DISCIPLESHIP INCLUDES EVERYTHING

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”  (1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NIV)

A disciple of Jesus is not necessarily one devoted to doing specifically religious things as that is usually understood. To repeat, I am learning from Jesus how to lead my life, my whole life, my real life.

So as His disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do religious things, either as part of “full-time service” or as a “part-time service.” My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, “religious” or not. 

-- Dallas Willard in “The Divine Conspiracy”

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PLOWED UP AND RE-SOWN

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”  (2 Corinthians 5:17 NKJV)

The almost impossibly hard thing is to hand over your whole self to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is remain what we call “ourselves” -- our personal happiness centered on money or pleasure or ambition -- and hoping, despite this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you cannot do. If I am a grass field -- all the cutting will keep the grass less but won’t produce wheat. If I want wheat… I must be plowed up and re-sown. 

-- C.S. Lewis, from an essay entitled “Is Christianity Hard or Easy?”

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PRACTICING WHOLE-LIFE WITNESS - Part 1

Jesus said, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  (Acts 1:8 NIV)

Our witness for Christ is never complete if it touches only individual lives… We are called to go into the world with a whole-life witness. In other words, our witness should transform not only the lives of individuals but also the world in which we live. In this way our witness becomes an expression of the Kingdom of God, coming on earth as it is already fulfilled in heaven.

Sometimes individual Christians and churches tend to emphasize either personal witness on the one hand or social witness on the other, but whole-life evangelism binds both together in a life-transforming whole. 

-- James A. Harnish in “A Disciple’s Path: Deepening Your Relationship with Christ and the Church”

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