The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter Eight

~ Chapter Eight ~

On Being a Disciple, or Student, of Jesus

On Discipleship to Jesus

“[Jesus] has made a way for us into easy and happy obedience—really, into personal fulfillment. And that way is apprenticeship to him. It is Christian ‘discipleship.’ His gospel is a gospel for life and Christian discipleship.” [299-300]

“[It] is discipleship, real-life apprenticeship to Jesus, that is the passageway within The Kingdom Among Us from initial faith in Jesus to a life of fulfillment and routine obedience. That is precisely why Jesus told his people, when they saw him for the last time in his visible form, to make disciples, students, apprentices to him from every ethnic group on earth. And to make disciples they would certainly have to be disciples.” [307-308]

“[A] disciple, or apprentice, is simply someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is. How does this apply to discipleship to Jesus? What is it, exactly, that he, the incarnate Lord, does? What, if you wish, is he ‘good at’? The answer is found in the Gospels: he lives in the kingdom of God, and he applies that kingdom for the good of others and even makes it possible for them to enter it for themselves. The deeper theological truths about his person and his work do not detract from this simple point. It is what he calls us to by saying, ‘Follow me.’” [309]

“[The] disciple or apprentice of Jesus, as recognized by the New Testament, is one who has firmly decided to learn from him how to lead his or her life, whatever that may be, as Jesus himself would do it. And, as best they know how, they are making plans—taking the necessary steps, progressively arranging and rearranging their affairs—to do this. All of this will, in one way or another, happen within the special and unfailing community he has established on earth. And the apprentices then are, of course, perfectly positioned to learn how to do everything Jesus taught. That is the process envisioned in the Great Commission of Matt. 28:18-20.” [318]

“[As] a disciple of Jesus I am with him, by choice and by grace, learning from him how to live in the kingdom of God. This is the crucial idea. That means, we recall, how to live within the range of God’s effective will, his life flowing through mine. Another important way of putting this is to say that I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything he did, but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner that he did all that he did.” [310]

“The assumption of Jesus’ program for his people on earth was that they would live their lives as his students and co-laborers. They would find them so admirable in every respect—wise, beautiful, powerful, and good—that they would constantly seek to be in his presence and be guided, instructed, and helped by him in every aspect of their lives… On this assumption, his promise to his people was that he would be with them every moment, until this particular ‘age’ is over and the universe enters a new phase (Matt. 28:20; Heb. 13:5-6). More generally, the provisions he made for his people during this period in which we now love are provisions made for those who are, precisely, apprentices to him in kingdom living. Anyone who is not a continual student of Jesus, and who nevertheless reads the great promises of the Bible as if they were for him or her, is like someone trying to cash a check on another person’s account. At best, it succeeds only sporadically.” [299]

“The effect of… continuous study under Jesus would naturally be that we learn how to do everything we do ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’ (Col. 3:17); that is, on his behalf or in his place; that is, once again, as if he himself were doing it. And of course that means we would learn ‘to conform to everything I have commanded you’ (Matt. 28:20). In his presence our inner life will be transformed, and we will become the kind of people for whom his course of action is the natural (and supernatural) course of action.” [299]

On the Narrow Gate. “The narrow gate is not, as so often assumed, doctrinal correctness. The narrow gate is obedience—and the confidence in Jesus necessary to it. We can see that it is not doctrinal correctness because many people who cannot even understand the correct doctrines nevertheless place their full faith in him. Moreover, we find many people who seem to be very correct doctrinally but have hearts full of hatred and unforgiveness. The broad gate, by contrast, is simply doing what I want to do.” [301]

On the Good Tree. “The fruit of the good tree is obedience, which comes only from the kind of person we come to be (the ‘inside’ of the tree) in [Jesus’] fellowship. The wolf in sheep’s clothing is the one who tries to fake discipleship by outward deeds. But then inward realities overwhelm him or her. ‘The will of my Father’ is the very thing that Jesus has just gone over in his Discourse. Doing what he said, beginning from ‘believe on him whom God sent,’ we step into the flow of God’s ways, we ‘enter the kingdom of the heavens.’ Naturally we will also enter into its next phase, its fullness, marked by the end of human history and the final settling of accounts. All of this is the same as saying that, in actually doing what Jesus knows to be best for us, we build a life that is absolutely indestructible, ‘on the Rock.’ ‘And the Rock was Christ.’ (1 Cor. 10:4).” [301-302]

“The great Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine passages, such as 1 Corinthians 13; Colossians 3; 1 Peter 2; 2 Pet. 1-1-15; 1 John 3:1-5:5, all convey exactly the same message in so many words, one of an inward transformation by discipleship to Jesus. In them the central point of reference is always a divine kind of love, agape, that comes to characterize the core of our personality. The deeds of ‘the law’ naturally flow from it. The law is not the case of personal goodness, [but] it invariably is the course of it.” [302]

The Holy Spirit and the Presence of Christ

“I am Jesus’ disciple that means I am with him to learn from him how to be like him. To take cases from ordinary life, a child learning to multiply and divide numbers is an apprentice to its teacher. Children are with their teachers, learning from them how to be like them in a certain respect—similarly for a student of the piano or voice, of the Spanish language, of tennis, and so forth. The ‘being-with,’ by watching and hearing, is an absolute necessity. And provision has been made for us to be with Jesus, as one person to another, in our daily life.” [302]

“In John 14, [Jesus] goes carefully over the fact that he would soon be taken away from [his disciples] in the visible form they had known. Then, he explains, another ‘strengthener’—‘comforter’ is just not the right word to use in translating paracleton today—would be active and interactive in their lives. The marginal reading of John 14:16 in the New American Standard Version is excellent for the meaning intended: a paraclete is ‘one called alongside to help.’ This other strengthener (other, that is, than the visible Jesus as they had known him) would be with them to the end.” [303]

“The personal presence of Jesus with individuals and groups that trust him was soon understand by Jesus’ first students to be the practical reality of the kingdom of God now on earth. That is, it is what the kingdom is as a factor in their lives. This reality is the additional ‘life’ of which the apostle John makes so much in his writings. It is the ‘in Christ’ that forms the backbone of Paul’s understanding of redemption.” [306]

“Paul very simply says, ‘All who are interactive with the spirit of God are God’s children’ (Rom. 8:14). The interactive movement he refers to is the inner reality, not the outward manifestations. And: ‘The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking [whether you do it in one way or in another] but is inner rightness… and peace and joy sustained by the Holy Spirit. For those serving Christ in this way are well-pleasing to God and approved by men’ (Rom. 14:17-18). And when Paul writes to the Colossians, he prays that they will walk worthy of the Lord, pleasing him in every respect, bearing fruit in every good work and constantly growing in their knowledge of God (Col. 1:10). Then he asks that they be ‘strengthened with all power, in terms of God’s glorious power’ (v. 11). One might expect that this would be for the sake of some astounding outward manifestations! But no, it is required to enable the Colossians to have ‘limitless endurance and long-suffering or patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has equipped us for a role in the destiny of the saints in the light.’ The most exalted outcome of submersion in the risen Christ is the transformation of the inner life to be like him… The kingdom of the heavens, from this practical point of view in which we all must live, is simply our experience of Jesus’ continual interaction with us in history and throughout the days, hours, and moments of our earthly existence.” [307]

The Imperfections of Discipleship

“It is almost universally conceded today that you can be a Christian without being a disciple. And one who actually is an apprentice or co-laborer with Jesus is his or her daily existence is sure to be a ‘Christian’ in every sense of the word that matters. The very term Christian was explicitly introduced in the New Testament—where, by the way, it is used only three times—to apply to disciples when they could no longer be called Jews, because many kinds of gentiles were now part of them.” [308-309]

“[If] asked whether they are good apprentices of whatever person or line of work concerned, [many people] very well might hesitate. They might say no. Or yes. Asked if they could be better students, they would probably say yes. And all of this falls squarely within the category of being a disciple, or apprentice. For to be a disciple in any area or relationship is not to be perfect. One can be a very raw and incompetent beginner and still be a disciple. It is a part of the refreshing realism of the Gospels that we often find Jesus doing nothing less than ‘bawling out’ his disciples. That, however, is very far from rejecting them. It is, in fact, a way of being faithful to them, just as chastisement is God’s way of showing that someone is his child (Heb. 12:7-10). A good ‘master’ takes his apprentice seriously and therefore takes them to task as needed.” [309]

Discipleship: A Holistic Focus

“That my actual life is the focus of my apprenticeship to Jesus is crucial. Knowing this can help deliver us from the genuine craziness that the current distinction between ‘full-time Christian service’ and ‘part-time Christian service’ imposes on us. For a disciple of Jesus is not necessarily one devoted to doing specifically religious things as that is usually understood. To repeat, I am learning from Jesus how to lead my life, my whole life, my real life. Note, please, I am not learning from him how to lead his life. His life on earth was a transcendently wonderful one. But it has now been led. Neither I nor anyone else, even himself, will ever lead it again. And he is, in any case, interested in my life, that very existence that is me. There lies my need. I need to be able to lead my life as he would lead it if he were I.” [310]

“[As Jesus’] disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things, either as a part of ‘full-time service’ or as a part of ‘part-time service.’ My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, ‘religious’ or not.” [310-311]

“[Life] in the kingdom is not just a matter of not doing what is wrong. The apprentices of Jesus are primarily occupied with the positive good that can be done during their days ‘under the sun’ and the positive strengths and virtues that they develop in themselves as they grow toward ‘the kingdom prepared for them from the foundations of the world’ (Matt. 25:34). What they, and God, get out of their lifetime is chiefly the person they become. And that is why their real life is so important. The cultivation of oneself, one’s family, one’s workplace and community—especially the community of believers—thus becomes the center of focus for the apprentice’s joint life with his or her teacher. It is within this entire context in view that we most richly and accurately speak of ‘learning from him how to lead my life as he would lead my life if he were I.’” [311-312]

‘Discipleship On the Job. “[The] specific work to be done, whether it is making ax handles or tacos, selling automobiles or teaching kindergarten, investment banking or political office, evangelizing or running a Christian education program, performing in the arts or teaching English as a second language—is of central interest to God. He wants it well done. It is work that should be done, and it should be done as Jesus himself would do it. Nothing can substitute for that. In my opinion, at least, as long as one is on the job, all peculiarly religious activities should take second place to doing ‘the job’ in sweat, intelligence, and the power of God. That is our devotion to God. (I am assuming, of course, that the job is one that serves good human purposes). Our intention with our job should be the highest possible good in its every aspect, and we should pursue that with conscious expectation of a constant energizing and direction from God. Although we must never allow our job to become our life, we should, within reasonable limits, routinely sacrifice our comfort and pleasure for the quality of our work, whether it be ax handles, tacos, or the proficiency of a student we are teaching… We do the job well because that is what Jesus would like, and we admire and love him. It is what he would do. We ‘do our work with soul, to the Lord, not to men’ (Col. 3:23). ‘It is the Lord Christ you serve’ (v. 25). As his apprentices, we are personally interacting with him as we do our job, and he is with us, as he promised, to teach us how to do it best.” [313-314]

The Cost of Discipleship

On the Parables of the Kingdom in Matt 13. “These little stories perfectly express the condition of soul in one who chooses life in the kingdom with Jesus. The sense of the goodness to be achieved by that choice, of the opportunity that may be missed, the love for the value discovered, the excitement and joy over it all, is exactly the same as it was for those who were drawn to Jesus in those long-ago days when he first walked among us. It is also the condition of soul from which discipleship can be effectively chosen today.” [320]

The Opportunity of Discipleship. “Do you think the businessman who found the pearl was sweating over its cost? An obviously ridiculous question! What about the one who found the treasure in the field—perhaps crude oil or gold? No. Of course not. The only thing these people were sweating about was whether they would ‘get the deal.’ Now that is the soul of the disciple. No one goes sadly, reluctantly into discipleship with Jesus. As he said, ‘No one who looks back after putting his hand to the plough is suited to the kingdom of God’ (Luke 9:62). No one goes in bemoaning the cost. They understand the opportunity. And one of the things that has most obstructed the path of discipleship in our Christian culture today is the idea that it will be a terribly difficult thing that will certainly ruin your life.” [320]

On Hating Your Family for Jesus. “The entire point of this passage is that as long as one things anything may really be more valuable than fellowship with Jesus in his kingdom, one cannot learn from him. People who have not gotten the basic facts about their life straight will therefore not do the things that make learning from Jesus possible and will never be able to understand the basic points in the lessons to be learned. It is like a mathematics teacher in high school who might say to a student, ‘Verily, verily I say unto thee, except thou canst do decimals and fractions, thou canst in no wise do algebra.’ It is not that the teacher will not allow you to do algebra because you are a bad person; you just won’t be able to do basic algebra if you are not in command of decimals and fractions.” [320-321]

On Counting the Cost. “[Counting] the cost is not a moaning and groaning session. ‘Oh how terrible it is that I have to value all of my ‘wonderful’ things (which are probably making life miserable and hopeless anyway) less than I do living in the kingdom! How terrible that I must be prepared to actually surrender them should that be called for!’ The counting of the cost is to bring us to the point of clarity and decisiveness. It is to help us to see. Counting the cost is precisely what the man with the pearl and the hidden treasure did. Out of it came their decisiveness and joy. It is decisiveness and joy that are the outcomes of the counting… The point is simply that unless we clearly see the superiority of what we receive as his students over every other thing that might be valued, we cannot succeed in our discipleship to him. We will not be able to do the things required to learn his lessons and move ever deeper into a life that is his kingdom.” [321]

How to Be a Disciple

Dwell on Jesus’ Words. “In John 8 [Jesus] said to [his disciples], ‘If you dwell in my word, you really are my apprentices. And you will know the truth, and the truth will liberate you’ (8:31-32). As the context makes clear, he is saying that we will be liberated from all of the bondage that is in human life through sin, and especially from that of self-righteous religion. Positively, we will be liberated into life in the kingdom of God… [Dwelling in Jesus’ Word] means to center your life upon… the good news about The Kingdom Among Us, about who is really well off and who is not, and about true goodness of heart and how it expresses itself in action. We will fill our souls with the written Gospels. We will devote our attention to these teachings, in private study and inquiry as well as public instruction. And, negatively, we will refuse to devote our mental space and energy to the fruitless, even stupefying and degrading, stuff that constantly clamors for our attention. We will attend to it only enough to avoid it.” [324]

Dwelling on Jesus’ Words, Part Two. “But dwelling in his word is not just intensive and continuous study of the Gospels, though it is that. It is also putting them into practice. To dwell in his word we must know it: know what it is and what it means. But we really dwell in it by putting it into practice. Of course, we shall do so very imperfectly at first. At that point we have perhaps not even come to be a committed disciple. We are only thinking about how to become one. Nevertheless, we can count on Jesus to meet us in our admittedly imperfect efforts to put his word into practice. Where his word is, there he is. He does not leave his words to stand alone in the world. And his loveliness and strength will certainly be personally revealed to those who will simply make the effort to do what his words indicate.” [324]

Deciding to be a Disciple. “[The] final step in becoming a disciple is decision. We become a life student of Jesus by deciding. When we have achieved clarity on ‘the costs’—on what is gained and what is lost by becoming or failing to become his apprentice—an effective decision is then possible. But still it must be made. It will not just happen. We do not drift into discipleship… [In] the last analysis we fail to be disciples only because we do not decide to be. We do not intend to be disciples… [In the words of William Law,] ‘[If] you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.’ Now perhaps we are not used to being spoken to so frankly, and it might be easy to take offense. But, on the other hand, it could well prove to be a major turning point in our life if we would, with Law’s help, ask ourselves if we really do intend to be life students of Jesus. Do we really intend to do and be all of the high things we profess to believe in? Have we decided to do them? When did we decide it? And how did we implement that decision?” [325-326, 327]

On Making Disciples

“The directions Jesus gave to his people when he last met with them in his familiar visible form was that they should ‘make disciples’ (Matt. 28:19). Although the language may seem somewhat intimidating, and our contemporary practice is almost unrecognizably different from what his earliest people did, there is no reason to think that he has changed his expectations and hopes for us. Our only question is a practical one: How do we do it? The answer comes in three parts: we must, of course, be disciples, we must intend to make disciples, and we must know how to bring people to believe that Jesus really is the One.” [327]

“Those who have found their way [into the kingdom] will inevitably want to share the new reality they have found with those around them. When we discover something great, we naturally want all those we really care about to be in on it. We would no more want to leave the sharing of the kingdom to ‘full-time workers’ than we would anything else we were really enthusiastic about.” [327]

“To plan on making disciples, we need to know what one is and how people become disciples. We need to know these things by personal experience, as did the first generation of Jesus’ people. They had been made disciples. And we need to be standing in the position of Jesus’ students and co-workers, so that our efforts in making disciples will be appropriately guided and strengthened by him. They are, after all, to be his disciples, not ours.” [328]

“We learn from Jesus how to make disciples as he did. We have seen that this involves proclaiming, manifesting, and teaching the kingdom of God. The teaching aspect becomes very important in making disciples. In it we help others to think accurately about ‘the effective range of God’s will’ and to understand why it is as it is and how it works. When we have come to the point where we can do this, then in conjunction with our own experience of becoming a disciple, making a disciple is no longer something mysterious. It is only a matter of appropriately informing people about Jesus and his kingdom and helping them, through prayer and guidance, to make a decision.” [328]

“The second thing for us to do if we are to make apprentices to Jesus is to intend to make disciples… It must be our conscious objective, consciously implemented, to bring others to the point where they are daily learning from Jesus how to live their actual lives as he would live them if he were they. That implemented intention would soon transform everything among professing Christians as we know them.” [331]

“[We] should be watchful and prepared to meet any obvious spiritual need or interest in understanding Jesus with words that are truly loving, thoughtful, and helpful. It is not true, I think, that we fulfill our obligations to those around us by only living the gospel. There are many ways of speaking inappropriately, of course—even harmfully—but it is always true that words fitly spoken are things of beauty and power that bring life and joy. And you cannot assume that people understand what is going on when you only live in their midst as Jesus’ person. They may just regard you as one more version of human oddity.” [313]

On Changing Worldviews. “[You] lead people to become disciples of Jesus by ravishing them with a vision of life in the kingdom of the heavens in the fellowship of Jesus. And you do this by proclaiming, manifesting, and teaching the kingdom to them in the manner learned from Jesus himself. You thereby change the belief system that governs their lives… Currently the minds and souls of Christians and non-Christians alike we constantly hammered by the innumerable fists of an ‘information society’ and an inescapably media-saturated social consciousness set squarely against the reality of the kingdom of God. Without necessarily intending it, these forces almost irresistibly direct our feelings, imagery, thinking, and belief against the world of Jesus and his Father and against the profound needs and hungers of the human soul. It is not a matter of conspiracy. It is actually something much more powerful. It is an anonymous and many-faceted structure of ‘authority’ that stipulates what it is to count as knowledge and reality. It is silently but ponderously conveyed by our entire system of education, Christian and otherwise. The essential teachings of Jesus emphatically do not receive its stamp of approval.” [334-335]

On Changing Worldviews, Continued. “One of the greatest weaknesses in our teaching and leadership today is that we spend so much time trying to get people to do things good people are supposed to do, without changing what they really believe. It doesn’t succeed very well, and that is the open secret of church life. We frankly need to do much less of this managing of action, and especially with young people. We need to concentrate on changing the minds of those we would reach and serve. What they do will certainly follow, as Jesus well understood and taught. But in our culture there is a severe illusion about faith, or belief. It is one that has been produced by many centuries of people professing, as a cultural identification, to believe things they do not really believe at all. That goes hand in hand with the predominance of what [has been] called client, or consumer, Christianity… Thus there arises the misunderstanding that human life is not really governed by belief. This is a disastrous error.” [336]

The Importance of Belief. “We often speak of people not living up to their faith. But the cases in which we say this are not really cases of people behaving otherwise than they believe. They are cases in which genuine beliefs are made obvious by what people do. We always live up to our beliefs—or down to them, as the case may be. Nothing else is possible. It is the nature of belief. And the reason why clergy and others have to invest so much effort into getting people to do things is that they are working against the actual beliefs of the people they are trying to lead.” [336]

On Changing Beliefs. “What has to be done, instead of trying to drive people to do what we think they are supposed to, is to be honest about what we and others really believe. Then, by inquiry, teaching, example, prayer, and reliance upon the Spirit of God, we can work to change the beliefs that are contrary to the way of Jesus. We can open the way for others, Christian or not, to heartily choose apprenticeship in the kingdom of God. A major part of this important work is coming to understand what the people we are dealing with really do believe, and not pretending—often with them—that they believe what they don’t believe at all. In a setting where a social premium has been placed upon believing certain things for the sake of group solidarity, we must face the fact that human beings can honestly profess to believe what they do not believe. They may do this for so long that even they no longer know that they do not believe what they profess. But their actions will, of course, be in terms of what they actually believe. This will be so even though they do not recognize it, and they will lose themselves in bewilderment about the weakness of their ‘faith.’ That bewilderment is a common condition among professing Christians today.” [337]

“In the context of our particular family or group or congregation, to present the kingdom of the heavens will mean that we must teach about the nature of belief (which is the same as faith) and how it relates to the rest of our personality. And then we must study our friends and associates to see what they really do believe and help them to be honest about it. We understand that our beliefs are the rails upon which our life runs, and so we have to address their actual beliefs, and their doubts, not spend our time discussing many fine things that have little or not relevance to their genuine state of mind… [This] means that we will directly confront the opposing beliefs… We will name them, and we will state clearly and thoroughly how and why they are mistaken or misguided. This is standard pastoral duty, of course, but because of its importance it is the duty of a family member, a citizen, and a neighbor as well. Though it must always be joined with prayer, service, and reliance on the spirit, they do not substitute for it. And we are now, and have been for some time, sorely deficient in this absolutely necessary labor. [337-339]

“If we cannot break through to a new vision of faith and discipleship, the real significance and power of the gospel of the kingdom of God can never come into its own. It will constantly be defeated by the idea that it is somehow not a real part of faith in Jesus Christ, and the church will remain in the dead embrace of consumer Christianity. The purposes of God in human history will eventually be realized, of course. The divine conspiracy will not be defeated. But millions of individual human beings will live a futile and failing existence that God never intended.” [340]