Your COMPASS for the Journey on the PATH of Discipleship: June 26-July 2, 2011
Posted by Isaac Butterworth | Filed under Compass, Discipleship, Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Formation
Your COMPASS for the Journey on the PATH of Discipleship is a daily resource designed to help you find direction in your walk with Christ. Over the past several weeks, we have been summarizing J. Stephen Yuille’s book, The Inner Sanctum of Puritan Piety. Next week, we will return to this most helpful treatment of the Puritan John Flavel’s doctrine of union with Christ. But for the time being, we are looking into disciplines for the spiritual life. Please join us on the journey.
Sunday, June 26, 2011 REFINING THE FOUR-POINT CHALLENGE
Compass:
Mark 12:28-34 ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. ‘There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
Map:
Last week, I shared with you what I called a four-point challenge. You may remember the four points
- Go to church
- Get in a face-to-face group
- Read your Bible
- Serve others.
That would be the list in its rawest form. At one point, I refined the list a bit by saying:
- Warm a pew
- Warm your heart
- Illumine your mind
- Illumine your world (or, at least, your corner of it)
This week, I want to refine the list a bit more, but, before I do, I want to tell you what prompted me to develop such a list in the first place. In a book by the title of Church Unique, Will Mancini claims that ninety-eight percent of the churches in America are functioning without any clear idea of where they hope to lead people on their spiritual journey. I don’t know about the percentage, but I think he’s probably right about the rest.
Many churches simply multiply programs. They have programs for women, programs for men, programs for youth, for singles, for married couples with children, for married couples without children, and so forth. And they just try to keep people busy. Involvement is the key motivation.
Journey:
But what if it were different? What if the key motivation were not just involvement, but movement? In his book, Seven Practices of Effective Ministry, Andy Stanley writes: ‘Think Steps, Not Programs’ (p. 88). The idea is this: Instead of having a strategic vision that focuses on programs, you have a strategic vision of a people-process, a pathway that takes people from where they are now spiritually, to where you want them to be. Then you make sure that you have all the programs you need along that pathway, in easy, obvious, and strategic steps that take them from point A to point B.
Monday, June 27, 2011 STEPS ON THE PATH OF FAITH
Compass:
Mark 12:28-34 ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. ‘There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
Map:
What if we could say to everyone who comes into the life of our church, ‘We’re going to help you gain distance and momentum in your spiritual journey. We have two or three or four steps that you can take to grow in your faith’? What if we said that to people?
Journey:
Two things would have to be in place, wouldn’t they? First of all, we would need to have some idea of what the ‘steps’ are, and, second, we would need to be involved in taking those steps ourselves. Wouldn’t we?
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 A RECOGNIZABLE PATH
Compass:
Mark 12:30 ‘Love the Lord your God….’
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Map:
Jesus’ great commission to his church was to ‘make disciples.’ I want to suggest to you that Christian discipleship follows a recognizable PATH. When Jesus called Simon and Andrew and James and John, he said to them, ‘Follow me.’ When he called Matthew, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And, in each case, they left behind what they were doing and they took steps, literally, to follow Jesus on the path of discipleship.
Journey:
So, what steps will we take? As we read above, Jesus was once asked what the greatest commandment was. And he didn’t hesitate. He said, ‘The most important one…is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”’ He then said that there was a second commandment just like the first in importance, and it was that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 PURSUE GOD
Compass:
Mark 12:30 ‘Love the Lord your God…with all your soul….’
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Map:
If we may use the words of this Great Commandment, we can see the four steps we are to take along the path of Christian discipleship, and, as a way to help us remember these steps, I am using the word ‘PATH’ as an acrostic. So, let’s begin with the ‘P’ in PATH:. PURSUE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD.
‘Pursue’ is the key word here. We are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So, let’s focus for just a moment on ‘lov[ing] the Lord [our] God…with all [our] soul….’ We might think about this step as one in which we deepen our soul’s capacity to love God. In Psalm 63:8, David says, ‘My soul followeth hard after thee’ (KJV).
Journey:
How can you and I take that step in which our soul follows hard after God? How can we take the step of pursuing our relationship with God and doing it with passion? We could start with worship, and we could pour ourselves into it. How could we do that? One thing we might do is prepare ourselves for worship. What if we didn’t wait till Sunday morning to get ready? What if we began on Saturday night or even earlier in the week? What if we prayerfully anticipated worship? What if we didn’t just plan to show up for church, but planned also to worship with all our soul? And what if, when we got there, we didn’t just sit passively in the pew, waiting to see if somehow the choir or the band or the preacher or someone else could move us – or even interest us? What if you and I took responsibility for our own experience in worship? What if we sang the hymns, participated in the responses, attended to the Word, offered ourselves and our substance, and – don’t leave out this part! – resolved to reenter the world with a renewed vision? What if we realized that we’re not the audience here but that God is, and that God is waiting on us to express our love with all our soul?
Thursday, June 30, 2011 ANSWER THE CALL
Compass:
Mark 12:30 ‘Love the Lord your God…with all your strength.’
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Map:
The the first step on the PATH of Christian discipleship is: Pursue your relationship with God. Love the Lord your God with all your soul. The second step is this. And this is the ‘A’ in our acrostic: Answer the call to your true vocation. Or, as the Great Commandment has it: ‘Love the Lord your God…with all your strength.’
If someone were to ask me what my vocation is, I might say that I am a minister or a pastor. If they asked you, you might say that you are in business, or that you’re a nurse, or a lawyer, or a teacher, or something else. But Christian vocation runs deeper than that. Whatever our various jobs or professions might be, vocation is the same for all of us. The word ‘vocation’ simply means ‘calling,’ and our calling as human beings is to bear the image of God in which we have been created.
And we have been. Genesis 1:27 says, ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’ Each and every one of us is created in the image of God. The only trouble is: As a race, we humans have marred the image of God that we are called to bear. We have distorted it and rendered it misshapen. We are not what God created us to be. But the New Testament tells us that God has set about to renew the creation and that we are a part of that grand renewal movement. Having deformed the image of God in which we were created, we are nevertheless, by God’s grace, being re-created in the image of Christ. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ (NRSV).
We are being ‘made over,’ you might say, into the image of Christ, and it is now our vocation, our calling, to bear his image in this world. In my original four-point challenge, this step on the PATH appears as serving God by serving others. And that’s a good way of looking at our vocation. We are here not to control others or to use them or to manipulate them. We are here to serve them. So, whatever your job is, what you are is a Christian cleverly disguised as a teacher or a doctor or a banker or whatever. Your real calling is to be a vessel of the Spirit of Christ, so that Christ can reach out to others through you.
Journey:
Jesus once said to his disciples, ‘The Son of Man [by which he meant himself] did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life…’ (Mark 10:45). We all give our lives to something. Every last one of us. God calls us to give our lives to Christ by giving them away in serving others. And we are to put all our energy into it. We are to love God with all our strength. That’s step two.
Tomorrow and Saturday, we’ll look at the other two steps on the PATH. I hope you will plan to continue with me on this journey. For now, here is what I urge you to do. I urge you to determine that you will make the first two steps on the PATH a habit in your life. Go to church next Sunday, but don’t just show up. Be present. You know what I mean? Be present to God. Pursue God with all your soul. That’s step one on the PATH of discipleship.
And then, step two: Serve others, but don’t just do service projects. Don’t just donate your time for this cause or that cause. Make your whole life a response to God’s call to bear the image of Christ in this world. And do it with all your strength. I read about someone recently, talking about a college friend of his named Mike. He wrote, ‘…In college, when I was around Mike, I wanted to be just like Mike. Now, after spending time with Mike, I want to be more like Jesus’ (Gary Thomas, Authentic Faith, p. 8). Be that kind of person. That’s your calling; that’s your vocation. Be the person who makes others want to be like Christ. Be the person who makes the PATH look inviting.
Friday, July 1, 2011 TRANSFORMED IN YOUR THINKING
Compass:
Mark 12:30 ‘Love the Lord your God…with all your mind….’
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Map:
The ‘T’ in PATH is for being ‘transformed’ and, specifically, it refers to being transformed in your thinking. When I was a teenager, my pastor gave me a little pocket New Testament, bound in red leather. And inside, on the flyleaf, he had written a note. And with the note was a Scripture citation: Romans 12:1-2. I couldn’t wait to turn to that passage and read what it said. If you know those verses, you will recognize the words: ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God’ (KJV).
These words are programmatic for the Christian life. They set the agenda. They represent a plan for living coram deo, before the face of God. (See Before the Face of God [4 Volumes] by R. C. Sproul.) ‘Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.’
The transformed life does not come by accident. Andy Stanley says in one of his books, ‘Direction – not intention – determines your destination’ (The Principle of the Path, p. 14). Your intention, and mine, may be to follow Jesus, but if we are not walking the path he is walking, if we’re not going in his direction, we’re not going to get where he is going. So, the third step on Jesus’ PATH is to think the way Jesus thinks. To return to the Great Commandment, we are to ‘love…God…with all [our] mind.’ We are to think – that is, we are to process reality – in a certain way. We are to develop a biblical worldview. In other words, we are to view the world and everything in it the way the Bible defines it.
Journey:
To do this is to love God with our mind, and to love God with our mind is, often, to think in opposition to the established order of things. Our thinking will not be ‘conformed to this world,’ but, rather, we will be ‘transformed by the renewing of [our] mind.’
The transformed mind, then, is counter-cultural, because we don’t think along the same patterns laid down for us by the dominant culture around us. Instead, we look at the world through the lens of Scripture. We maintain a biblical worldview.
Our culture, or ‘the world’ as the Bible calls it, subtly but effectively teaches us how to think and how to live. It teaches us, for example, that we have to gratify every desire immediately. ‘I want it, and I want it now!’ That becomes our mantra. Our culture forces us to think we have to control everyone and everything around us. It leads us to believe that the most important consideration in every situation is how it affects us personally. It convinces us that we are to hate our enemies and get back at those who harm us. It says that we are to do whatever it takes to get what we want, no matter who gets hurt. It holds up before us the unholy trinity of money, sex, and power and tells us: This is what life is all about! And, in the end, what it does is: it makes us anxious, self-centered, deformed, and needy.
The biblical worldview counters such notions. Instead of instant gratification, we are told to be patient, to ‘wait upon the Lord.’ Instead of believing that we have to be in control, we are told to yield ourselves to God’s control. Instead of promoting ourselves, we are told to deny ourselves. Instead of hating our enemies, we are told to love them. Instead of returning evil for evil, we are told to return good for evil. Instead of cursing those who insult us, we are told to bless them. Instead of loving things and using people, we are told to do life the other way around. (See Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? by John Powell, S.J.) And we are told that our money, our relationships, and whatever degree of power we have are to be submitted to God and to God’s purposes.
And that’s the bottom line in all of this: the purpose of God. Since the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit and threw the whole creation out of balance, God’s purpose has been to restore his wounded creation.
Remember how, on Thursday, we talked about our vocation, our calling, which is the same for all of us? We are all called to be image-bearers of Christ. Look again at the effects of being ‘conformed to this world.’ Such things as instant gratification, the anxious need to control, self-promotion, retaliation, greed, and all that – they are all evidence of the old order of things, a world out of balance. Now look at the effects of being transformed in our thinking. Look at patience, self-denial, forgiveness, contentment, and trust in God. What are these things evidence of? A new order, right? Human beings renewed in the image of Christ, of people committed to God’s agenda,, of servants of the Kingdom devoted to God’s grand program of renewal!
And so, we have our options. There are two: We can be ‘conformed to this world,’ which is itself broken and malformed, or we can ‘be transformed’ by the renewing of our minds. But if we walk the PATH of discipleship, it is transformation all the way!
Saturday, July 2, 2011 FOR OTHERS
Compass:
Mark 12:30 ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart….’
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Map:
Step four on the PATH brings us to the letter ‘H’ in our acrostic. The ‘H’ is for heart. We are to nurture a heart for others. One of the lies our culture tells us is that it’s everyone for themselves. The good and wonderful gift of individuality has been deformed into the damaging ideology of individualism.
Yesterday, we mentioned Adam and Eve. Look what happened when they disobeyed God. They got caught, and they were ashamed. So, what did they do? They started blaming each other. Adam even managed to shift some of the blame to God! ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree,’ he said (Genesis 3:12). The woman you gave me! The woman, of course, blamed the snake, and we’ve been blaming each other ever since. The sure sign of the loss of connection in any relationship is blame. Blame leads to fear, and fear leads to isolation, and isolation leads to a misshapen existence. God never intended for any of us to be isolated; God never intended for any of us to be alone. God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone’ (Genesis 2:18). And the implication is that it is not good for any man or any woman or any child to be alone.
And that doesn’t mean that everyone has to be married. What it means is that God’s intention is that we live in community. And community was what was disrupted as a result of the first sin. And community is what has been disrupted as a result of every sin since then. So, what has God done about it? He has set about to restore community.
His covenant with Abraham was established in order to build a great nation. His covenant with that nation was established in order to build a just world. The nation failed, and the world suffered. So, God sent his Son. God sent Jesus, a descendant of Abraham and a son of that great nation. And what did Jesus do? He called together a small group of people to form a community. In time, he redeemed this community by his death and resurrection, and, as he did, he conquered every sin, every form of evil, every force that is set on separating and dividing people from one another and from God. He even defeated death, the greatest separator of all! And then he sent his Spirit to breathe life into that new community, which, of course, is the church. The same way God breathed life into Adam, the Spirit of God breathed life into the church.
Journey:
And we are the church. We are the community of faith. We are the people of Jesus. We are the New Humanity. And our life together is our witness to what God is doing in this world. We are to be a provisional demonstration of what God intends for all humanity – provisional because we will never be perfect at it, but a demonstration all the same. If we who say we follow Jesus cannot be reconciled to one another and live in harmony with each other, then what hope does the world have?
We are the ones who are called to obey what Jesus termed his ‘new commandment:’ ‘A new command I give you,’ he said: ‘Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another’ (John 13:34). If we go back to the Great Commandment in Mark, chapter 12, we will be reminded that we are to love God with all our heart. We are to nurture a heart for others.
When you think about it, our Triune God is himself, in himself, a community of love. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all three, live together in perfect harmony. There is love and only love flowing in and out among them. And we…we are invited to enter into the community of the blessed Trinity and to let the three Persons of the Godhead live their life and love their love in and through us.
‘By this,’ Jesus said, ‘all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another’ – not, notice, by how religious you are – whatever that means – but by the quality of your life together.
SUMMARY
So, what have we said over these past two weeks? To call on Andy Stanley again, ‘Direction, not intention, determines your destination.’ The PATH lays out for us our direction. We are to love God with all our soul, with all our strength, with all our mind, and with all our heart. So, we will continue on the direction of this PATH.
We will pursue our relationship with God. We will answer the call to our true vocation. We will be transformed in our thinking. We will nurture a heart for others. To say the same things again in another way: We will go deep with God through prayer and worship. We will be image bearers of Christ in the world, serving rather than seeking to be served. We will train ourselves to have the mind of Christ, to maintain a biblical worldview. And we will commit ourselves to one another in authentic community. This is the direction we will go. This is the PATH we will take. This the way in which we shall walk. By this means, we will follow Jesus.
Photo Credit: White’s Chapel Prayer Labyrinth by QuesterMark
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