The PATH of Discipleship
Part I
Isaac Butterworth
September 26, 2010
Mark 12:28-34 (NIV)
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
29 "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31 The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself. 'There is no commandment greater than these."
32 "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
A few weeks ago, I shared with you what I called a four-point challenge. You may remember the four points: (1) Go to church, (2) Get in a face-to-face group, (3) Read your Bible, and (4) Serve others. That would be the list in its rawest form. At one point, I refined the list a bit by saying, Warm a pew, Warm your heart, Illumine your mind, and Illumine your world (or, at least, your corner of it).
Today, I want to refine the list a bit more, but, before I do, I want to tell you what prompted me to develop such a list in the first place. In a book by the title of Church Unique, Will Mancini claims that ninety-eight percent of the churches in America are functioning without any clear idea of where they hope to lead people on their spiritual journey. I don’t know about the percentage, but I think he’s probably right about the rest.
Many churches simply multiply programs. They have programs for women, programs for men, programs for youth, for singles, for married couples with children, for married couples without children, and so forth. And they just try to keep people busy. Involvement is the key motivation.
But what if it were different? What if the key motivation were not just involvement, but movement? In his book, Seven Practices of Effective Ministry, Andy Stanley writes: ‘Think Steps, Not Programs’ (p. 88). The idea is this: Instead of having a strategic vision that focuses on programs, you have a strategic vision of a people-process, a pathway that takes people from where they are now spiritually, to where you want them to be. Then you make sure that you have all the programs you need along that pathway, in easy, obvious, and strategic steps that take them from point A to point B.
What if we could say to everyone who comes into the life of our church, ‘We’re going to help you gain distance and momentum in your spiritual journey. We have two or three or four steps that you can take to grow in your faith’? What if we said that to people?
Two things would have to be in place, wouldn’t they? First of all, we would need to have some idea of what the ‘steps’ are, and, second, we would need to be involved in taking those steps ourselves. Wouldn’t we?
Jesus’ great commission to his church was to ‘make disciples.’ I want to suggest to you today that Christian discipleship follows a recognizable PATH. When Jesus called Simon and Andrew and James and John, he said to them, ‘Follow me.’ When he called Matthew, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And, in each case, they left behind what they were doing and they took steps, literally, to follow Jesus on the path of discipleship.
So, what steps will we take? As we read a moment ago,, Jesus was once asked what the greatest commandment was. And he didn’t hesitate. He said, ‘The most important one…is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”’ He then said that there was a second commandment just like the first in importance, and it was that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.
If we may use the words of this Great Commandment, we can see the four steps we are to take along the path of Christian discipleship, and, as a way to help us remember these steps, I am using the word ‘PATH’ as an acrostic. We’ll cover the first two steps on the PATH this week, and next week we’ll pick up on he other two steps. So, let me begin with the ‘P’ in PATH.
PURSUE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD
‘Pursue’ is the key word here. PURSUE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD. We are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So, let’s focus for just a moment on ‘lov[ing] the Lord [our] God…with all [our] soul….’ We might think about this step as one in which we deepen our soul’s capacity to love God. In Psalm 63:8, David says, ‘My soul followeth hard after thee.’
How can you and I take that step in which our soul follows hard after God? How can we take the step of pursuing our relationship with God and doing it with passion? We could start with worship, and we could pour ourselves into it. How could we do that? One thing we might do is prepare ourselves for worship. What if we didn’t wait till Sunday morning to get ready? What if we began on Saturday night or even earlier in the week? What if we prayerfully anticipated worship? What if we didn’t just plan to show up for church, but planned also to worship with all our soul? And what if, when we got here, we didn’t just sit passively in the pew, waiting to see if somehow the choir (or the band) or the preacher or someone else could move us – or even interest us? What if you and I took responsibility for our own experience in worship? What if we sang the hymns, participated in the responses, attended to the Word, offered ourselves and our substance, and – don’t leave out this part! – resolved to reenter the world with a renewed vision? What if we realized that we’re not the audience here but that God is, and that God is waiting on us to express our love with all our soul?
ANSWER THE CALL TO TRUE VOCATION
That’s the first step, then, on the PATH of Christian discipleship: Pursue your relationship with God. Love the Lord your God with all your soul. The second step is this. And this is the ‘A’ in our acrostic: ANSWER THE CALL TO TRUE VOCATION. Or, as the Great Commandment has it: ‘Love the Lord your God…with all your strength.’
If someone were to ask me what my vocation is, I might say that I am a minister or a pastor. If they asked you, you might say that you are in business, or that you’re a nurse, or a lawyer, or a teacher, or something else. But Christian vocation runs deeper than that. Whatever our various jobs or professions might be, vocation is the same for all of us. The word ‘vocation’ simply means ‘calling,’ and our calling as human beings is to bear the image of God in which we have been created.
And we have been. Genesis 1:27 says, ‘So God created man in his jown image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he crated them.’ Each and every one of us is created in the image of God. The only trouble is: As a race, we humans have marred the image of God that we are called to bear. We have distorted it and rendered it misshapen. We are not what God created us to be. But the New Testament tells us that God has set about to renew the creation and that we are a part of that grand renewal movement. Having deformed the image of God in which we were created, we are nevertheless, by God’s grace, being re-created in the image of Christ. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ (NRSV).
We are being ‘made over,’ you might say, into the image of Christ, and it is now our vocation, our calling, to bear his image in this world. In my original four-point challenge, this step on the PATH appears as serving God by serving others. And that’s a good way of looking at our vocation. We are here not to control others or to use them or to manipulate them. We are here to serve them. So, whatever your job is, what you are is a Christian cleverly disguised as a teacher or a doctor or a banker or whatever. Your real calling is to be a vessel of the Spirit of Christ, so that Christ can reach out to others through you.
Jesus once said to his disciples, ‘The Son of Man [by which he meant himself] did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life…’ (Mark 10:45). We all give our lives to something. Every last one of us. God calls us to give our lives to Christ by giving them away in serving others. And we are to put all our energy into it. We are to love God with all our strength. That’s step two.
d d d
Next week, we’ll look at the other two steps on the PATH. I hope you will plan to be here. For now, here is what I urge you to do. I urge you to determine that you will make the first two steps on the PATH a habit in your life. Go to church, but don’t just show up. Be present. You know what I mean? Be present to God. Pursue God with all your soul. That’s step one on the PATH of discipleship.
And then, step two: Serve others, but don’t just do service projects. Don’t just donate your time for this cause or that cause. Make your whole life a response to God’s call to bear the image of Christ in this world. And do it with all your strength. I read about someone recently, talking about a college friend of his named Mike. He wrote, ‘…In college, when I was around Mike, I wanted to be just like Mike. Now, after spending time with Mike, I want to be more like Jesus’ (Gary Thomas, Authentic Faith, p. 8). Be that kind of person. That’s your calling; that’s your vocation. Be the person who makes others want to be like Christ. Be the person who makes the PATH look inviting.
