THE FIRST STEP BACK

If one wished to make discipleship to Jesus the most important thing in their life, what should they do? If they wish to leave the constraints of religious performance and external conformance behind, how would one proceed?

I would encourage you to stay away. Really, I encourage you to stay away.
If you can, you probably should.
Genuine disciples simply can’t stay away.
They have nowhere else to go.

If you are comfortable in the garb of religious clichés, Christian morals and church doctrine determined by those with the most authority and influence, you should stay there, for discipleship will be for you a burden and an immense disappointment. See: Matthew 13:44-46 for example.

If you just can’t stay away, then you have made the first step toward genuine, inner transformation where the work must be done. But let’s be clear, you have to do something. Discipleship is not passive, it is active. But the active part is not in the area of trying to obey Him, being righteous or perfect. Leave all hope in that direction behind. We aren’t striving for obedience; we are putting effort into becoming a certain kind of person for whom obedience becomes spontaneous. We do that by doing the things within our power, which will enable Him to do what He has been waiting to do all along; change every aspect of our entire person into one fully functioning human being. While we have a part to play in this transformation process, we will never trust our part. Remember, we are learning to Trust Christ, the essence of the good news of the Kingdom.

If the idea that you have to actually DO something to enable God to do something else in your life appalls you, you have hit a major obstruction to further development. If you want transformation to simply strike you like lightening in the midst of a church service, then retreat silently into your Christianity and religious observances. If that is your idea of discipleship, you will never have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, necessary, as Jesus said to enter the Kingdom of the Heavens. You will have a righteousness that is defined by external performance of religious activities and nailing down the corners of your pristine doctrine.

If you are willing to embark, to move beyond this initial roadblock into making being with Jesus learning to be like Him the most important thing in your life, take a walk. Really, take a long walk. Leave the technology (all of it) behind and settle this issue for at least today. Will I make following Jesus the most important thing in life? It is the most important decision you will make every day of the rest of your existence, which will never end.
Will, I today, choose discipleship to Jesus as the single most crucial aspect of my life?
TO BE CONTINUED…
On your next walk: Learning the language of the Kingdom.

A CONFESSION

A confession. As I live in Christ, following Him, albeit in an imperfect way into discipleship to be the person God has always intended me to be, I become less and less interested in presenting Christianity to people. I don’t want to invest my life into trying to get people to align with or adhere to Christianity. I want people to find what I have found in the person of Christ.

The lovely, winsome, intelligent, intriguing and living person of Jesus Christ.

Since childhood I have always questioned the prevailing assumptions being presented in the church and was regularly thumped (both literally and figuratively). I went underground for years and built walls that almost destroyed my soul. God never gave up, even when Christianity did.

I found new life in Christ. A person. Not a religion, church or sect. And it has been Christ, not Christianity that has begun to heal my hurting soul. Redeemed by His blood and saved by His life.

Christianity was a tag hung on some by the world, then taken over by the church and now argued over as to who is and who isn’t really in. Count me out. In Lebanon it is the name of a political group, in America it is the description of our historical roots and in other places it is the side of bloody protests. Perhaps it is time to give the word back to the world that gave it to us. Like Cassandra in Greek Mythology where Apollo's cursed gift of prophecy became a source of endless pain and frustration, the moniker ‘Christian’ has been an untold source of sorrow and hurt, wars and blood.

Let’s be honest, ‘Christianity’ is now a ‘religion’ and the world isn’t buying what we are selling wrapped in the description they invented. For good reason the world has had a bellyful of our sermonizing and in-fighting. What we are selling is a merchandized, commercialized, consumer driven religion that requires adherents to bow at the shrine of the influential writers and speakers who apparently are the gatekeepers and protestant popes of this religious movement.

Often what we are selling is not consistent with the person of Jesus in whom we are finding a life of such transformative power we have had no trouble considering the cost as the best bargain ever presented in life.

I am too old to speak to a movement or start a trend. I have neither the energy, the patience, the intelligence nor probably the right. I pray for those God is rising up in the midst of our religious culture who will say by their life, no more. No more religion. No more consumerism. No more to ‘Christianity’. Just followers of Christ into the kind of life He intends, becoming all that He intended us to be and by our lives shut the mouths of kings. For it might be His intent that this new breed of Christ followers will be the way by which He will sprinkle many nations with Himself; where the kings shall shut their mouths at him; for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider (Is. 52:15)

IRS

OK, some thoughts as I exit the federal building in Boise. Ah, what to say!

I know what I would have said in days gone by. Very practiced and trained in the weapons of this flesh. I know what one living in this world would say. I used to live there. I know how one entrenched in the warfare of this world would act. It was my old battlefield. Frustrated? That's an understatement. Discouraged. Rarely have I felt more. An Imbroglio. Possibly appropriate. Galamatias. There's a word that comes to mind to describe what I may have wanted to express in response to some of the conclusions reached by the 'examiner'.

On the 2+ hour drive home I came to one conclusion. My hope, confidence and rest is in God alone. It is not in finances, it is not in physical events and health and, I wish to LOUDLY proclaim, it sure as heaven and hell is not in government, the IRS, bureaucracies, the UN or the lords of this world. None of those things put a hallelujah on my chorus.

So I recognize God, every so often in a timely fashion, has to challenge the foundations of my hope and confidence to make sure that my house is being built on a rock. On Him. I will always praise Him because He alone is my hope.

Is There Anything Worth Everything?

Some thoughts as I sit in the parking lot of the Federal Building in Boise awaiting my opportunity for God to show Himself strong on my behalf!!

Jesus constantly encouraged His followers with this challenge of discipleship: Is it the most important thing in your life? If it isn’t, you won’t be successful in the endeavor. Not because He won’t let us, but because it can’t be done any other way. But, how do we know what is important to us and what is not. What is most important to us and what is of little importance to us?

What would you give your life for? What would you give your life up to? Would you give your life for pleasure? Would you give your life up to fulfilling your desires? Would that be a noble endeavor?

Would you give your life for truth? Would you give your life for freedom?

Is there anything in your life that is worth giving your life for?

Would you give your life for the pursuit of happiness? Even the best moralists know that we need to find something in life more important to us than being happy.

Would I give my life to learning how to be a fully formed human being if it was the path by which my ultimate purpose is fulfilled: To glorify God and serve Him forever? Would that be a noble endeavor? Would I give the rest of this life (whatever is left) to this one task of learning how to be the fully formed human being my creator intended in order that He might trust me with His power in living a life that will never end?

What did He find worth giving His life for?

What would you give your life for?

The Veritas Forum

At the Veritas Forum at Columbia University in 2006, Alistair McGrath discussed with atheist David Helfand the issue of the meaning of life and the topic of Dawkin’s book: Is God a Delusion? Alistair McGrath, a writer whose must read book, ‘In the Beginning’ about the development of the King James Bible is positing the position that science points more arguably to the truth of God than to God as a delusion.

In the argument Mr. McGrath makes an interesting observation about the position of the reformation. “The reformation corresponds very well to what Thomas Kuhn would describe as a radical paradigm shift. And the key thing about Protestantism is it proposes not simply one such reforming event in the past, but an ongoing process of constant reevaluation and revision to try to ascertain that we have the best possible handle on our knowledge of God, and we want a sort of biblical anchor for that.” (emphasis mine)

If Mr. McGrath who is a brilliant intellectual follower of Christ is right in his characterization of the reformation movement then we must embrace and encourage those who challenge, question and present a new perspective that cause us to think, ponder, study and pray. I, for one, do want the best possible handle on my knowledge of God with a biblical anchor.

Let’s not be afraid to think new thoughts and challenge old ones, holding up everything to the ‘light of the knowledge of the Glory of God as seen in the face of Christ’.

Note: This quote by McGrath comes from a book entitled: A Place for Truth, Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions, published by InterVarsity. It is a compilation of talks at the Veritas Forum. Since it’s founding at Harvard in 1992, this forum has provided a place for leading thinkers to explore life’s most challenging and deepest questions of truth and life. A place to consider a serious dialogue without fear of reproach. I have personally followed the discussions for years and recommend them to anyone who is up for a challenge.

RICHER THAN RIGHT

What rail did we take bringing us off track in discipleship? Our dialogue has become splitting hairs over issues of Christianity rather than a discussion and presentation of a person, Jesus Christ. Our ‘Christianity’ has become our doctrines and thus it is more important to swear allegiance to our doctrines than to our King. Jesus has become just another Buddha who said on his death bed to his disciples who were concerned on how best to remember him; don’t remember me, it is not my person but my teachings that matter.

What matters in Christianity today is apparently having the right answers to the right questions. Whether you even believe them isn’t the issue, you just have to profess to believe them or worse, commit to things you don’t even profess to believe.

Get enough of the right answers you are in, too many wrong answers you are off to the bad place. Which ones do you have to answer correctly? Do you have to even believe your answers are true or just have them? Can you just profess them, even if you don’t believe them? Can you just commit to them even if you don’t profess to believe them? How many wrong answers can you have? Which ones are worth more points? Will they be multiple choice, fill in the blank or T or F? To which did the ‘thief’ profess?

Ask yourself, what is the importance of believing that Jesus is Divine?
Is it to just to have the right answer? Is it to get points to add to the score to make the cut? Is it to have superior knowledge from which to manufacture bullets to hurt others badly in lively debates?

Surely you are thinking, no, it isn’t anything like that at all. It isn’t to have the right answer. If I believe Him to be Divine, to have come here and established a beachhead of divine life in this little far away place we call earth, then I am going to relate to my world differently. More importantly, I will relate to Him differently. I will make following Him into life the most important thing as I learn how to become the kind of person who lives the life He described.

I will evaluate the world in which I live and the situations I go through from a different perspective and will come to see this life I live as one lived in a completely different world than the one described by the lords of knowledge.

Maybe, in this world then, it is safe to tell the truth. A world where His advice not to worry can be taken seriously. Maybe I really do live in a world where He reigns and rules and will see to my care. Perhaps I can forgive those who mistreat and abuse me. A world where He can spread before me a table right in the presence of my enemies and I might even say to them, 'Why don't you sit down with me for a bite to eat'.

Isn’t that richer than being right?

THE PARADIGM SHIFT

One of the most important steps one can take into genuine, meaningful, life-changing discipleship to Jesus is to make the paradigm switch from Jesus being merely a nice religious figure to one who actually knew what He was talking about. The need is there to begin to view Jesus as an intelligent person who has the most important information on the most important subjects of life.

If we would view Him as encompassing truth outside the religious realm, like His first followers understood Him, we would see one in whom dwells all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. If He does have that capacity for wisdom and knowledge, then you can begin to understand why He said if you learn to put into practice the things that I have taught, you will know the truth about life and the truth about life will set you free.

Who else can you turn to, realistically, in order to learn how to become a fully formed human being living in this world? To be free to be the kind of person we are meant to be? Who else would be your teacher? Really, the list is very, very, short.

Take any of them and ask if this would be true: If you put my teachings into practice, then you will be my students and I will be your teacher. You will come to know the truth about life and this world and in knowing that truth, you will never again be ruled by unsatisfied desires and will find fulfillment in becoming the fully formed human being you were designed to be.

That’s really the test isn’t it? Putting the things into practice. Who is it that offers life to the fullest extent? Jesus could say as an intelligent human being who knew a thing or two about life, ‘If you learn to put into practice the things that I teach you, your life will be like a house built upon solid rock. Even the most devastating of life’s challenges won’t be able to tear it down’.

LEARNING LOVE

My brief stay in the hospital for a rather minor surgical repair of failing body parts and my current recuperation at home has forced me to consider in silence much of where I have come since I last visited a hospital on an extended retreat some 11 years ago.

I have learned that I am not my body and as a primarily spiritual being who will never stop existing I have realized that inner transformation is paramount. This can only happen in discipleship to Jesus.
Matthew 7:17, the good tree cannot bear bad fruit.
Proverbs 4:23 Watch over your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life.

I am redeemed in order to be continually transformed in the way of Christ. This transformation happens in the inner person where the Great Command of Luke 10:27 is realized (to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your strength and all of your mind and your neighbor as yourself). But, I am not to act as if I love God and my neighbor; I am to have a character totally saturated with His kind of love. If not, even loving God and by extension my neighbor will be an impossible burden leading to frustration and failure.

Trying to love without actually learning His kind of love produces angry, bitter and contemptuous Christians who find discipleship a hopelessly burdensome task.

However, being permeated with His kind of love will produce a life adequate for every occasion, a well of water spring up to eternal life that Jesus spoke of (John 4:14) and rivers of living water to those around us in desperate need. This is God’s conspiracy and one we are called to take part in as co-conspirators. This is why He is more interested in the character we are building than the doctrine we are amassing.

Knowledge of and intimacy with the doctrinal tenants of the church will not produce Christlike character. You can look around and see this for yourself. It is not that it is unimportant; it just will not create inner transformation.

The future He has planned for us will be based on the character being forged right now in the crucible of life by His grace. This happens in discipleship to Christ as we learn a life that will never become obsolete.

REIGN AGAIN KING JESUS

Thankfully, Casey keeps me up on some of the great controversies in the church today. Apparently there are those out there being pilloried for actually encouraging people to become Disciples of Jesus. To follow Jesus and learn how to become the kind of people who treat others the way Jesus did. In confidence and quietness encouraging others to live the ‘Jesus Life’. Hmmm?

My own analysis of what has happened down through the centuries to the Disciples of Christ is that every few hundred years they must peal away from the authoritarian rule of the church. Like everything man gets their hands on, they want to take control and exercise dominion. It is how we were created and a good thing, until we think our dominion is paramount. The tension always leans towards the mighty exercising power over the masses. The church has constantly done this and is doing this today.

The genuine disciples see this and find the need to Trust Jesus only. They fearlessly stand in His Kingdom professing allegiance to Jesus and following Him and learning His kind of life (eternal). And with each new stand the religious elite object and stammer, heresy. Consider if the term ‘reformed theology’ had not already become part of the hierarchies accepted religious language and someone started a ‘reform’ movement in the church today.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize what the lords of religious knowledge would scream. Reform? We don’t need to reform what the bible teaches, what the church believes, what we sing and do. Heresy. Heresy and death at the stake to all those who wish to reform what the church has believed for 1500 years (or 100, 500 or 2000 years).

Of course, we are too ‘reformed’ to burn people at the stake today. We write books about them, magazine articles and the authoritarian church hierarchy with all their seminarian influence, publicly brand these true Disciples in the kind of life Jesus actually lived, heretics. Swinging a sword of vile vengeance and reproachful hate in the name of accepted, staid doctrine.

I pray to God on behalf of these new, bold, reformers of the current perverted christian tradition to succeed and bring us back to the life Jesus actually made available to us to live today. A life that finds following Him into discipleship the most important thing in life. To once again emerge as salt and light, not in the four walls of our buildings but within the borders of our community, out into our Valley to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Disciples who draw on the rich resources of the Kingdom Among Us, where out of our innermost beings flow the rivers of living water Jesus spoke of.

Let the rivers flow again and bring the Life of Jesus to this hurting world.

Look around for yourself and draw your own conclusions. The evidence is in and the verdict needs to be read. The protectors of the purity of doctrine have failed to lead people into a life of transformation, overflowing with the goodness of a Majestic God. Let us become co-conspirators again in HIS great plan of overcoming the kingdoms of this world with the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. Please Lord Jesus, put the Hallelujah back into the Hallelujah chorus.

Reign again King Jesus and let us seek first Your Kingdom.

Break us away from the religious hierarchy of a tyrannical church.

LIVING LIFE AS A CO-CONSPIRATOR

As a disciple, learning how to live life is for the benefit of the world.

Each of you as followers of Christ, have a prophetic responsibility in the community in which you live. That is the salt and the light stuff we talk of.

You will only find that as a reality when you learn your place in the heavenlies right now. This is why we want to go to heaven right now.

Heaven is here. God is in action. Now is your time.

Of course this doesn’t preclude the grand future we have in His presence where we will know as we are known. I don’t want to diminish our hope in any way. But heaven will take care of itself and while we look forward to what the ancients called our ‘long-home’ our life is lived here and the life lived here has a meaning and a purpose that stretches far beyond the borders of time.

This invitation God extends is to enter the Trinitarian community and live as a co-conspirator. To become a vital part of what God is about in this very short time of human history (very short from a cosmological standpoint and very, very unlikely). To become a part of a community of loving people who are redeemed and everything He had hoped the created human being to be.

So that the whole universe can become conscious of the presence and goodness of God. We become a lesson to all of the powers in the universe of the goodness and greatness of God. You will be an exhibit. Get a new understanding of who you are; Ask yourself what would it be like to be on eternal exhibit? To be that valuable.

That is what God wants and He makes it available to everyone. It is available because God is right here. And the Kingdom draws nigh unto others in the form of those who have this new life, this new life received from above now immersed in the reality of the Trinitarian presence of God. This is the bottom line of why it is not difficult to make discipleship the most important thing in your life.

STAYING IN THE GAME

When I have an unpleasant experience while trying to minister to people.

When I am the object of unfair, unjust and unfounded criticism.

When my best efforts to reach out to someone in need is met with rebuke.

What keeps me in the game?

The God who fills the entire universe-wants to be intimate with me. He planned for me from the beginning-has a plan for my ongoing existence. A pretty good trade.

I view the Gospel of Jesus as an invitation to greatness.

It is not an invitation to debase, hate or demean myself.

It is an invitation to be, as a disciple, a co-conspirator with an eternal God, as I accept and respond to His loving invitation to Trust Christ.

As I become more intimate with Him, in this interactive relationship, my desire to sin diminishes as sin itself becomes less and less interesting.

Living a life where readiness to holiness is more appealing.

Seeing my relationship with Him as one that goes beyond the borders of, but certainly includes, forgiveness of sins. Yet, if all I know of Jesus is He has died for my sins, I don’t know Him.

If all I know of God is that He has forgiven me, I don’t know God.

He forgave me to introduce me into the richness of His purposes for me.

His purpose now in a life that will never end.

This is the With-God life.

This universe we live in is itself a manifestation of the greatness of the Word and Voice of God. In it’s vastness and wonders we hear God speaking and see His handiwork and ongoing creativity. If we are to believe what His first followers thought of Him, He is the One holding it all together even now.

Colossians 1:13-20 and Hebrews 1:1-4. They understood Him to be the One in whom all wisdom and all the treasures of knowledge resides.

The Trinity, holding everything together and conspiratorial in their intent.
The ultimate reality about this universe you live in is the Trinity.

Want to know what is at the center of this universe?

God and this lovely community of Divine Persons.

Enjoying and sharing together the goodness they have.

The members of the Trinity have been there forever and will be there forever enjoying themselves and granting us the privilege of sharing their kind of life and the power to be a co-conspirator of His, overcoming the kingdoms of this world…the evil in this world. You are very much part of this. Then together, as a community of loving persons immersed in His ongoing goodness, we are prepared to march into the evil armed with His goodness.

That’s what keeps me going, keeps me in the game as I know He has been given say over everything and is going to be with me every step of the way until the job is done.