MATURE CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”  (Acts 2:42 NIV)

One aspect of the world that I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by thirty-second commercials. Our sense of reality has been flattened by thirty-page abridgments.

It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate. Many claim to be born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In our kind of culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. 

-- Eugene Peterson in “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”

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A WAY FOR US

Plainly, in the eyes of Jesus there is no good reason for not doing what He said to do, for He only tells us to do what is best. In one situation Jesus asks His students, “Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46)  

Just try picturing yourself standing before Jesus and explaining why you did not do what He said was best. Now it may be that there are cases in which this would be appropriate. And certainly we can count on His understanding. But it will not do as a general posture in a life of confidence in Him. He really has made a way for us into easy and happy obedience -- really, into personal fulfilment. And that way is apprenticeship to Him. It is Christian ‘discipleship.’ His gospel is a gospel for life and Christian discipleship. 

-- Dallas Willard in “The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God” 

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SPILLING OUT

"Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice!"  (Philippians 4:4 NLT)

Philippians is Paul's happiest letter. And the happiness is infectious. Before we've read a dozen lines, we begin to feel the joy ourselves -- the dance of words and the exclamations of delight have a way of getting inside us. But happiness is not a word we can understand by looking it up in the dictionary. In fact, none of the qualities of the Christian life can be learned out of a book. Something more like apprenticeship is required, being around someone who out of years of devoted discipline shows us, by his or her entire behavior, what it is. Moments of verbal instruction will certainly occur, but mostly an apprentice acquires skill by daily and intimate association with a 'master,' picking up subtle but absolutely essential things, such as timing and rhythm and 'touch.'

When we read what Paul wrote to the Christian believers in the city of Philippi, we find ourselves in the company of just such a master. Paul doesn't tell us that we can be happy, or how to be happy. He is simply and unmistakably happy. None of his circumstances contribute to his joy: He wrote from a jail cell, his work under attack by competitors, and after twenty years or so of hard travelling in the service of Jesus, he was tired and would have welcomed some relief. But circumstances are incidental compared to the life of Jesus, the Messiah, that Paul experiences from the inside. For it is a life that not only happened at a certain point in history, but continues to happen, spilling out into the lives of those who receive Him, and then continues to spill out all over the place. Christ is, among much else, the revelation that God cannot be contained or hoarded. It is this 'spilling out' quality of Christ's life that accounts for the happiness of Christians, for joy is life in excess, the overflow of what cannot be contained within any one person.

-- Eugene Peterson's introduction to the book of Philippians in The Message

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