ECIPLESHIP for Passionate Christ-Followers

From the lips of Jesus’ mouth, we have the compelling command to “go and make disciples”. This is the focal point of what we are to DO. This command is not about the BEING part of us. A lover of God is who we’re supposed to BE, as Jesus stated in the Great Commandment. That’s a whole concept of its own.

Let’s get back to the DOING thing… This making-disciples-thing is really about evangelism more than anything else. According to the New Testament, a disciple was a follower of Jesus, whether for thirty seconds or thirty years. So when Jesus tells us to make disciples, He’s telling us to help people become born again! Of course we’re supposed to grow them up in the faith…especially since Jesus said we are to “teach them everything I have commanded you”. But disciple-making is first about outreach, evangelism, extending the Kingdom to others, friendship influence, and bringing others to repentance.

The Old Testament has a sobering statement that emphasizes the same thing. In Ezekiel 33:7-9, God declares,

⁷ “Now, son of man, I am making you a watchman for the people of Israel. Therefore, listen to what I say and warn them for me. ⁸ If I announce that some wicked people are sure to die and you fail to tell them to change their ways, then they will die in their sins, and I will hold you responsible for their deaths. ⁹But if you warn them to repent and they don’t repent, they will die in their sins, but you will have saved yourself.

The above statement was made to the prophet Ezekiel. This called man of God had a heavy responsibility. When God revealed His wrath on a person or people group, the prophet was compelled to tell them THE TRUTH and let them deal with it. If Ezekiel did not tell them, like a watchman on the wall of an ancient city, he would be held responsible for their lostness. BUT–if Ezekiel simply told, he was released from responsibility. He had carried out his part.

For today, Jesus tells us ALL to be His witnesses. TELL. It is a sobering responsibility, but a critically important one. That’s why you’re here! That’s why, when you gave your life to Jesus, He didn’t immediately take you up to glory. YOU HAVE WORK TO DO!!!! You can’t reach everybody, but you can reach somebody.

Who?

Who had God placed in your life that needs a witness? To whom have you been made a watch-person? Whose life is in the power of YOUR words???

Living primarily for ourselves and our self-made puny dreams relegate our ability to persevere to wimpy wisps of air in the hurricanes of life.

Harvest season was always intense on the farm. All of the crops needed to be brought in before the Minnesota winter set in. On one particular day, while emptying wagon-loads of feed into the silo, I ripped my knee wide open on a rusty protruding nail on a fence post. The nail actually flipped me completely over as I was running by. But I was on a mission! There was no time to worry about an open knee (a three-inch gash that allowed me to see the inner workings of my knee joint). I needed to get the wagon empty and get back to the field where my Dad would be waiting. A little pain could not stop me from doing what needed to be done.

Do you get the picture? I think we Christ-followers are often on a theoretical mission that has failed to grip our soul and infuse our passions. We do what good Christians do, but fail to be unrelenting in our pursuit of God-things. As a result, trials come and overwhelm us, derail us, and render us useless for the Kingdom.

Here’s the truth of the matter: When we passionately engaged in what Jesus told us to do, the trials of life are never our primary focus, but rather, opportunities for God to morph us even more into the image of Christ.

If we fail to be hungry students of scripture, we fall back only on what we have learned and known from the past. It’s all we’ve got because there is nothing new, fresh, or germinating in the present. What we’ve learned in the past is fine, but we must always be learners in the present.

Check out Colossians 2:8:

“See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”

So many Christians today are captive through hollow and deceptive philosophies depending on human tradition. I’m not just talking about “those other churches” either. I’m convinced that the vast majority of evangelical church-goers are living on what they’ve received in the past rather than what God is giving them today. We depend on the way things were done a generation or two or ten ago, but fail to embrace the new things God wants to teach us and train us in for today. As a result, we have a shell of a faith that’s hollow, irrelevant to a needy world, and dull in it’s ability to be light in the darkness.

I’ll never forget the Sunday morning that I was preaching on vision. We had just moved into a new and much larger worship center. One of the statements I made drew a rare and hearty applause. I said, “We need to become a church that more than culturally Christian but radically biblical.” As the congregation affirmed the statement, I found myself thinking, “Most have no idea what this will cost them.” And I was right…

The Christian faith, lived out in the context of our world today, looks much different than it did 15, 30 and 50 years ago. We need to be passionately biblical, culturally sensitive, careful to never base our lives and ministry on human traditions and principles of this world.

We MUST be all about Jesus. Forget the rest…

All of the heroes of faith, honored in Hebrews 11, staked their lives on the word and character of God, no matter what the results of their faith acts might be. And not every faithful person was rewarded with a storybook ending. Listen to verses 35b – 38:

“But others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. ³⁶ Some were jeered at, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons. ³⁷ Some died by stoning, some were sawed in half,^[d] and others were killed with the sword. Some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, destitute and oppressed and mistreated. ³⁸ They were too good for this world, wandering over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground.”

Key phrase in there: “They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection.” Yep! That’s right! Because an awful lot of them bit the dust placing their faith in God. They believed that whether they lived or died, as long as they followed hard after God, they would also be safe, whether in life or death. The three young mavericks in Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego said it so well when facing certain death by fire. Refusing to worship the king’s gold idol in a foreign land, the godly rebels declared, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. But even if he doesn’t, we want to make it clear to you, Your Majesty, that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up.”

Biblical faith is only faith when it presses through fear. The fear of failure, fear that God’s way won’t be as good as yours, fear that something tragic will happen, fear that God won’t come through like He says He will, fear that God won’t provide, fear of pain,  fear of what others think…. Our fears are endless! Authentic faith is what enables us to overcome fear.

Fear paralyzes us from significantly following after God. Fear is the number one thing that keeps us from being and becoming everything that God has in mind for you. We have a nation filled with Christians who are living an acceptable lifestyle, according to the church’s standards today. We measure our Christianity according to the expectations of our Christian culture and fellow believer-friends. Many of us measure up quite well.

How does God see you? Are you living a lifestyle of risk-taking faith? Are you crazy for God?

Would others say you are?

Christ followers have a Hall of Faith! Similar to the Hall of Fame for football in Canton, Ohio, or the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, the Christians’ Hall of Faith is located in Hebrews 11. Residing there is an amazing assortment of unique and high-achieving individuals. All of them have exhibited a degree of startling and rare faith. Beginning with Abel, the son of Adam and Eve, to Zechariah the prophet, we are reminded of heroes to admire from A to Z! And we can learn from them too.

The common element of faith demonstrated by all in The Hall is that they were crazy! Really. At least they were from our human perception.

• Imagine being in the heat of battle so much so that you get rid of 30,000 soldiers in order to fight with only 300! And you do that with only a few clay pots, some ram horns and ancient torches! And then you win! Meet Gideon.
• Consider a prostitute in Jericho, a city about to be annihilated by the Jews crossing the Jordon River into their Promised Land. Rather than living out her days in hopelessness and despair, she heard of the God of Israel that performed the impossible on behalf of His people. She simply believed, even though her life was twisted, ugly, and godless. Her unlikely faith and life-saving actions on behalf of Israel’s spies secured her place in The Hall. She even became an ancestor of Jesus! Meet Rahab.
• Daniel (one of the prophets alluded to in verse 32) shut the mouths of lions!…and also of a few pagan enemies of God too. Even though Daniel was a man of eighty years old at the time (ancient for sure in those days of old), he was arrested for praying to the God of Israel. He didn’t wane in His devotion for God, nor shrink in the face of certain death. He totally entrusted His life into the hands of Yahweh who he knew so well. (He had spent lots of time talking with Him.) By faith, He never stopped being on task for God, entrusting Him to take care of all the details…even when he was dropped into a pit of blood thirsty ravaging lions. The beasts enjoyed a Persian meal the next morning after Daniel was surprisingly protected.

Fairly crazy people, don’t you think?

Every person in the Hall of Faith pushed through their fear. I’m sure they were often terrified to the core, but they refused to let fear win the day, even when their actions seemed ludicrous. They staked their lives on the word and character of God, no matter what the results of their faith acts might be.

There.

It’s where we need to go as a church. But what is it like and what does it mean for us?

Let me give you a few snapshots that God has given me about There…

1. We are an Acts 2-type church. We are unified, passionate, courageous, risky, a little insane (for Christ’s sake), and totally in love with Jesus.

2. We are seeing people from our community come to personal faith in Jesus every week. This happens in two primary ways — by Edinbrook individuals sharing life with others outside of the faith and by Edinbrook people inviting people to come and experience our weekend worship services, KIDS, youth events, and other special outreach endeavors.

3. We are innovative and fresh for the sake of making meaningful connections with those coming in from a culture very different from the one we Christians are familiar with in the church.

4. We pursue excellence (not perfection) in everything we do SINCE we are representing Jesus.

5. We have at least three packed worship services on the weekend, along with several satellite sites, house churches, and maybe even a church plant or two.

6. We are totally biblical proclaiming the full truth of the scriptures while being passionately contextual to our changing culture.

7. We are increasingly becoming a highly valued presence in our community as we practice Jesus-style love through proclamation and demonstration.

8. We are strategically engaged in world missions through gospel proclamation, church planting, and extending compassion to the needy.

God wants us to get There. I can hardly wait!

The disciples were on a steep learning curve after Jesus left planet earth. Thank goodness, He gave the gift of the Helper to enable them (and us) to do and be things that were way beyond their reach. As a result, these unlearned and simple disciples were oozing with character, even early on in their new world-changing venture.

Acts 4 tells the story of the Peter and John in the midst of some pompous and angry Jewish leaders. This council of religious elites was fed up with the ridiculous story of the recently crucified Jesus being the long promised Messiah. The disciples were threatened, flogged and told to never speak of this Jesus again. But here’s the statement I really love in this story – “Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John, and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were marveling, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus,” Acts 4:13. The sense given in this verse is that there was not so much facial recognition as character recognition. Peter and John had actually morphed internally to become like their Master! And it was recognizable to others!

We catch another glimpse of God’s transforming power when we read about the early Christians in Antioch (Acts 11). It was in this city that the believers were first called Christians, literally meaning “little Christs”. Yes—these passionate disciples had morphed into people who lived their lives and character in such similar fashion as Jesus that people coined them with this new name. It stuck!

Scripture tells us to ALL become like Jesus:

• To be “growing in every way more and more like Christ,” Ephesians 4:15
• To be “be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ,” Ephesians 4:13
• To “have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had,” Philippians 2:5

One of the things that God, by His spirit, wants to do for each of us is to transform us into Christ-likeness from the inside out. There is a vital partnership required, however, in order for this to truly happen. God will always do His part – we need to make sure that we do our part.

Our part is NEVER accomplished in a casual ho-hum way. We will never mature in our relationship with God by focusing primarily on worldly things. We will miss out on God’s best blessings if we follow a “life-in-the-rut” sort of Christianity.

Instead, Jesus was radical, crazy, startling, living on the edge, pushing the envelope, unbound by traditions, and mission driven! God wants to do His work in us to make us like THIS!

Want to be like Jesus?

The Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit is always a highlight for me. We try to bring our lead staff members every year, as well as our Board of Directors. It has become our annual leadership infusion! Here are a few highlights for me:

• Bill Hybels: Leadership is moving people for here to there. We can often emphasize “there” so well, giving everyone a clear picture of our preferred future. We cannot imagine why people would not want to go there…. And then we here people say, “But I like it here!” We need to give people as many reasons as we can find to help them see why staying “here” would be terrible. When we help people understand why “here” is NOT a good place to stay, they will begin considering the “there” we’re trying to get to.
• Andy Stanley: There are some tensions and conflicts that cannot be solved. We need to create a third category (not just win or lose) that enables us to continue the process of wrestling with certain issues that will never go away. A couple we face at Edinbrook right now are 1) Do we do church to feed the believer or reach the lost?  2) Do we worship with familiarity or freshness?  The ANSWER to both of these is BOTH! We need to live in the tension that will accomplish both as best we can.
• Jim Collins: To keep our church (and other organizations) from dying a long painful death, we must do a number of important things that keep us alive. #9 was “Reach the young by changing practices without changing the core values.” In other words, stimulate progress but preserve the core. YES, YES, YES!!!
• Tony Dungy: Quoting his mentor, “Stubbornness is a virtue as long as you’re right.”
• Jeff Manion: The “Land Between” is what Israel experienced between Egypt and Canaan. It is fertile soil for complaints, leadership melt-downs, God’s provision, and rejecting God. But it is also the only place we learn to trust God, thereby being transformed from being slaves to being the people of God. VERY COOL!
• Jack Welsh: “Non-profit should never mean non-performance.”
• And FINALLY, a great quote from T.D. Jakes on our need for encouragement: “I am so wonderful and so good, I wish I had a me!”

My sister is contemplating life and death these days. I visited her on Tuesday in the hospital — she has a highly resistant infection in her digestive system that the docs can’t seem to treat. They’ve told her this could kill her. Yikes!

So when I visited with her on Tuesday, we had some wonderful conversation. She has always been independent, a rebel, stubborn, and determined. These can be great traits or problem ones, depending on how they are used. My sister has never been a church-going person, so we talked for a little while about her relationship with the Lord.

Here’s the deal…she loves church as long as it’s not church-as-normal. In fact, not long ago, she attended Joel Osteen’s church in Huston, Texas and absolutely loved it! Believe me, it’s a far cry from what we grew up with in Woodstock, Minnesota…and I have a few thoughts of my own about Joel’s ministry (that are not pertinent to this discussion). She told me about the amazing music, the wonderful atmosphere, the realism she experienced, and a message that connected with her life. So here’s the deal — I have a spiritually hungry sister who rarely goes to church because the church doesn’t offer what connects with her.

Here’s the status of the church:

• We get so enmeshed in our own world of Christian community that we are quite out of touch with the world we’re called to reach.
• We tend to poo-poo atmosphere, presentation, current music, communication styles that actually communicate, and all the other stuff that we Christians pompously proclaim we don’t need.
• We’re too spiritual to need those kinds of things.

Well — it’s not about us! We have a bigger mission. These things that the world connects with is what the church needs to pursue, not for us, but for them.

Research has revealed that one of the main reasons people do not consider Christ is because the church is out of touch.

SO–let’s get in touch and let others really see how amazing Jesus really is!

Check out this article by an amazing leader, Perry Noble. This is DEFINITELY worth reading…