We can make excuses, but in our own lives, in our churches and in our homes we often do not reflect the life of a person who is completely committed to know, love, learn from, and imitate Jesus. When it comes to the decline of the American church we can debate endlessly what happened, when it happened, who is to blame for it happening or why it happened. I have seen some content producers whose sole effort seems to revolve around listing and complaining about what is wrong. That is very tempting and it is pretty easy to do. But it is not especially effective. If it were effective in making disciples, we might see some progress and improvement. What we see are people who agree with each other spending more time following and watching each other.
So, what do we do? For my part, I am going to focus in the coming year on five key areas in my life, teaching and ministry. Hopefully, my personal devotions, sermons, leadership, public and private life, conversations will focus on these key areas. Some directly, some indirectly, but I intend that in everything I do it will come back to one of these five things, things I want to emphasize in my ministry and my personal life. This should have been the case all along; I have become distracted and I believe without these focuses the way forward is pretty grimm.
In the weeks ahead, I plan on exploring each of these in greater detail but for the moment we will suffice with a brief overview.
Be a self-learner of God. There are two dangers for every disciple in the area of being a learner. One is to allow someone else to be the sole source of learned material. Think of the person who attends services, but never reads or studies the Bible on their own. The second danger is when we rely on what we learned in the past, in some cases the distant past. Think of the person who has never added to what they learned in their early years as a Christian. I hope the day I stop learning is never.
Be sensitive to the Holy Spirit. We have all heard the true cliche, “It is better to have the Holy Spirit in us than Jesus beside us.” That is true, Jesus Himself said so. But if we ignore the Holy Spirit, His presence is no advantage for us. I want to learn to be and to actually be more sensitive to the promptings and leading of God’s Spirit. This is not unrelated to learning, but also includes things such as silence and active listening/application.
Holy living. Holy living is much more than not doing things. That will simply lead to legalism and endless arguments over details. While there are some things that should never be in a holy life the objective of a holy life is to be like God. This covers a whole spectrum of things such as love, joy, creativity to name a few. Holy living is not just doing, holy living is being and enjoying the company of others, specifically God.
Be a person of prayer. Prayer is, in my opinion and experience, the most difficult of Chrisitian disciplines. In part, because we often select one aspect of prayer and act as if it is all there is to prayer. It is also hard because we want to do stuff and praying feels like we are being inactive. But beyond asking for stuff and for forgiveness, prayer has a wide variety of expressions. As the old timers used to say, “Work is prayer”. We need to broaden our understanding of prayer, but not just talk about it, practice and live it.
Sharing my faith. Evangelism is at the core of the Good News. However, we have allowed our desire to help people make decisions, while we have failed to explain that they are deciding to be a disciple, not just a believer. I (we) need to reorder our thinking so that we call people to follow Jesus, not just let Him save them. This is perhaps one of the hardest challenges we must face.
I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, but this does seem to be a good time to stop, think and look for better ways, because what we have been doing has not been working.
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