. The amount of Christians in Bangladesh alone has doubled in the last 10 years. Not to mention that millions of Muslims are coming en masse to Christ. And, again, at the heart of it all is not a group of people with Masters degrees and PhD’s, but ordinary people.
This phenomenon challenges my long-held assumptions that being a mature Christian is all about my training: what I know and what I am able to do. Instead, I’ve come to see that more important than WHAT I KNOW is WHAT I DO WITH WHAT I KNOW. The key to mature discipleship is not passing on content but passing on a process or a pattern. THIS is what made the apostle Paul able to function so efficiently in his apostolic gifting; this is how he could spend a few weeks to a few months at most in a town and then leave confident that, though they were complete pagans before, they could thrive and reach their entire surrounding area for Christ.
We will talk more about and model this process over the coming weeks, but this past Sunday at the park, we tried to introduce two elements of that process.
1.) committing to not just hearing the Word but also doing something about [obeying] it.
2.) committing to share these fresh spiritual insights immediately with anyone who will listen to us.
Simple, yet difficult.
Imagine with me how different our lives would be if every single one of us took to heart what we heard from the Lord, and asked God to help us obey it. And imagine with me how we would change and our relationships would change if we were able to authentically include others in our journey by sharing with them everything we’re learning and stewing over.
I’d love to hear how things have changed or might/would change for you if you began to take these two practices to heart.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:35 am
I’ll start: for me, I would love to grow more in practice #2. It would be a lot easier and more natural for me to talk about spiritual things with people if I started practicing #2. Because the social norms of yesteryear told us that religion and politics were not to be openly discussed in polite society, I find myself constantly wanting to withhold spiritual conversations when talking with people about what I did over the weekend or what I did in Kenya, etc. Though society has changed as has that “rule” [with many people I'm finding], my ease in talking openly has not. And so I miss the chance to share with people how much Jesus is an important part of my life, and I also miss the chance to discover who is spiritually open and who is not.
I picture myself going deeper in my friendships with not-yet-christians as I do this and share in a “I’m-still-learning-this” way. And I picture my friendships with Christians being strengthened too as the Word of God becomes more of conversation topic with us. I’ll receive insights and even some prayer from them. So really, a win all around.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I often think of my spiritual life as being in a separate compartment from the rest of my life. Sometimes I assume people will react negatively to that compartment, so I pack it away.
I also want to grow in #2. perhaps it starts by viewing my life as a whole – seeing things with spiritual eyeballs and being willing to talk about the reality of God in my life!