Disciples Made Here Every Day

If that sign could be hung over my door, my life would be complete, and all goals satisfied.  After all, what was the last commandment Jesus gave to the disciples He had made?

Interestingly, He did not say to go and get people to say the sinner's prayer.  Nor to walk down an aisle.  Jesus did not even say to go and get people saved.  Of course, being saved  is vitally important simply because the opposite, by definition, is so dreadful.  Consider any of the disasters that often do befall mankind and see that the first response of good people everywhere is to jump in and SAVE those in need.  Jesus did very clearly say that without help we are all lost.  It was Jesus who "jumped in" to save us, and He who came up with the catchy imagery we still use today:  He said that a person "must be born again".

But I have a little twist on the general mandate understood by most Christians, regarding evangelism.  In my view, each person's final destiny is already determined.  No, not by a capricious God who selects certain people by some weird favor and rejects others because of some invisible wart.  But by the person!  If all else were equal, and every quivelling argument were settled; if every bit of spiritual ignorance was eliminated; if each personal psychological hang up was mollified; I would then ask each man and woman: Under these undefiled circumstances, what WOULD you do with Jesus?  It is the spirit inside that either WOULD accept the loving acts of Christ, or else reject the amazing gift of Christ's love and grace.  Each pure spirit makes its own decision clear to God in many innumerable ways.  There are no unknowns in His mind, and He has not left the eternal fate of any soul in the hands of one as shabby as me.

But what I can do, and what Jesus commanded even me to do, is to "go and make disciples of all nations"!  I do not know which people will or will not repent, so I must try to share the Good News (The Gospel) with anyone I meet in order to encourage them to make their decision for Christ as soon as possible and become His disciple.  God would rather that His children repent early and begin to serve and enjoy living an abundant life, rather than wasting years in ruin and wreaking havoc, before finally following.  Once a person willingly becomes a disciple (a student, or follower) His growth and walk with God are his own responsibility and continually depend on day to day choices.

If you do not/can not/ will not listen and learn of the one path God has laid out for your eternal hope (and don't tell me that you would have refused the one shaft drilled down to the forsaken Chilean miners because there was only ONE shaft offered?), then my heart breaks for you, even as it leads me to somebody else who might still discover the joy I have found in the resurrected Christ living in me.  Others will admit their sin, repent of its entrapment, receive forgiveness, and become one of His glad, ever-learning disciples.

Follow Him today.  Do become a disciple of Jesus Christ.


(Verse quoted in red is from Mathew 28:19)

PS
If not today, what might be the arguments, points of ignorance or hang-ups that hold you back?

By the way...MILLERWRITES copy is COPYRIGHTED. Why cut and paste when you can simply copy the link?

D is for DISCIPLE!

[This is the MILLERWRITES contribution to the 2012 Blogging A to Z April Challenge  Here is my INTRODUCTION to this particular series, and an opportunity for you to influence which alphabetically aligned weird words I will comment on this month.  THANK YOU for stopping by!]

DISCIPLE may only be a 'weird word' to you if you try to pronounce it as it is written; dis-kippel, or disc-i-plea.  The word is used fairly often in our national discussions about the various leaders we honor with our followership.  (My spell check is balking at that last word.  Maybe that's why we have discipleship in our vocabulary.)  Anybody that a group of folks respect and would choose to emulate can call that group his disciples.  Louis Farrakhan has disciples and Leanord Nimoy has disciples and Richard Petty has disciples.  It seems everyone has disciples except me!  I do have a nice group of followers, but I guess they know enough to keep it at that.

Interestingly, Jesus Christ never told His followers (His disciples, I should say) to go out and make everyone a Christian!  That word simply means 'Christ one' and is not a very definitive, meaningful term.  (I often joke with my non churchgoing Christian friend when he tells me about something he's doing on a Sunday morning, that "Oh yeah, I'M a Christian, so I'll be in church.."  As if going to church makes one a Christian the same way going to McDonalds makes one a hamburger!  Oh, I guess it does, in the same way.)

Antioch, a city in Turkey (which my son lived in for two weeks last year!) is famous for this little bit of Bible trivia:
Acts 11:26
and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

I have always thought that was pretty cool, but I've long been into nicknames.  I took this passage to mean that the group there at Antioch had a meeting and a discussion to go over a list of possible titles some committee had recommended, and then voted and finally settled on "Christian".  It turns out that the term was given, nay, thrown, at them by outsiders as a pejorative!  As in; "Look, there go them Christ-ones to church, instead of going to McDonalds with us!

The Christians called themselves a host of more positive and heartening names including;  "brethren," "the faithful," "elect," "saints," and "believers."  Jesus may have used some of these words to refer to his devoted followers once in a while, but in the end He never said to go and make 'saints' out of anybody.  He didn't demand that much from the likes of His apostles.  He didn't call for us to be 'believers' because that is way too little.  In fact, James said that even the demons 'believe, and shudder!'. (James 2:19)  There is a title more realistic than our pridefully claiming to be perfectly 'faithful', and better than simply being 'brethren'.  Jesus wants all of us, well all of us who have ever lived in a nation, to be His DISCIPLES!  In His last words before He was ascended back into heaven...

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.  (Mathew 28)

He wants people everywhere to study His ways, to adopt His kind of love for God and man, to sacrifice all for the sake of others; in short, to enjoy a life spanning relationship with Him and the satisfaction of practicing His DISCIPLINES.