DISCIPLESHIP… BEGINS WITH A DECISION

God wants you to grow up: "We must stop acting like children…Then we will grow in every way and be more like Christ.” (Ephesians 4:14a,15b CEV)

Your heavenly Father's goal for you is to mature and develop the characteristics of Jesus Christ, living a life of love and humble service. Sadly, millions of Christians grow older but never grow up. 

They're stuck in perpetual spiritual infancy, remaining in diapers and booties. The reason is because they never intended to grow. Spiritual growth is not automatic; it takes an intentional commitment. You must want to grow, decide to grow, make an effort to grow, and persist in growing.

Discipleship is the process of becoming like Christ, and it always begins with a decision: "'Come, be My disciple,' Jesus said to him. So Matthew got up and followed Him" (Matthew 9:9 NLT).

When the first disciples chose to follow Jesus, they didn't understand all the implications of their decision. They simply responded to Jesus' invitation. 

That's all you need to get started: decide to become a disciple. 

-- From "The Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotional" by Rick Warren

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GROWTH MEANS MATURITY

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”  (James 2:14-17 NIV)

If we are to be mature we must get hold of a mature faith -- or better, it must get hold of us. For the immaturities of our faith will soon show themselves in immaturities in our actions and our attitudes. “The creed of today becomes the deed of tomorrow.” Nothing can be more immature than the oft-repeated statement: “It doesn’t matter what you believe just so you live right.” For belief is literally by-lief, by-life -- the thing you live by. And if your belief is wrong your life will be wrong.

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to say that if you have a correct belief you’ll necessarily have a correct life. That doesn’t follow. The creed, to be a creed, must be a vital rather than a verbal one. For the only thing we really believe in is the thing we believe in enough to act upon. Your deed is your creed. But it does matter what you hold as the basic assumptions of your life. If you have no staring point, you’ll have no ending point. 

-- E. Stanley Jones in “Christian Maturity”

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GROWING OLDER -- A WIN-WIN SITUATION

“We know that God, who raised the Lord Jesus, will also raise us with Jesus and present us to Himself together with you. All of this is for your benefit. And as God’s grace reaches more and more people, there will be great thanksgiving, and God will receive more and more glory. That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.”  (2 Corinthians 4:14-18 NLT)

All of us are aging. Some of us handle it well -- we get better with age like good wine and cheese. We keep on keeping on, while looking forward to the ultimate experience of the Lord when He takes us home. Others of us, unfortunately, stick our heads in the sand of time and wish aging would go away. It won’t. So if you can’t beat it -- join it! Live the rest of your life for God’s glory, and look forward to the best of life to come in His presence. They call that a win-win situation. 

-- Stuart Briscoe in “Daily Study Bible for Men” 

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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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TRANSFORMING THE WAY WE THINK

“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”  (Romans 12:2 NLT)

To be seasoned as a Christian is to have the values of Jesus Christ seep all the way through us. No longer an external authority or set of rules, they have been internalized and personalized. They have become us. To describe this transformation of our ways of feeling and sensing is to say that we have been “Christianized.” Here the word does not refer to the event of formal entrance into the Church; it refers to the inner shaping of our emotions and judgments.

This process of being seasoned must be ongoing in our lives, since we are never fully and finally matured. But the result of this process is that our instincts become trustworthy. Never infallible, our feelings nonetheless become, in time, reliable. The mature Christian is one whose sense -- about when to express anger, about how to show affection, about who is my “neighbor” -- can be trusted. Shaped and seasoned by Christian values, our intuition becomes dependable. Our feelings are transformed so that we experience them neither as alien nor as simply unpredictable. They become positive resources in our life, part of an inner authority whose movement we can trust. We mature in our faith life, then, as we learn to consult and trust the authority of our seasoned senses.   

-- Evelyn E. Whitehead and James D. Whitehead in “Seasons of Strength: New Visions of Adult Christian Maturing”

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HABITUAL FAITH

“Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.”  (Romans 13:14 NIV)

Faith is a habit. Confidence comes from habitual -- or daily-disciplined -- faith… Christians gain confidence and motivation by “putting on the mind of Christ” -- breaking through their own egos to see themselves from God’s point of view -- habitually. In other words, the confident, mature Christian views life by the light of faith -- not by the light of their own self-gratification. 

-- Adapted from David Yount

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