Discipleship will open us up to opportunities beyond anything we can ask or think. While it may be tempting to create a crisis for which discipleship is the solution, framing discipleship as a solution misses the point.
It isn’t something we do to fix the problems we are facing. Discipleship is a way of life we commit to when we proclaim, “Jesus is Lord.”
As we enter the community of faith through baptism and learn obedience (Matthew 28:19-20), we become the sort of people capable of navigating the challenges we face in ways that point to Christ. Discipleship is what we do to become the sort of people who live differently in a world that does not know God.
We exist within a world uniquely proficient at telling stories that deny God. While social media and the internet have allowed for the proliferation of such stories, there is no sector of society that does not encourage conformity to something other than Christ.
In some sense, Christians are in competition with other entities that are also seeking to make disciples. These entities advance ideologies, which involve a manner of thinking about and determining the relevance of various aspects of the world.
Entities like the state, industry, and culture press us to conform to a way of thinking about the world that obscures God and seeks to employ us to demonstrate the pseudo-wisdom of the world rather than “the manifold wisdom of God” (Ephesians 3:10).
Discipleship is crucial now not because there is some “pending doom” but because the world, regardless of era or culture, competes with God for our loyalties.
As John writes, “For all that is in the world — the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life — is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:16-17).
What Is Discipleship?
It’s a discipled posture. Without discipleship, Christians become less capable of being a faithful presence in the world.
As I am not in Thinking Christian, we “will need to reconsider what it means to make [and be] disciples in a context where our ability to fulfill virtually every fleeting desire may well keep us from cultivating the deeper longings of our heart.” Those longings are forged within the comfort and crucible of the Christian community.
Christianity binds us to Christ and to one another. As a body of connected members, we learn new ways of being together and new ways of being in the world. This way of being together and in the world is the fruit of discipleship.
While “there is in any culture a range of footings we can be on with each other: intimate or formal, deferential or egalitarian, narrowly functional…or open-ended” (Taylor, The Language Animal), those who proclaim “Jesus is Lord” are to learn to be with others on the “footing” called “discipled.”
Cultivating a discipled posture is crucial because, “only when the rank and file of the Christian Churches are enlisted in active service for Christ, will His Kingdom advance as it ought” (Moody, To the Work).
Christians can, should, and do participate in formal settings demanding politeness and decorum. We are often involved in more casual daily interactions. However, our interaction in these settings is to be nested in discipleship.
Being “discipled” is our non-negotiable way of being in the world. It governs all of our other interactions. Being in the world without being discipled may still allow Christians to live principled lives characterized by kindness, generosity, and civility.
Yet, Christians have not been called from darkness to life simply to be nice. We have been called to bear witness to Christ (Matthew 10:18).
To approach the world with a discipled posture requires that, having been buried with Christ in baptism, we learn to walk in newness of life by observing the full counsel of God’s Word (Matthew 28:19-20; Romans 6:4).
Learning to walk is not simply a matter of accumulating information about God. Too often, Christians have mistaken education for discipleship, yet there is a difference between learning and learning to obey. Discipleship involves the former and requires the latter.
Knowledge without discipleship is dangerous. It is dangerous because knowledge without discipleship heightens our willingness to assume we are capable of navigating the world on our own terms and in our own strength.
In a broken world, human thought, unrestrained and unguided (i.e., undiscipled) by God’s Word, is vulnerable. As philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests, such vulnerability often involves knowledge through the development of “scientific ideas, institutional designs, organizational techniques, ideologies, concepts, and memes.”
Allowing our knowledge to guide us apart from discipleship means operating apart from God’s authority. We become our own sovereign, deciding the course of our own lives.
Our choices are no longer discernments aimed at respecting and reflecting God’s authority, but dismissing his wisdom and will.
What Is the Cost of Discipleship?
It’s choice and discipleship. Choice is a relatively recent innovation. As sociologist of religion, Peter L. Berger notes, “Modernization leads to a huge transformation in the human condition from fate to choice.”
While Christians might replace the language of “fate” with a theological term appropriate for expressing our convictions about God’s hand in our lives, the shift toward choice is difficult to deny. Again, as Berger notes,
“All of life becomes an interminable process of redefining who the individual is in the context of the seemingly endless possibilities presented by modernity. This endless array of choices is reinforced by the structures of capitalist systems, with their enormous market for services, products, and even identities, all protected by a democratic state which legitimates these choices, not least the choice of religion. All of these areas of an individual’s life were once taken for granted, were fated. They now become an arena of almost endless choices.”
The proliferation of choices creates expectations. It becomes “normal” to determine the course of our lives. There is nothing particularly wrong with making choices like who we marry or what career to pursue.
There is, however, something wrong if those choices lead us to displace God as the Sovereign in our lives. Disciples make choices within the context of a discipled life. At our most faithful, we make life’s big choices as an expression of our commitment to observing all of Christ’s commands (Matthew 28:20).
Discipled Speaking and Acting
If discipleship is our way of being in the world, we must understand how to speak and act in a “discipled” manner. Learning to observe all Christ has commanded (Matthew 28:20) won’t be easy. The shift away from a default assumption that God exists makes learning to obey more challenging.
As philosopherCharles Taylor notes, while there was once “a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God,” we currently live in a world “in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”
While there are multiple factors that have drawn us into an arena in which God and faith are marginalized, our concern is not primarily that the world believes our faith is feasible or rational.
Instead, by living out our faith, we give God the opportunity to showcase his sovereignty, wisdom, and benevolence in our individual and collective lives.
Being “discipled” is the means by which we resist the forces that would hinder us from reflecting Christ and allow ourselves to be carried forward by the forces that prompt us to conform to Christ’s image.
Our resistance will often need to be tailored to the forces that seek to hinder us. We can resist by practicing some of the traditional spiritual disciplines or engaging in other practices that keep us from accepting stories that deny God.
Resistance represents our refusal to accept the alternatives of the world. We follow God even though we may not understand where He is leading us.
As we resist those forces that hinder us from conforming to the image of Christ, we also seek to align ourselves with the movement of God’s Spirit. To do so also requires that we obey.
Our proactive obedience forges within us a deeper understanding of how God works because we test God by obeying him and walking in accordance with his wisdom (Malachi 3:10). That participation cultivates an awareness of one’s own movements in relation to God.
It demands that we move beyond assertions of truth (though without leaving them behind) to develop the God-following skills necessary to speak and act faithfully.
To speak and act as disciples, we would be wise to take James’s advice: “…let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20).
Our ways may seem right. They may even feel good in the short term, but, if we are committed to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” we can’t just do what seems right in our own eyes (Matthew 6:33). We must learn to speak and act obediently.
To be discipled is to learn to move and breathe in the world in ways that point others to Christ. It is up to all of us to learn obedience. Discipleship is, at the same time, the work we are called to do and the privilege we receive when we commit to following our Savior.
As Dwight Moody notes, “During the years that I have been privileged to labor for God…I have strongly and increasingly felt that the task of arousing Christians to a deeper sense of their responsibility is even a more important task than that of the simple evangelist.”
May the body of Christ awaken to that deeper sense and begin the hard, good work of being and making disciples.
For further reading:
What Does it Mean to Be a Disciple of Christ?
How Can I Disciple a New Believer?
What Did Jesus Mean to 'Go and Make Disciples’?
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