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Christian Living

Embracing a Discipleship Commitment for Your Spiritual Growth

Part of the reason that I struggled with writing for my website in 2017 was my involvement in several discipleship groups during the year. At FBC Newton, we have been focused on developing these groups (D-Groups), and they have been my priority, so anything extra was relegated to the back-burner. But as the original groups have now split into multiple new groups, my time commitments are not quite as taxing as they were, and so I now have a bit more time to write. These D-groups have been a blessing to me, and I wanted to share with you the commitments of the groups, because I think they are important commitments for every Christian to embrace.

Each group consist of 3-5 people of the same gender who meet together regularly to

  • Pray for one another.
  • Discuss how to live out the teachings of Jesus.
  • Sharpen one another in Christian living.
  • Hold each other accountable in their Christian walk.

    • Don’t each of us need these things in our lives to aid us in our Christian discipleship?

    “But that means you are asking me to add something extra to my schedule. Do you know how busy I am?”

    I know, we are all extremely busy. But…

    Do you not have time for something extra if it will help you grow significantly with Jesus Christ?
    If your answer is “No, I do not,” then that may mean that you need to give something else up.

    a pocketwatch to symbolize the need to make time for discipleship
    Will You Make Time For Discipleship This Year?

    Commitments to one of our Discipleship Group Include:

  • Meeting with your group regularly.
  • Reading at least 1 chapter of the Bible each day, Monday thru Friday.
  • Writing down what God is teaching you through your reading.
  • Sharing during the group.
  • And the final commitment is that at the end of no more than 2 years, the group will divide to start at least one additional group to do the same thing again with more people.


    • That’s It. Pretty simple commitments. Read God’s Word every day and get together with others to tell them how God is transforming you through it.

    So, if you know that the Great Commission of Jesus commands you to “Go and Make Disciples,” then how are you being obedient to His command?
            Who is discipling you?
            Who are you discipling?

    If you do not have a clear answer to these final questions, then something needs to change in your life to make space for obedience to a key command of Jesus!

    And let me just say… You can do this!

    .

    Categories
    God

    The Love of God. God is Love.

    Pastor D. L. Moody wanted everyone to hear the truth: God is Love.
    portrait of D. L. MoodyBut he also knew that even though people may come to a worship service, not everyone is listening! Therefore, he shares:
    “We built a church in Chicago a few years ago, and we were so anxious to make people believe that God is love, that we thought if we could not preach it into their hearts, we would burn it in! And so right over the pulpit we had the words put in gas jets, ” God is love,” and every night we had it there.”

    R. A. Torrey worked with Moody in that church and became the pastor a few years before Moody’s death. Regarding the message of “God is Love,” he indicates:

    Mr. Moody… was so anxious that everybody should always hear this one truth, and was so afraid that some preacher might come and forget to tell it, that he had it put on the gas jets right above the pulpit, to that the first thing you would see when you went in there on an evening was that text shining out in letters of fire.

    One stormy night, before the time of the meeting, the door stood ajar. A man partly intoxicated saw it open, and thought he might go in and get warm. He did not know what sort of a place it was, but when he pushed the door open he saw the text blazing out, “God is love.” He pulled the door to, and walked away muttering to himself.

    He said to himself, “God is love? No. God is not love. God does not love me. He does not love me, for I am a poor, miserable sinner. If God was love, he would love me. God is not love.”

    But it kept on burning down into his soul, “God is love! God is love! God is love” After a while be retraced his steps, and took a seat in a corner. When Mr. Moody walked down after the meeting, he found the man weeping like a child. “What is the trouble?” he asked. “What was it in the sermon that touched you?”
    “I didn’t hear a word of your sermon.”
    “Well, what is the trouble?”
    “That text up there.”

    Moody himself indicates:
    “I found him there weeping like a child; but as I unfolded the Scripture, and told him how God had loved him from his earliest childhood all along, the light of the gospel broke into his mind, and he went away rejoicing!”

    Jesus is the clear evidence to us that God is Love. Jesus came to rescue us from our sin. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. The religious leaders were appalled at such behavior. To their complaints about who He associated with, Jesus explained:
    “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT SACRIFICE,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

    Brennan Manning indicates:

    This story provides us with a revelation as bright as the evening star: Jesus comes for sinners, for those as outcast as tax collectors and for those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams. He comes for corporate executives, street people, superstars, farmers, hookers, addicts, IRS agents, AIDS victims, and even used car salesmen. Jesus not only talks with these people but dines with them—fully aware that His table fellowship with sinners will raise the eyebrows of religious bureaucrats who hold up the robes and insignia of their authority to justify their condemnation of the truth and their rejection of the gospel of grace. Are we really that different?

    I hope I not only remember that God is Love toward me, a sinner, but also that I am to now share that love with others who are struggling with their own sin.

    Categories
    Jesus

    Grace That We Do Not Deserve but Fortunately Can Receive

    Grace. It is not something we do well. At least not often. Perhaps those that we hold the most grace out towards are our children, who sometimes can “do no wrong” in our eyes. But to others with bad behavior, they don’t get a pass, instead we desire for them to experience our wrath through revenge. I’m so glad that isn’t how God deals with me! And it certainly isn’t how God calls us to deal with others.

    “Over the years I have seen Christians shaping God in their own image – in each case a dreadfully small God…. Some, like the elder brother in Luke, sulk and pout when the Father serves the best for the prodigal son who has spent his last cent on sinful living. Some tragically refuse to believe that God can or will forgive them: My sin is too great.”

    “This is not the God of grace who ‘desires all men to be saved.’ This is not the God embodied in Jesus that Matthew came to know. This is not the God who calls sinners — which, as you and I know, means everybody.”

    God says that He loves us in spite of us and that He demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, He sent Jesus Christ who died for us.
    a chalkboard-style quote saying Grace is the amazing undeserved love that God provides to us through Jesus
    He loves us not because of what we’ve done and not because of who we are, but because of who He is! That is God’s Grace.

    “God wants us back even more than we could possibly want to be back. We don’t have to go into great detail about our sorrow. All we have to do, the parable says, is appear on the scene, and before we get a chance to run away again, the Father grabs us and pulls us into the banquet so we can’t get away.”

    Let us delight in God’s grace. The grace He holds out to us is amazing. And because of our experience of God’s grace in our own lives, let us then attempt to be people of amazing levels of love and grace to others. Let us be accepting of all people. Let us not force people to clean up their lives to “look more like us” before we offer them the right hand of fellowship. Let us not withhold our forgiveness to others when they ask for it. Instead let us take God’s love and share it with others so that more people come to a knowledge of who He is – the God of amazing grace.

    –quotes above are from Brennan Manning in Ragamuffin Gospel

    Categories
    Christian Living

    Being Obedient Means Always Placing Your Yes on the Altar

    What does it look like to be obedient to God at all times?
    What would it look like to always place your “yes” upon His altar?

    Isaiah tells us that he saw a most spectacular vision of God, and just the vision of God on His throne with the end of His robe filling up the temple had Isaiah falling down on his face and saying: “God, I will do whatever you ask of me.”

    There are great examples of those who have heard God’s call and simply answered “Whatever you ask God.” But there are other examples we find in the Bible as well:

    We see Moses say something along the lines of: “God, I have a bunch of excuses for You, but even if you can give me some great reasons as to why those excuses aren’t valid, please don’t ask me to do it. Find someone else. I don’t care if I’m the perfect person. I don’t care. Just don’t ask me.” Have you ever felt like that?

    We find Jonah’s attitude to be: “God has asked me to do something. I ain’t gonna. I’m skipping town. I’m going to go the exact opposite way that God told me to go.” Have you ever been that disobedient? Jonah eventually goes and is obedient (after being vomited out on the shore covered with the stomach contents of some great fish), but he obeys with anger and he is upset over the outcome of God’s kindness to people he doesn’t like.

    Who are you going to be like when God calls you? Awestruck Isaiah? Willing Joseph or Mary (see my earlier post by clicking here? Reluctant Moses? Rebellious Jonah?

    God still has the same call to each of us: “Who will go for Us, and whom shall I send?”

    I’m not talking about overseas missions. I’m not talking about going to a nation like Nineveh nor preaching repentance to an unreached people group in the wilds of the jungle. I’m not talking about going to a king like Pharaoh and trying to talk to heads of state about Jesus. Those things all scare us. Certainly, if that is what God calls you to do, then I hope you will answer that call, knowing that He will give you the ability to be obedient. But what I am talking about is that the call on your life is to be a missionary all the time to the people right around you.

    You are to be on mission for God all the time. Wherever you are going to work today – as an employer, as an employee, as a student, as a retiree going to drink coffee with some friends – Wherever you have been placed by life’s circumstances, your choices, and God’s sovereign hand – you are to be on mission for Him.

    You are to be the messenger of God for those that you are around. You are to say “Yes” to God every time he asks you to be obedient.

    Categories
    Christian Living

    Obedience to Jesus Can Be Tough

    Obedience can be tough.
    At times it will feel like climbing a mountain.
    a narrow path leading up a mountain - symbolizing the difficulty of obedience to Jesus
    What if your fiancée told you she was pregnant but that she hadn’t been sexually involved with anyone? You knew you hadn’t been sexually intimate with her, so how did this pregnancy happen if she hadn’t had sex with someone else? It would be tough to believe her, wouldn’t it? At least in today’s technological age, we might could discuss something such as in vitro fertilization, but that wasn’t available back in Joseph & Mary’s day.

    Mary told Joseph that she was pregnant. He knew that he wasn’t the father because they were engaged and had not yet had sex. And so when Mary shared that she had remained faithful to him, but that she had become pregnant by the power of God, he could not believe it. He determined that she had concocted some false story, and he decided he would “break off the engagement” quietly.

    Joseph could have cried out to the religious community and said, “This woman that I love, this woman that I have trusted, this woman that I pledged to marry has had sex with another man. Then she tried to tell me this preposterous story about what happened.” But he didn’t. Even though he didn’t believe her, he loved her and chose not to disparage her.

    I believe Joseph was heart-broken. The woman he loved had cheated on him (she hadn’t, but that’s what it looked like to him) and then she probably cried her eyes out telling him that it was a supernatural pregnancy from God. But who could believe that? So Joseph just determined that his fiancée whom he loved was lying to him and would not come clean, so he decided, “I’ll just end this quietly.” And his breaking off their marriage certainly also broke Mary’s heart. Can you imagine how many tears both of them shed over how this was all taking place?

    But then God sent an angel to Joseph to tell him that Mary had been completely truthful. Can you imagine the scene as Joseph ran back to Mary who is still crying tears over her upcoming divorce (because in those days the breaking of a “betrothal” required a divorce certificate). As he enters the room and sees her crying, he apologizes and says, “Mary, I believe you! God sent an angel to me. I’m sorry I ever doubted you. Please forgive me.” And then Mary’s tears of heartache were turned to tears of joy as the two of them embraced and prepared again for their upcoming marriage.

    But then came more difficulty, because now Joseph would have to explain to others about what had occurred, because if he was anything like me, I would not want anyone to tarnish my wife’s reputation, especially when she was simply doing God’s will. Mary is going to “start showing” that she is pregnant by the great big bulge that baby Jesus is going to cause. It is obvious to everyone that Mary is pregnant before the wedding. And now Joseph and Mary are telling a story that they didn’t have sex, but that Mary is miraculously pregnant by the hand of God. Everyone is thinking – what an ingenious (and ridiculous) excuse.

    God called Mary & Joseph to a difficult task. Mary, you are going to give birth to the Messiah, and Joseph you will raise Him as your son. And yet it will be difficult because people are going to call Mary a loose woman and call Jesus an illegitimate child (both were probably called much worse). Yet Mary and Joseph both chose to submit to God and follow through in difficult obedience all the same.

    They had hearts that said: “Whatever you ask God, we will do. We are Your servants.”

    God has not called you to such a difficult task. But he does expect you to be faithful to what He has commanded you to do. He does expect your obedience. You know something that He has impressed on your heart to do. Will you do it? Will you say, “Whatever you ask God. I am your servant”?