Discipleship & Spiritual (Trans)formation

discipleship Martin Luther style

I’ve finished Dallas Willard’s “The Great Omission,” and like all of Willard’s works, it’s both encouraging and convicting. I’ve always liked Willard’s writings; The Divine Conspiracy and The Renovation of the Heart totally altered the way I see the Christian faith and practice. “The Great Omission” isn’t really a “book” in the technical sense of the word, though it has chapters; it’s really a collection of essays on Discipleship and Spiritual Formation, and on how the two are integrated. Usually in a post like this I would include a string of quotes, but to do that for this book would be to write a forty-page document! Rather, I’ve thrown together a little “essay” of sorts that gets to the crux of the matter, and so I present to you: On Discipleship & Spiritual (Trans)formation.

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Discipleship to Christ isn’t just for super-Christians; rather, as Dallas Willard points out, it’s the basic level of entry into God’s kingdom. “[The] kind of life we see in the earliest church is that of a special type of person. All the assurances and benefits offered to humankind in the gospel evidently presuppose such a life [of discipleship] and do not make realistic sense apart from it. The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian—especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He or she stands out on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the Kingdom of God.” (The Great Omission, pp. 3) The “Christian life” has been reduced to believing a certain set of assumptions and (maybe) trying to live a life according to Christian standards. In the New Testament, the Christian life is one of discipleship, period. “The word ‘disciple’ occurs 269 times in the New Testament. ‘Christian’ is found three times and was first introduced to refer precisely to disciples of Jesus—in a situation where it was no longer possible to regard them as a sect of the Jews… The New Testament is a book about disciples, by disciples, and for disciples of Jesus Christ.” (3) The Great Commission wasn’t a call for the disciples of Jesus to make converts to a certain set of faith and practices but to make disciples. If you are not a disciple of Christ, you are not a Christian. Period.

Willard’s question is haunting: “Who, among Christians today, is a disciple of Jesus, in any substantive sense of the word ‘disciple’? A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice—a practitioner, even if only a beginner. The New Testament literature, which must be allowed to define our terms if we are ever to get our bearings in the Way with Christ, makes this clear. In that context, disciples of Jesus are people who do not just profess certain views as their own but apply their growing understanding of life in the Kingdom of the Heavens to every aspect of their life on earth.” (xi) A disciple is one who “sits under” a master, learning to live life as the master does, seeking to become like the master through diligence and, of course, the master’s help. If we are consistently pursuing conformity to Christ, by “putting on Christ” and “putting to death” all that is anti-God and anti-human within us, then we are Christ’s disciples. If we are NOT doing this, our discipleship—and thus our faith and “position” before God—is brought into question.

It’s no secret that the current state of Western Christianity is pathetic. For the most part, we are indistinguishable from our non-Christian neighbors in actual life, in our behaviors, dispositions, inclinations, thoughts and motivations, and in our character. The reason for this, Willard speculates (and I have to agree) is that we have substituted life with Christ for membership in country clubs. Western churches really are a lot more like country clubs than anything else: you “sign on,” profess a shared sentiment, make friends and do stuff together. The moral decay and sterility of the Western church is a sharp contrast to the church in Asia and Africa, where the Christian faith isn’t about social strata but about real life. Many of those who leave the Western church and Americanized version of Christianity do so because of an experienced disparity between the picture of “Christian life” in the New Testament and actual life. “There is an obvious disparity between, on the one hand, the hope for life expressed in Jesus—found real in the Bible and in many shining examples from among his followers—and, on the other hand, the actual day-to-day behavior, inner life, and social presence of most of those who now profess adherence to him… [The Christian life] is not meant to run on just anything you may give it. If it doesn’t work at all, or only in fits and starts, that is because we do not give ourselves to it in a way that allows our lives to be taken over by it.” (x) Of those disillusioned by the church and Christian faith, how many simply went through the motions of “church culture” but never really set themselves under Christ as his disciples? Many profess Christian thoughts and habits but never forsake their sin, never repent, never truly surrender themselves to Christ; and the “abundant life” Christ offers goes out to his disciples, those who take on his yoke and die to themselves. So long as we persist in clinging to our sin, even to ourselves, perhaps trying to supplement our lives with Christ rather than “giving up” our lives for him, we aren’t privy to the “abundant life” he offers. Real disillusionment comes not because the promise is invalid but because we simply haven’t taken Christ up on that promise.

The “abundant life” Christ offers is offered only to those who become his disciples, his apprentices. Disciples are disciples by virtue of living life alongside their master, putting into practice the master’s teachings and way-of-life, assisted by the master in their endeavors. We can’t physically walk around Galilee with our Master as the Original 12 did, but Jesus promised his spirit to those who follow him, and the Spirit indwells those who surrender themselves to him and truly make him their master. The Spirit in Jesus’ disciples has as his chief aim our conformity to Christ. He is “Christ with us,” and by his presence and power we are enabled not only to live life with Jesus but also to be changed by him. By living as his disciples—with the desire, intent, and seated decision to be conformed to him, to become “like him”—we are able to experience the “abundant life” Christ promised. Engaging with Jesus’ spirit in spiritual disciplines (“sitting under him,” so-to-speak) we find that our hearts and lives are changed as we’re being refashioned, from the inside-out, by the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Such “spiritual transformation” isn’t just handed to us, though that’s what we’d like most of the time. Disciples learn, by diligence and practice, and with many setbacks and screw-ups, how to live like their Master; and the Master is patient, and encouraging, and he steps in and helps the disciple move in the right direction. Transformation into Christ-likeness takes place over time, from “one degree of glory to another.” There’s no expectation in the New Testament of disciples finding their hearts, minds, and souls immediately transformed in a sonic boom or thunderbolt; it takes time, patience, and diligence. 2 Peter 1.3-11 gives us a picture of spiritual transformation towards Christ-likeness, and it’s for no small reason that St. Peter advocates diligence, self-control, and perseverance. If transformation came overnight, in the “blink of an eye,” such a description would be pointless. N.T. Wright comments in After You Believe, “Part of [our] have-it-all-now culture, as applied to Christian living, declares that now that you’re a Christian, indwelt by the Spirit, you ought to be instantly holy. You want to be like Jesus Christ—pray this prayer, have this experience, and it’s all yours. No, replies Patience, with Humility standing close beside; we shall learn the present lesson this week, the next one the following week, and so on. We shall practice the virtues, step by step, ‘putting them on’ with conscious thought and effort, even though the clothes don’t seem to fit us very well at the present moment.” (150)

The life Jesus offers to those who take up his yoke and die to themselves is an abundant life, and the picture the New Testament paints of this life stands in stark contrast to the self-centered, self-driven, self-worshiped lives we’re naturally inclined to live. Take, for example, the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The contrast between a life dominated by such character and a life dominated by “the desires of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of riches” is black-and-white. Jesus doesn’t promise that his disciples will suddenly find themselves immersed in an “abundant life” characterized by material things and selfish dreams come true; rather, he gets to the heart of the matter. Our constant thirst for more things, for the fulfillment of our dreams and realizations of our ambitions, comes from a heart striving after something, and we think these things will take care of that deep-seated feeling of having to have more. The cure isn’t to indulge the heart but to change the heart, and in doing so we find “life abundant.” The fruit of the Spirit aren’t so much habits we embrace but changes that come into our heart, and as these changes take root, we experience life differently, and we find that it’s abundant regardless of the circumstances in which we live. But this change in our hearts and lives giving birth to an “abundant life” don’t come automatically. Wright points out elsewhere in After You Believe, “The nine varieties of fruit do not just suddenly appear because someone has believed in Jesus, has prayed for God’s Spirit, and has then sat back and waited for the fruit to arrive. Sure, there will be changes in thought, praxis, and heart upon conversion. But these are blossoms. To get the fruit you will have to learn to be a gardener. You have to discover how to tend and prune, how to irrigate the field, how to keep birds and squirrels away. You have to watch for blight and mold, cut away ivy and other parasites that suck the life from the tree, and make sure the young trunk can stand firm in strong winds. Only then will the fruit appear.” All too often we expect the fruit to come without any action on our part, and we pass our days “in malice and envy,” not taking the time—nor the work—to set ourselves at Jesus’ feet to learn from him the rhythms of life, and in that learning to be changed by his Spirit in us.