Discipleship

May

2021

The Church Command

As iron sharpens iron, so does one man sharpen another (Pr 27:17)

Lord, I praise you for your people. I thank you for surrounding me with them.

If you want to be good at something, it helps to see others who are good at it. Doctors do residencies so they can follow other doctors. They don’t learn medicine all by themselves. Instead, good doctors build good doctors. The Christian life is like this.

A basic principle of the Christian life is that it requires a church. You cannot live the Christian life all by yourself. You grow in Christ as you interact with a body of Christians. Christians need each other as soldiers need each other, as teammates need each other, as family members need each other.

Other Christians will pray for you, teach you, encourage you, rejoice with you, challenge you when you sin, and help you walk through a difficult problem. Other Christians understand the difficulties of living the Christian life. They know how hard it is to stand for Jesus in the midst of your culture. They can sympathize with your struggles. They’ve been there. Other Christians can talk with you on a deep level about the most important thing in your life – Christ. Non-Christians cannot do this. They don’t understand. You need Christians. You need a church.

Many people, however, talk about being spiritual without the church. In the West today, such talk is rampant. People want to follow God their own way. They live as if Christianity is merely a preference. You like roses, I like tulips. You like BMWs, I like Toyotas. You like yoga, I like Jesus. They live as if they get to decide what the Christian life is. They become the arbiter of how to follow God, as if God had nothing to say about the matter.

But God does have something to say about the matter, and one of the things He said was that His people should not forsake meeting together. God built the church with the blood of His Son. He loves the church. It is the bride of Christ, and the Christian who lives the Christian life loves the church and is committed to her.

The church is necessary for spiritual growth. One function of God’s people is to build each other up in the faith. Christians who put themselves in healthy churches become part of a community that will help them walk in Christ. Anyone who wants to follow Jesus needs a church. It is one of the tools God uses to sharpen our lives. You cannot follow Jesus by yourself.

And you can be by yourself in different ways. Some people are by themselves because they never attend a church. Others are by themselves in the midst of a church. They attend weekly, but they don’t know the people. They are part of the crowd on a Sunday morning, but they are not part of the life of the church. They listen to a sermon and go home, but they don’t know anyone. To belong to a church requires relationship and not just shoes in the room. When people lack relationship with the body of Christ, they fall away. Their walk with God grows weak, insipid. They become more like their culture and less like Christ. But they think they are spiritually fine because, after all, they are attending a church.

Being part of a church flows out of a desire for Christ. The people with the greatest desire for Christ are in a church . . . by choice. They surround themselves with the body of Christ . . . by choice. Because they have great passion for Jesus, they have great passion for the church. The two passions go together; in fact, you might say that the desire for a church is a visible expression of the desire for Christ. The church is the body of Christ. If you want Jesus, you want to be around those who have Him. This is rather basic.

God designed His people to be together. In heaven all His people will be together in unison. Church on earth prepares us for that day. Would you forsake God’s people in heaven? Then why would you do it on earth? The attempt to have Christian spirituality without Christian community is absurd.

Now I suppose I need to say a word about what a church is. This will be brief. If you want more, go here, here, and here. A church is not necessarily an official organization with a Christian name that meets in a building. You can attend many such meetings and not be with God’s people.

A church is a community of Jesus followers who fit the following criteria: they believe Scripture to be the Word of God and, consequently, adhere to the gospel of Christ; they meet regularly to worship Jesus, proclaim the Scriptures, and build one another up in the faith; they partake of communion and practice baptism of new believers; they share their faith, they desire to live a holy life and care for those who need help; they have elder leadership. These are broad parameters, and in the real world a church can look as different as a megachurch of 10,000 or a house church of four.

Whatever it looks like, this community is necessary for your spiritual growth. Life in Christ involves life in the church. When you intentionally put yourself outside the church, you harm your soul.

And many people today do just that. They harm their souls but have no idea the harm they cause. Let’s just get this straight. The church is not merely a nice addition. It is necessary for life — spiritual life.

Apr

2021

Desires

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. (Lk 9:23)

. . . I die daily. (I Cor 15:31)

Father, grant me the heart to give up my very being to you.

Living the Christian life is the hardest thing you will ever do.

It is also the most fulfilling thing you will ever do.

But isn’t that normal? Aren’t the hardest things in life usually the most rewarding?

Sometimes people act as if God made us just so He could forgive our sins, and then we could go live our lives as we wished. I know. It’s silly thinking. When you read Scripture you find that God made us for Himself, that we went and lived our own way, but that He responded with the Cross in order to remake us. He wants us conformed into the image of Christ. He then wants us, in Christ, to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to Him. To make such a sacrifice involves dying to self, and the soul does not want to do it. And yet, in Christ, the soul wants it. This is the irony of following Jesus: we want the very thing we don’t want. We have desires on different levels.

Jesus did too. At Gethsemane Jesus did not want to go to the Cross. He prays, “Remove this cup. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.” Jesus explicitly states that it was not His will to go to the Cross. And yet it was. He went for the joy that was set before Him. He went because He delighted to do the will of the Father. He had desires on different levels.

The Christian who will live a godly life must want to do so. And he must want this so strongly that he is willing to die to see it happen.

We don’t talk this way in Christian circles today, but I would propose to you that the reason is that we don’t like the message of dying. We emphasize the comfortable truths of the gospel to the exclusion of the hard ones. But the gospel, whatever else it entails, entails a call to die. And the people who actually do this dying are the people who desire Jesus so passionately that they are willing to give up all for Him.

Dying to self is not so much a matter of exerting one’s will to mortification. Nor is it a matter of following a set of rules that emphasize self-denial – fastings, prayers, vigils, etc. People who die to self do so because they desire the kingdom of God more than they desire their personal desires. Thus, dying to self is not a negative endeavor. It is not primarily a subtraction of our desires but a fulfillment of a greater desire.

I’m not talking craziness. We understand this concept quite well, for people act this way all the time. When I was a boy, I had a morning paper route and would get up at 5 am to deliver newspapers. It was not my desire to get up at 5 am, but it was my desire to earn an income, so I died to my desire for sleep so that I could fulfill my desire to earn an income. In other words, my dying to one desire was not a subtraction or a personal negation. It was a necessary part of fulfilling a greater desire. This is why athletes lift weights, students write term papers, and parents drive their kids to soccer. All of these ordinary activities are pictures of dying to a small desire in order to fulfill a bigger one.

Biblical dying to self simply puts an exponent on the same principle. Jesus willingly went to the Cross even though He didn’t want to. Paul willingly suffered imprisonments, beatings, hunger, thirst, slander, and more, even though he didn’t want to. Daniel’s three friends were willing to forfeit their lives. Jeremiah faced constant abuse and opposition but kept preaching. Peter went to jail for preaching, and when freed he went right back to preaching. In all these cases and more, someone died to his life and comfort because he desired something higher. These people had a passion for God and His kingdom. They denied their desires because they were fulfilling their ultimate desire.

Without this ultimate desire for Christ and His kingdom, there is no living the Christian life. You cannot give up the career you always wanted just to die to it. But you can die to that career if you have a desire higher than that career. You cannot deny yourself money and comfort just to do it. But you can deny yourself those things if you desire something higher.

Now I need to say a word here about the nature of self-denial. Sometimes people give up the career they always wanted because they somehow think God wants us to have only the things we don’t want. They think it is more spiritual to deny themselves what they want. But this idea is not always true. Does a good father want his daughter to always deny her desires, or does he want her to actually enjoy some of those desires? In fact, he may do everything he can to help her pursue her desire to go to law school. And yet that same father may tell that same daughter to set aside short-term desires to pursue long term benefit. This is how God is. Earth is short term. The kingdom of God is long term. Biblical dying to self must occur when God lets us know that we need to set aside a particular desire for His sake. We must not, however, deny self just to do so. If our driving passion is for God, then the driving principle in our lives must be for what God wants. Sometimes He wants you to enjoy the desires of your heart. Sometimes He will call you to lay them down, but when you lay them down, you do so because, ultimately, He is your great desire, and, thus, you are then pursuing the desire of your heart.

Our desires are part of the foundation for living the Christian life. They are central to the Christian life itself. So look at your big desires. Are they focused on earth? If so, you handicap your ability to live for God. He wants to be your great desire.

Making God our main desire is something that we cannot do ourselves. This change comes from God’s Spirit in us. Perhaps the most basic work of the Spirit in a person deals with transforming the heart. The Spirit changes our desires, and it is these new desires that He then uses to spur us on to a new life.

A passion for Christ is foundational for living the Christian life. You can’t live a life that calls you to die to your desires unless you have a greater desire for Christ. You won’t let go of earth unless you want heaven. And you need God to help you want heaven. And the odd thing is that when you get heaven, you enjoy earth all the more. You find your life by losing it.

Dec

2020

What Does the Bible Say?

I sat on a student panel tasked with investigating the morality of abortion. It was the 1970s, and I was in high school and had not yet made up my mind on the issue. As the panel discussed the various arguments flying around the culture, one student asked a question that hit me like a bucket of water.

“What does the Bible say?”

I was just beginning my Christian life, and I didn’t know what the Bible said, but somehow I knew that if the Bible addressed abortion, that student’s question was the key to this issue. Not everyone on the panel may have ascribed authority to the Bible, but I knew that as a Christian I had to.

Authority comes in many varieties, and people give different levels of authority to different types of authorities. Appeals to science, to reason, to freedom, to economics, to emotion, to culture, to government, to Scripture are like sergeants, captains, colonels, and generals in an army. They all have a measure of authority at times, but they cannot all have the same level of authority. Some authorities must outrank others.

Now I knew that if I was to follow Jesus, the Bible had to be commander in chief when it spoke. I knew that if the entire culture lined up on one side and the Bible lined up on the other, I would have to fall where the Bible was.

This principle – the pre-eminence of Scripture – is a hallmark of Christian thinking and flows from the nature of Scripture. If the Bible is God’s Word, it must be pre-eminent. If it is not pre-eminent to you, you do not treat it as God’s Word.

Unfortunately, for most people of every culture the Bible is not pre-eminent. When it comes to thinking about God, human nature, sin, faith, heaven, hell, spiritual matters or moral issues, most people give priority to something other than the Bible. It may be their upbringing, their culture, their friends, social media, a professor or popular teacher, Hollywood, a political party, or their own desires. Many people say they honor the Bible as an authority, and they may give it a measure of credence, but they still dishonor it when they fail to give it priority. They may honor it as a soldier honors a sergeant. The problem is that Scripture is commander in chief and not a mere sergeant. You dishonor the commander in chief when you treat him as a sergeant.

The church in the West thinks more like the West than it does like the New Testament. We have let the culture define love and followed it. We have let the culture define equality and believed it. We have let the culture tell us that it is arrogant to think God has provided only one way. We have adopted cultural ways of thinking about sexuality. We have adopted cultural thinking about human identity. Many of us do not believe we are fallen, or if we confess that we are, we often think that our sin is not that egregious. We wonder why God would condemn us for such “minor” transgressions as lust or anger, especially when the anger is justified.

Some of us speak, as the culture does, as if political activism is the ultimate answer to our problems. Others speak, as the culture does, as if racism is the sin above all sins. We can forgive an adulterer perhaps, but we can’t forgive a racist. Some follow the culture by saying that the husband is not the head of the wife. Others follow the culture by saying that a person’s sexual identity defines him or her. Others follow the culture by thinking they can be independent from the body of Christ. They don’t need to commit to a church. Or so they think. Many follow the culture by adopting a consumer mindset when it comes to their local church. They think the church exists to feed them and not that they exist to serve the church. We are good at meeting our needs. That’s the culture. But we won’t die to self. That’s Scripture.

We have bought into what social media tells us. We have bought into what our friends say. We have bought into what we see on Netflix. We have bought into what our favorite political party says. We have bought into the culture, and in doing so, we have abandoned Scripture. We have ignored the commander in chief and listened to a sergeant.

One of the marks of a thriving faith is that the Bible trumps the culture. Your culture (whatever it is) is hostile to what Scripture says, and it wants to draw you away. Different cultures do this in different ways, but all cultures do this. If you give priority to your culture, you lose spiritual authority and power, your faith grows limp, and you begin to live like everyone else.

One of the keys to living a Christian life is listening to the right authority. When you listen to Scripture above all other authorities, you thrive. When you listen to other authorities above Scripture, you wither.

If you want to know what you listen to most, look at your free time. How much of your time do you spend in the Scriptures, in prayer and in seeking God, versus how much do you spend on social media, watching movies, listening to music, or otherwise absorbing your culture? Where you most engage your mind is where your highest authority is. If you spend 10 minutes of your free time each day reading Scripture and two hours absorbing your culture, then you are giving your culture priority, and your faith will suffer. If you want to make God’s Word a priority in your life, make it priority in your time. You are always feeding your mind. The question is – what are you feeding it?

Nov

2020

Wanting God’s Word

I have not departed from the commandment of his lips; I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my portion of food. (Job 23:12)

I love you, O Lord. Therefore, I love your Word. Feed me on it.

The Bible is God’s Word.

Many voices deny this fact. They claim that the Bible is man’s book, not God’s book. They claim that the Bible is culturally conditioned and, thus, suspect when it comes to addressing people today. They claim that the Bible is full of contradictions or that the events it relates never happened. They claim that the Bible is cruel, oppressive to women, or sexually backward.

Today the various voices against the Bible are loud and occupy the seats of power within all cultures. The Bible stands as the most attacked and most censored book in history, and among the power brokers of Western culture, its ideas are roundly mocked and brushed aside.

But the Bible still stands as God’s Word. Despite the efforts to discredit and dismantle Scripture, it still changes lives, brings peace, frees people from sin, reconciles enemies, puts joy in the heart, and more. This is because the Bible is God’s Word.

The power of the Bible is not in the book on its own but in the God who stands behind it. The Bible has power because ultimately it comes from Christ and points to Christ.

For this reason, those who know God love the Bible. Indeed, one of the marks of genuine faith is a love for Scripture, for if you love God, you want to know what He says.

Unfortunately, however, too many who go by name of Christian have no desire to know what God says. They work their jobs, go to their schools, raise their children, eat, shop, play, and live life as if God has nothing to say about who they are and how they should live. They are so busy living life that they have no time to listen to God. They don’t even think about listening to Him. But they consider themselves good people (churchgoing people even) and, thus, Christians. This phenomenon is not Christianity. You do not see it in Scripture.

But most people in church don’t know Scripture. They don’t take time to read it, to meditate on it, and to learn from it so that they might obey it. And so they disobey it (all along thinking they obey it) because they love other things more than they love God. For if they had loved God, they would have taken the time to learn what He says.

The irony is that many of these people would tell you that the Bible is God’s book, but they live like the people who tell you that the Bible is man’s book. They somehow think they revere the Bible when in reality they pay scant attention to it.

God calls you to know Him, to love Him, and to obey Him. From the heart. And a heart that wants God, wants His Word.

Nov

2020

Jesus is Everything

Another of the disciples said to him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.” (Matthew 8:21-2)

Jesus is everything or Jesus is nothing.

He is more important to you than your mother, father, son and daughter, or you have missed Him (Mt 10:34-9). He calls you to unwavering allegiance to Himself.

Modern Christianity has glossed over the radical nature of Jesus’ Christianity. Modern Christianity is merely respectable. It wants the comforts of home, the entertainment of Hollywood, the approval of society, and, oh yes, let’s throw in some Jesus too.

This is not the Christianity that turned the world upside-down. Rather, this is the world turning Christianity upside-down.

Jesus is everything or Jesus is nothing. Here in America we had an election this week, and the results are still unknown., Much of America is wringing its hands over who its next president will be. Social media has lit up with claims of doomsday if such-and-such gets elected, and the mainstream media treats this election as if life itself hangs in the balance over who wins. This fear shows where their hope is. To these people, political power is everything.

But Jesus must be everything. If your hope lies in an election, then it does not lie in Jesus. If politics is everything, then Jesus is not. And if Jesus is not everything, He is nothing. I struggle with this. Who wouldn’t? If you take seriously the ultimacy of Jesus, you should struggle with His call. If you are like me, you find times when good things pull you from ultimate things – when sleep or work eats up your time with God, when sports or money becomes a priority, when family keeps your mind and time occupied. I struggle precisely because I have good and normal desires for various earthly things, and I don’t want to place those desires under the lordship of Christ. I want Jesus to be one good thing among many good things and not to be everything.

But Jesus is everything or Jesus is nothing. This is why He calls us to die, to take up our Cross, to lose our life, and those who follow Him walk that path. They may stumble while on that path, but they are on that path. It’s hard. But it’s good.

For when you get Jesus, you get everything.

Discipleship

The Church Command

Desires

What Does the Bible Say?

Wanting God’s Word

Jesus is Everything

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