1 Personal Note and 2 Quick Thoughts on Today's Reading
Happy Thanksgiving!
One of the things I’m thankful for is that you folks actually read these little posts every day. There’s just one month left—let’s finish strong!
“To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’”
-John 8:31-32
Notice the reoccurring theme?
True disciples are those who actually do what Jesus said;
If you do what he says, then you’ll know the truth.
Obey first, and gain insight second.
“‘Very truly I tell you,’ Jesus answered, ‘before Abraham was born, I am!’ At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.”
-John 8:58
The reason they get so angry is because “I Am” is how God identifies himself to Moses on Exodus chapter 3. Jesus is here claiming to be Israel’s God, which the Jews take to be blasphemy.
Here’s the question:
If you had been a devout Jew at the time of Jesus, how would you have responded to him?
Today’s Scripture
Count the Cost
Jesus doesn't want anyone to accuse him of not being forthright about the cost of being a disciple. He uses hyperbolic language ("You have to hate your own family") to show that the only way discipleship works is for faith to be first, and everything else second. (How do I know that Jesus doesn't literally want us to hate our families? Well, to honor your father and mother is one of the Ten Commandments, among other reasons.)
Then, the little Parables of the Tower Builder and Warring King make the same point: understand that following Jesus comes with a cost, and don't say he didn't warn you. And if you aren't willing to pay the price, discipleship just won't make sense for you--you might as well be salt without saltiness.
For me, this raises the question, "Why would anyone choose to become his disciple, knowing that discipleship is so costly?" Here's my answer: because his way leads to life, and no other way will ultimately give us what we want.
Today’s Scripture:
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You Have Everything You Need
When Jesus sends the Twelve out on their discipleship residency training, he tells them "Take nothing for the journey." The implication is that the Twelve have everything they need to do ministry in Jesus name.
For us, it's the same:
You have everything you need today.
Today’s Scripture:
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The Key to Understanding The Parable of the Sower
The key to understanding this parable is to realize it's all about proper hearing. The way to know if someone has properly heard Jesus is if that person actually does what Jesus says. The way to know if someone has not heard Jesus is if that persons does NOT do what Jesus says.
Why doesn't everyone respond with obedience when he or she hears the Word of God? Jesus doesn't really explain why, but he does say (quoting from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah), that, though the Word of God might be right in front of some people, they can still totally miss it:
though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understandLuke 8:10
Today’s Scripture:
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Cross Before Crown
Jesus is clear with his followers: it's Cross before Crown; you have to lose your life to find it.
Where do you need to die to yourself today?
Today’s Scripture
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Jesus the Attending Physician
After medical school, new doctors are supervised by experienced physicians. These residents are given more and responsibility and freedom, always overseen by attending physicians to ensure that they develop all the skills they need to be competent and capable physicians.
In today's passage, Jesus is like an attending physician, giving his residents just enough responsibility to learn, but not so much that their possible failures could do irreparable harm:
7 Calling the Twelve to him, he began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over impure spirits.
8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. 9 Wear sandals but not an extra shirt.10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. 11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”
12 They went out and preached that people should repent. 13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.Mark 6:7-13
Here's the point: Jesus wants us to learn to live like him.
How can you "practice" your faith today?
P.S. I didn't post anything the last two days (Mark 5:21-43 and Mark 6:1-6). But, I preached on Mark 5:21-43 on Sunday, and you can watch or listen to my sermon here.
Today’s Scripture
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The Great Commission
For the last four months, we've been reading through the Gospel of Matthew, and today we come to the end: the final words of Jesus to his disciples. What follows is a reflection on what those words mean for us today, and why we do what we do at Munger, the way that we do it.
The Mission of the Church
Organizations lose their way when they lose their why.
Michael Hyatt
Why does the church exist? What is its purpose? An uninformed observer, after visiting churches throughout the country, might conclude that the church exists to:
• Host worship services on Sundays; or
• Feed the poor in soup kitchens; or
• Mobilize marchers for a political cause.
And that observer would be wrong. Although churches should host services on Sundays and be in ministry to the poor and work for change in society, none of these worthy activities are the actual mission of the church.
Instead, the mission of the church is to make disciples.
This mission is found in its original context in the Great Commission of Jesus: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).
A disciple is a student. A Christian disciple is someone who is in apprenticeship to Jesus, so as to learn the Jesus way of living. According to Jesus, this is the point of the church: the church exists to make disciples.
Go Everywhere and Teach Everything
The mission of the church is to go wherever people are and teach them everything Jesus said and did. Jesus does not tell his followers that their mission is to have vibrant worship services or to feed the poor or to be engaged politically; he tells them to make disciples. If we take Jesus’ command seriously, we will inevitably host weekly worship services and be in ministry with the poor and we’ll be engaged politically, but these things are the results and implications of the church’s mission (i.e., discipleship) and not the primary mission itself.
Discipleship to Jesus is emphatically not narrowly confined to what we might call habits of personal piety such as prayers, moral living, and Sunday school attendance. Discipleship is not something we do for a few minutes in the morning before we engage with the real world. Note the words of Jesus in the Great Commission: “teach them everything I have commanded you.” Even the most cursory reading of the gospels shows that Jesus was not merely concerned with matters of personal piety.
Likewise, discipleship to Jesus must be much more than habits of personal piety in our own lives. Discipleship affects all of life, from the personal to the political. After all, from a human perspective, it wasn’t personal piety that got Jesus killed — he was killed because he was a threat to the powers and principalities. Jesus was not killed because he was irrelevant to real life, but because he was specifically concerned with real life.
Put On Your Oxygen Mask First
As a pastor, I’ve seen the following many times: a husband and a wife have children who become the focus and emotional fulfillment of their lives. They would do anything for their children’s happiness, and they often do. Over time, this focus on the children causes the husband and wife to neglect their own relationship, and the marriage begins to wither. One day, the husband and the wife come to the conclusion that divorce is inevitable, and they break the news to the children. Unintentionally, the parents’ apparent focus on the children – at the expense of the marriage – ends up harming the children in the long run.
First things must come first; our problem is that we tend to focus on second things, and wonder why we aren’t getting first results. There is a reason the flight attendant tells you to put your oxygen mask on first, before tending to your child. After all, if you asphyxiate and keel over, there will be no one to help your son or daughter. First things must come first.
The situation in many of our churches today is that we are spending our time focusing on good things, but they are secondary concerns rather than our first mission. Let me reemphasize, the problem is not that worship services and food banks and political engagement are bad things. In fact, they are good and necessary things we need to be doing, and things that Jesus commanded. The problem is that putting these outcomes of discipleship in place of discipleship itself means that we are setting ourselves up to fail, like a panicked mother who forgets to put on her own oxygen mask.
For example, hosting a vibrant worship service is not our first mission, though it is a good thing – a very good thing. If we are actively and effectively making disciples, we will have vibrant worship services on Sundays. But, if we come to believe that vibrant worship services themselves are the point and put our efforts toward that end, at best we’ll have superficial shows that lack the power to change hearts, and at worst our churches will be empty.
In a different vein, some American Christians have mistakenly concluded that you can have social justice without discipleship. It didn’t work for the Marxists, and it won’t work for us. This is because social justice is an abstract idea that is impossible without real men and women bringing it about. For example, if we want to see racial justice in America, it won’t happen apart from training men and women to die to themselves and sacrifice on behalf of their neighbors. In other words, it won’t happen without discipleship. To put discipleship first is not to abandon social justice: on the contrary, the only way to move toward social justice is through the ancient practices of discipleship.
There is a reason the world is such an unjust place, and that reason is sin. It makes people selfish and it makes people cruel. The only cure for sin is the gospel, and it is through the journey of discipleship that Jesus “breaks the power of cancelled sin,” as Charles Wesley proclaimed. If the church focuses on training people to be apprentices to Jesus, that effort will unleash ferocious forces of compassion into the world — we’ll do more work with the poor, not less.
Branches Don’t Need Management Consultants
At the Last Supper, Jesus spoke to his disciples about vines, branches, commitment, connectedness, and fruitfulness. Here are a few selected verses:
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower.… Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.… If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”
John 15:1-8
The branches don’t strain and they don’t strategize; the branches produce fruit naturally, effortlessly, because they are connected to the vine. Jesus promised his disciples that if they stayed connected to him, then their ministry would be fruitful. To see an example of fruitful ministry, we look to the ministry of Jesus himself and we see that through him, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matthew 11:4-5). Once again, a focus on disciple-making is not a focus on personal piety: the mission of disciple-making is the only way to actually transform the world.
It Worked!
“How was it possible for this obscure Jewish sect to become the largest religion in the world?"
Sociologist and world religions scholar Rodney Stark asks an excellent question in his book, The Triumph of Christianity:
"[Jesus] was a teacher and miracle worker who spent nearly all of his brief ministry in the tiny and obscure province of Galilee, often preaching to outdoor gatherings. A few listeners took up his invitation to follow him, and a dozen or so became his devoted disciples, but when he was executed by the Romans his followers probably numbered no more than several hundred. How was it possible for this obscure Jewish sect to become the largest religion in the world? [emphasis added].
Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity, 1.
Christianity grew because the followers of Jesus did exactly what he told them to do: they made disciples by going everywhere and teaching everything Jesus commanded.
Churches grow when they make disciples. It’s possible to grow churches through the superficial, but it won’t last — in that case both the people in the church and the church itself will be like the seed that fell on rocky soil. To experience true and lasting growth, we need to focus on making disciples.
One of the criticisms of disciple-making is the charge that the “real” work of the church will be neglected. What that is meant to convey is that if we focus on making disciples we will become inward-focused, irrelevant, and neglectful of those in need.
What’s fascinating, however, is the original disciples trained other disciples, who trained others, and that, in the early days of the church, these fledgling apprentices to Jesus were known even by their enemies for their care for others – particularly the poor. For example, during the plagues that afflicted the Roman Empire, Christians stayed behind in the infected cities to care for the sick, though this action meant that they often died themselves. As Professor Stark explains:
“Indeed, the impact of Christian mercy was so evident that in the fourth century when the emperor Julian attempted to restore paganism, he exhorted the pagan priesthood to compete with the Christian charities. In a letter to the high priest of Galatia, Julian urged the distribution of grain and wine to the poor, noting that ‘the impious Galileans [Christians], in addition to their own, support ours, [and] it is shameful that our poor should be wanting our aid.'"
Stark, 118
A disciple learns from his teacher. The early Christians learned from Jesus to lay down their lives and love their neighbors as themselves. The church’s focus on discipleship meant that the church grew, because the pagans saw the witness of the disciples of Jesus and were convinced of the truth of the gospel.
The gospel is true and actions based on that truth will be effective. If you rotate crops and fertilize correctly, you will have a bountiful harvest. If you base your life on the words on Jesus, the things he said would happen, will happen. The words of Jesus aren’t a theory: they are the truth about the world itself. The words of Jesus are as true as gravity, and as inescapable.
And so for 2,000 years, whenever the church has taken the Great Commission seriously and put its effort into making disciples, it has flourished.
When Jesus used his last words to tell his disciples their mission was to make disciples, he knew what he was doing.
The question is, do we?
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"Immediately"
I've always thought that the calling of Andrew and Peter, James and John was a strange story, but recently I read something somewhere that made a lot of sense to me. Twice, Matthew tells us that the brothers left their nets "immediately," i.e., when Jesus calls, they respond totally: they don't hedge their bets or halfway follow him. What's Matthew trying to tell us?
Either we follow Jesus, or we don't: there is no place for a half-hearted discipleship.3
Jesus says, "Follow me." In response, what do you need to "immediately" leave, drop, or do today?
Today's Scripture