Growing up in LA in the 60’s and
70’s I was given to rebellion and an extreme lack of self discipline. I had no direction no intention in my life at
all except to fulfill the desires of my heart and my flesh. I didn’t even know that I was living that way
though because the whole idea of having an intentional life was foreign to me
until just recently. It had never
occurred to me that I had purpose, though in ways I guess that I have sought my
purpose all along. Of course I know that
globally my primary purpose was and is God, and all that He encompasses. So I was the proverbial person who had built
my life on the shifting sand and was tossed about by every wave of doctrine
that came my way, both secularly and as a Christian. Somehow though because God has had His hand
on my life He has allowed me to come to a place of growing in maturity in
Him. It feels very odd to me to not only
desire discipline, but to desire to obey and submit to Him, and to reach out
for direction in my life. I’m learning who God created me to be and the purpose
He created me for. And in that I’m
learning to like myself.
So I’m not one for new years
resolutions, but I’m seeing that a new year and a new decade is a chance to
have a new beginning, to put away old habits and old ways of thinking. It seems that all around me I am seeing and
hearing a call to a closer relationship with Christ and to greater obedience
and commitment to Him. It is a time for
a fresh start and a place to take stock of where I am and where I want to go,
to refocus on my direction and seek His will in my life and my walk.
So this new year has become a new
beginning for me. I am seeing more
clearly what God is doing in my life.
His call on my life is coming more into focus. I am seeing that it is not a – one single
thing – but a direction. To follow
Jesus, my Christian walk is not ‘mine’ but the walk that Christ is calling me
to walk. It involves His ministry of
helping to disciple His body, by loving and training, mentoring, and
ministering to His church.
Some notes on today’s lessons:
In Luke 9 it tells where Jesus had
a multitude following Him. He turned to them and said to follow Him, but if
you’re not willing to leave father mother sister and brother then you are not
fit for the Kingdom of God. The Church
needs to hear this today. What is the
excuse for not following Him COMPLETELY?
Do you have family you have to take care of, cares of the world, money
to manage, fame and fortune to pursue? What worldly things are causing you to rebel
against Jesus command to follow Him?
It’s not enough for you to say you believe, you must give up your life
to Him. If you resist giving up these
things you are not fit for the kingdom of God.
How many Christians have made a
profession of faith and have remained right in the same spiritual place in
their Christian walk. Salvation is not
all there is. The Bible, Jesus said to
go into all the world and ‘make disciples’.
That is not what we think of these days as the mission of the
Church. Somehow mission work has become
salvation work. Our responsibility is
not only to bring people to the faith, but to grow those converts into
disciples of Christ.
I have often wondered why my own
heart has been more focused on God’s body – the Church - rather than on the
unsaved of the world and recently I have come to realize that this is the
answer. That’s the biggest reason that I
relate to Chip Ingram and his ministry – which is to the body – to make
disciples of God’s Church – to grow them up and help them gain some maturity
and help them truly follow Christ.
For so many years the Church has
made it her mission to bring people in.
I wonder if Jesus were here and if He were to turn to the crowds and say
the same thing as He said in Luke, how many would remain? Many turned away back then. We do a disservice to people when we do not
make it clear that to belong to Him is to give up one’s own life. He never backed off from that message. He repeatedly told it to those who came to
Him.
Luke 9:57-62
The Cost of Following Jesus
57As
they were walking along the road, a man said to him, "I will follow you
wherever you go."
58Jesus
replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of
Man has no place to lay his head."
59He
said to another man, "Follow me."
But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."
But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."
60Jesus
said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim
the kingdom of God."
61
Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and
say good-by to my family."
62Jesus
replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for
service in the kingdom of God."
And as we think about being totally
committed to God, living for Him vs living for self we also must realize that
many of those who call themselves Christians have not really put their trust in
Him. It’s very possible that they never
knew Him and vise versa. This is a
crisis in the Church to me.
Luke 13: 22-30
The Narrow Door
22Then
Jesus went through the towns and villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem.
23Someone asked him, "Lord, are only a few people going
to be saved?"
He
said to them, 24"Make every effort to enter through the
narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able
to. 25Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the
door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, 'Sir, open the door for
us.'
"But he will answer, 'I don't know you or where you come from.'
"But he will answer, 'I don't know you or where you come from.'
26"Then
you will say, 'We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.'
27"But
he will reply, 'I don't know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you
evildoers!'
28"There
will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown
out. 29People will come from east and west and north and
south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. 30Indeed
there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be
last."
The call is to follow Him. The price is our lives. The way is to know Him. The first commandment to love the Lord with
all your heart and all your soul and all your strength. The means of knowing
Him and loving Him is to have Him and His Word written upon your hearts, taught
to your children, talked about at home, in travel, at night and morning.
Constantly being aware of God, thinking and meditating on His Word causes them
to be written on your heart.
It does NOT say learn and repeat
over and over, or memorize only. It says
to write them upon your heart. This is
more than head knowledge and to love the Lord is more than an emotional
feeling. It takes the combination of
learning and abiding and communing with Him to get that knowledge into the
heart.
But you cannot get Him into your
heart unless you learn His Word. So we
must learn the Word (renew the mind) then meditate on it and pray and spend
time with God and then put it into practice.
Deuteronomy 6: 1-9
Love the LORD Your God
1
These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach
you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, 2
so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your
God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give
you, and so that you may enjoy long life. 3 Hear, O Israel,
and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may
increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the
God of your fathers, promised you.
4
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love
the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today
are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you
lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your
hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the
doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Commanding us to love God is
commanding us to ‘know’ God as in the knowing that an intimate relationship of
oneness brings. To love God is to be
intimate with Him to the point of becoming one with Him.
The differentiation of the heart
and soul and strength here is very interesting.
It does not say mind. Head knowledge is not enough. And the strength to follow and obey is not available
to us who have been born in sin, without the Holy Spirit. So I say that to love/know God is not a
matter of gaining knowledge of or studying alone, though you must do this to
know God. It is not a matter of feeling
Him alone, though one must learn how to discern His presence and become aware
of the connection with Him. It is not a
matter of human strength alone, i.e. working hard at it, though it takes a
commitment to obey and follow through with that obedience. This is not legalistic religiosity. All of this is what happens when we are introduced
to a God that loves us. When we see Him
clearly and understand how He loves us personally we are drawn into a happy
heartfelt obedience to His will, to learning all we can of Him, and to a
constant communing with Him. (This is
also related to the matter of the ‘diet’ of input that we chose to take in)
The commandment to love God
requires that one commit to an intimate relationship with Him. The word ‘know’ has been taught to replace
the word ‘love’. But to remove the
‘love’ from the command and replace it with ‘know’ has been a problem because
of common understanding of the meaning of the word ‘know’.
The word KNOW – Synonyms:
acknowledge, apperceive, appreciate, apprehend, associate, be acquainted
with, be aware of, be cognizant, be conscious of, be conversant in, be friends
with, be informed, be learned, be master of, be read, be schooled, be versed,
cognize, comprehend, differentiate, discern, discriminate, distinguish,
experience, fathom, feel, feel certain, fraternize, get acquainted, get the
idea, grasp, have, have dealings with, have information, have knowledge of,
identify, keep up on, learn, notice, on top of, perceive, prize, read, realize,
recognize, savor, see, sustain, sympathize with, take account of, taste, undergo,
understand.
Note: the use of 'appreciate' should involve valuing
something or understanding it sympathetically, and when there is no value or
sympathy, use 'recognize' or 'understand'; appreciate first meant
'set at a price; appraised'
So I say again that the commandment
to love God requires that one commit to an intimate relationship with Him.
Through Jesus we see God’s heart
and are drawn to Him and are able to relate to Him from His human-ness and our
own. Jesus was walking love. He did not
mince words with us, rather He gave us the Truth, that to follow Him was to
commit our lives to Him and God.
He draws us to Himself and points
us to the Father who in turn gives us back to the Son as His bride.
This love enables us to make that
commitment and enter into an intimate relationship with Him.
When we are introduced to the real
Jesus, because of His love, Truth, and honest realness with us (as demonstrated
by who the Body/Church is) we trust Him.
This is what we are called to be,
what He wants us to give up our lives for.
We must walk in love, truth, and
honest realness so that others will trust the Jesus in us and along with us
follow Him, not just to salvation, but to the cross where we all must die.
They will know we are Christians by
our love.
(love being a combination of the
intimate knowledge communion and connection with the Father and with each other
plus the acting out of this commitment Him and each other)
So after all that I have committed to becoming an r12
Christian (Chip Ingram’s series on becoming a disciple of Christ – my words not
his) and I invite you to join me.
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