Christian Discipleship – Page 3

God’s Life: Raising Kids Who Get It

Previously, we explored the mutuality of marriage as God intended. Now, Paul in Ephesians (6:1-4) explores what it means to have God’s life as the ruling influence in the relationship between parents and children.

No doubt there is a sense in which parents submit to the needs of their children, however, here the submission revolves around the needs and (unequal) roles of each.

First, Paul calls children to obey their parents. Obey is not a command placed on the wife in the husband-wife relationship in the Bible. (Though Sarah is said to have obeyed Abraham in 1 Pet 3, it was not commanded of her). Moreover, in healthy families, there is a clear recognition of who the parents are and who the children are. When parents allow their children to violate this boundary, all kinds of dysfunction follow.

Obedience to parents would have been an expected virtue in the ancient world, however, Paul roots obedience to parents in God’s life. Children are to obey “in the Lord” which might be more freely rendered, “as is consistent for those who belong to the Lord.” Furthermore, obedience to parents reaches back to the Ten Commandments call to honor one’s father and mother and is connected with the promise of a long (prosperous) life on earth. Obedience, then, is an important spiritual discipline in which children are to experience and live out God’s life.

Second, Paul calls on fathers particularly (notice the move from “parents” in v. 1 to “fathers” in v. 4; see also Col 3:20-21) to educate their children. This move is probably not to exclude the mother—which the Ten Commandments clearly included—but to recognize the role that fathers were supposed to play in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Note that the text begins with restraining fathers: “don’t make your children angry.” Children, as well as wives, in the ancient world belonged to the husband and so the category of child abuse was nearly absent. However, this is not the way of Jesus.

Instead, fathers who belong to Jesus treat their children different than the way the world treats children. Even more Paul calls on fathers to make sure their children are disciplined and educated by the Lord.

Note how much this sounds like what Moses taught the nation of Israel:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4–9 NRSV)

Therefore, one of the main questions we should ask as we raise our children: “what kind of people are we making?” How we raise our children will affect them for life, and maybe, even eternity. It may be the turning point to whether or not “they get it.”

God’s Life: Flipping Marriage on its Head

Throughout history, marriage has been viewed as a hierarchal relationship where the man should be the clearly defined leader of the relationship. Very few cultures have approximated truly egalitarian marriage with husband and wife as full partners.

In the debate over the role of men and women today, proponents generally choose one of these poles. However, the biblical understanding of marriage in Ephesians 5:21-33 challenges both of these poles by offering a third way to view the marriage relationship.

After Paul calls his readers to submit to another (Eph 5:21), he calls on women to submit to their husbands. For the record, there is nothing new here that one could not have picked up on the streets of Ephesus. Any Latin or Greek moralist would have called for the same behavior from women.

However, Paul roots this (expected) behavior in something very different from the need for good order. For him, the wife’s behavior echoes the relationship that the church has with Jesus. The church should submit to Christ, and likewise a wife submits to her husband. Sounds hierarchal, doesn’t it?

However, in a sweeping tour de force, Paul realigns the husband’s role with that of Christ’s toward the church. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her—so should the husband for his wife. The husband should always move to present his wife in the best light, just as Christ would the church. In fact, the husband should love his wife as himself. He should treat his wife as he himself wants to be treated. Sounds egalitarian, doesn’t it?

Finally, to think of marriage as either hierarchal or egalitarian misses the mark. Christian marriage imitates the relationship between Christ and the church. Christ is the head of the body—not in the sense that a corporation has a CEO, but in the sense that a human body has a head. A head without a body is no more functional, or desirable, than a body without a head. Sounds (oh, what word would work here? how about) interdependent, doesn’t it?

If this sounds strange to your ears, notice what Paul says in another place:

For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man… In the Lord, however, woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God. (1 Corinthians 11:8–12 NIV)

or in yet another place:

But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. (1 Corinthians 7:2–4 NIV)

Interdependence (reciprocation or mutuality) might be the better word to describe Christian marriage. While a wife respects her husband, he should love her. As a husband loves his wife, she should respect him. In this way, the needs of both are met and they are better people because of the relationship.

This is how a Christian husband and wife participates in the mystery of Christ and the church.

Mimicking God

The goal of Christian spiritual formation is that the believer becomes more like Jesus. This does not entail an abdication of one’s own personality but rather an embracing of those Christ-like characteristics, dispositions, and habits that brought Jesus into harmony with God.

Furthermore, and paradoxically, the more like Jesus we become the more truly human we become. The new creation work of God is to recreate us in the “image” of God (Eph 4:24). This “image” language intentionally echoes the Genesis creation story where God created people in his own image. Thus, to become like God is to become truly human.

Therefore Paul invites his readers at the beginning of chapter 5:

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1–2 NRSV).

Having just called for his readers to forgive like God forgives, Paul continues to call people into the deeper life of God by calling them to remove what is not truly human. There is a long list of these beastly vices: fornication, impurity, greed, vulgar talk, and drunkenness. In place of these vices should be wise living and the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.

In this rather lengthy call for ethical living (Eph 4:17-5:21), what stands out to me is how Paul teases his reader into the transforming work of God. Early in this text, Paul speaks of learning Christ as the way to God. This learning-Christ curriculum involved deleting the old self and wrapping yourself with the new self—“created based on the likeness of God.”

Therefore, it is not a far stretch to see the way of Jesus as the way of imitating God—much like how young children seek to imitate their parents. As God’s beloved children, Paul calls us, we are to live a live of love because Christ showed us the way. Jesus was both the demonstration of God’s love for us and a model for how we should love God.

Because of the work of Jesus, we are now “children of light” (Eph 5:8). Therefore, we live in the light and not the darkness; in fact, our lives themselves shine light on the way of darkness.

So imitating God, we say, “Let there be light!”

I Am Responsible

The following post comes from an article I wrote for my church’s weekly newsletter but because it was related to the series I have been writing on Ephesians, I thought those who have been following my thoughts might appreciate this piece.

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As a church family, we have been exploring Paul’s description of the mission of God. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul will set forth what God has done for us in Christ in the first three chapters, in chapters 4 through 6 Paul will list a patchwork of virtues, dispositions, habits, and actions, God seeks in us because of what he has done for us in Christ.

These virtues, dispositions, habits, and actions will cover everything from how we treat one another, including those closest to us, our families, but it will also deal with values as personal as our sexual ethics, how we choose to use our language, or how we express our anger.

One thing remains clear: while we cannot save ourselves–this is the work of God–we are responsible for what we do with the salvation God has given us.

Responsibility may well be the missing virtue of our time. We always seem to have an excuse, a rationalization, or someone to blame so that we don’t have to feel the full force of personal responsibility. We become so good at (accustomed to?) using such tactics that we sometimes are unaware that we are using them.

M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, attributed much of what we call mental illness today to people’s mishandling of responsibility. According to Peck, neurotics take too much responsibility (often over other people), while psychotics take too little (even over their own lives). I’m sure Dr. Peck would add that things are more complex than this, but he is on to something.

Still my mental health is related to the level of personal responsibility that I take over things that are truly mine. As the Serenity Prayer reminds us, there are some things you can’t change and some things you can. May God give us power to discern between the two.

Learning Jesus

Dallas Willard in his amazing book The Divine Conspiracy seeks to tease believers once again to accept their calling as apprentices of Jesus. To become an apprentice of Jesus means that one will need to learn the ways of Jesus. However, as Willard points out, learning to follow Jesus also involves a certain amount of unlearning.

In calling the readers of Ephesians to the ways of Jesus (in Ephesians 4:17-5:21), Paul will remind them first what they needed to unlearn. Formerly, they were alienated from God’s life because of their “ignorance and hardness of heart” and had “abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity” (Eph 4:18-19).

Not only were this way of living self-destructive, but more importantly, they are contrary to what it means to follow Jesus. “This is not,” says Paul, “the way you learned Christ!” (Eph 4:20).

Then, what does it mean to follow Jesus exactly? For Paul, in this text, it means three things: putting off vices, putting on virtues, and seeing this process as the transformation of becoming like Jesus.

In Ephesians 4:17-32, Christians are to live no longer like the world around them and are to put away their former way of life. This involves a laundry list of things such as falsehood, anger, stealing, bitterness, and slander, to name a few.

In contrast, Christian are to take on certain virtues, such as speaking truthfully, but only what is beneficial to one’s hearers. Other virtues include being “kind to one another, tenderhearted, and forgiving one another (Eph 4:32).

So how is this related to becoming like Jesus? First, Paul begins by insisting “in the Lord” that believers do not live like the world and this because we did not “learn” Christ this way!

This putting-off and putting-on process is described in resurrection/creation language: we put off the old self so that our minds can be renewed and we put on the new self which God is (re)creating in His image.

We are not to grieve the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is God’s promise to us that he will finish this work in us. The call to forgive one another is based on how God “in Christ” has forgiven us (Eph 4:32). While we participate with God in our transformation, it is still God who accomplishes it; it is God who can make us more like Jesus.

So, then, how have you learned Jesus? Only your life can tell.

Built to Serve

In my continuing reflections, we have notice how in the first three chapters of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has described what God has done for us in Christ. In chapter four, Paul turned the corner to begin to highlight what should be our appropriate response in light of what God has done for us in Christ.

Paul calls his readers to exhibit habits of unity (humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance and love), then he sets before them the basis of unity, ultimately rooted in the unified nature of God:

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4–6 NRSV).

From this point, the apostle explores the anticipated outcome of this unity: that believers in Jesus will grow into the “full stature of Christ” (Eph 4: 13) or stated another way, that we would grow to look more like Jesus with every passing day.

In Ephesians 4:7-16, Paul observes that God has given every Christian a “gracing” so that “Christ-ness,” so to speak, is shared among each member of the body of Christ.

More so, God has given special gifts to the church in the form of those called by him to lead. These leaders include apostles, prophets, evangelist, pastors and teachers—however, there is no reason to think this is some exhaustive list, as we know of other functional leaders in the church, such as deacons (servants) and preachers.

More important than what these leaders are called is their purpose—which is at cross-purposes with what is generally expected of church leaders today. God give to church leaders to equip God’s people to do the people’s ministry.

Thus, the ministry of leaders is to empower members in the pursuit of their ministry. This only makes sense if we see every Christian as having a ministry. However, to be sure, there are different “levels” of ministry. After all, leaders here have a specialized ministry to equip the body of Christ.

This equipping, though, also has a particular outcome: “for the building up of the Body of Christ.” This work is ongoing until, according to Paul,

all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ (Ephesians 4:13 NRSV).

So legitmate Christian ministry results in all of us growing up! And, as we grow up, we will become more like Jesus. And, as we grow up, we participate in the body of Christ in a way that promotes health. And as we grow up, we understand that each of us have a part to play as we build one another up in love.

We are truly in this together.

Credo: I Believe

The Latin credo means “I believe.” From this word comes our English word creed. Often a creed will be a summary statement of what is believed and thus a short way to describe our most important beliefs. Creeds are by their nature reductionistic and only become problematic when we see them as the sum of what we believe as oppose to a summary of our main beliefs.

The Bible—though we rarely recognize them as such—also contains several creeds or creedal type statements. For example, try this one: “The Lord our God is one.” Though a very short sentence, it say a lot. It does not say everything but it does say something essential, central, core.

Or, take this repeated creed: “You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2 as well as Ex 34:6; Neh 9:17; Psa 86:15; 103:8; and Joel 2:13).

Likewise, in the New Testament, “Jesus is Lord” powerfully condenses the whole of the Gospel.

By the 3rd or 4th century, the church found creeds a useful way to summarize the faith—though, creeds were sometimes use to exclude those who did not believe exactly as the creed stated this or that tenant. The more positive function of a creed was to state what Christians believe in fairly short order.

One of the earliest creeds was the Apostles’ Creed, though it was not really by the apostles, it did capture their main teachings.

I believe in God the Father Almighty
Maker of heaven and earth.
And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord;
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead, and buried;
He descended into Hell [lit., Hades];
The third day he rose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic Church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting. Amen.

In all, not a poor summary of the Christian faith. We might quibble with Jesus going to the underworld, but there are texts (See e.g., 1 Peter 3:18-20 and Eph 4:8-10) that seem to support that Jesus did in fact visit the abode of the dead while his body lay in a tomb for three days. And the mention of the catholic Church throws most Protestants, but catholic here is an adjective meaning universal. I can honestly say that this creed captures what I believe the Bible teaches.

That is because this creed echoes Scripture and reflects what Paul does in his vision-casting letter to the Ephesians. Paul, having spent the first three chapters of his letter describing what God had done to save us, now (in chapter four) calls his readers to respond to what God has already done.

The place Paul begins his call for believers to live virtuous lives is with what he calls the “unity of the Spirit.” Just as God is one (remember the OT confession above) so the church is to be one.

This oneness is relational, not just doctrinal. Paul calls on believers to express “humility, gentleness, patience, and forgiveness” toward one another as the means of “keeping” the unity that comes from God’s Spirit.

Then Paul offers us a creedal statement in which to ground our unity: “There is one body and one Spirit — just as you were called to one hope when you were called — one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” (Ephesians 4:4–6 NIV).

The oneness of God, then, is the basis for the unity of the church and is the foundation for all we believe. We believe in one God who sent our one Lord who in turned poured out his one Spirit. Therefore we confess in Jesus one faith and one baptism; we commune with the Spirit in one body with only one hope—to be re-united with our one God.

This I believe.

Leaving Something Behind

Following Jesus always require that we leave something behind. Some things to be left behind are obvious such as sins, bad attitudes, and selfish ways; some are less obvious like dispositions, privilege, or the need for power.

Last week I was with a small country church that was reflecting on the Gospel of Mark’s version of the “Rich, Young Ruler.” At the climatic turn in the story, Jesus calls for the man to sell all of his possessions, give them to the poor and then follow him.

Jesus did not require every disciple to sell their possessions so it seems that Jesus could tell that this particular man’s possession had a strangle-hold on him. The man’s response to Jesus validates this, as Mark narrates, “… he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22 NRSV).

Later, Peter will respond to Jesus’ teaching about the difficulty the rich have in entering the kingdom of God with “Look, we have left everything and followed you” (Mark 10:28). While, somewhat self-serving, Peter did leave something behind to follow Jesus. In fact, in the Gospel of Mark several people left things behind to follow Jesus.

At the beginning of the Gospel when Jesus called his first disciples, Peter and Andrew, they responded by “leaving their nets and following Jesus.” Likewise, when the next set of brothers, James and John, were summoned, they “left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired hands, and followed him” (Mark 1:16-20). The cost of following Jesus, it appears, means leaving something behind.

This does not appear to be an isolated theme in the Gospel of Mark. When Mark tells of the calling of Levi, a tax collector (Mark 2:13-14), Mark notices that Levi “got up and followed Jesus,” even though at the time he was on the job. Levi left working for the imperial government to serve the kingdom of God.

The healed demoniac was willing to leave his home and friends to follow Jesus. Here, against the normal flow of things, Jesus refused to let the man follow him personally, but calls on him to tell “what the Lord has done for you” among his own family and friends (Mark 5:1-20). This is how most of us will follow Jesus today.

Later in the Markan narrative, the blind man named Bartimaeus will seek healing from Jesus (10:46-52). In coming to Jesus, he will throw off his cloak, leaving it behind. Once Bartimaeus had received his sight, he “followed Jesus on the way.”

In a turning point moment in the Passion Narrative (Mark 11-16), when Jesus is arrested, Mark, sadly, no doubt, notes that the remaining eleven disciples deserted Jesus and fled (14:50). Almost ironically, the word deserted in the Greek is the same word for leaving something behind used in the stories about the calling of the disciples mentioned above. The left all to follow Jesus and now the left all to abandon Jesus.

Immediately following this announcement of desertion on the part of Jesus’ disciples, Mark tells the curious story of a young man who was following Jesus at the time of Jesus’ arrest (14:51-52). Oddly, it seems, the young man was wearing nothing but a linen cloth. The soldiers grabbed him but “he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” This story, whatever its meaning, serves as an anti-discipleship story: here is how not to follow Jesus, so to speak.

So, consistently, throughout the Gospel, Mark illustrates that to follow Jesus one must leave something behind. Mark’s story of Jesus then raises two pertinent questions:

What are you willing to leave behind for Jesus?
What are not unwilling to give up for Jesus?

Discipleship is lived out between those two questions, don’t you think?

Declaring an Impossible Future

In Masterful Coaching, Robert Hargrove, asserts that leadership coaching seeks to help leaders “to dream an impossible dream based on the difference that [people and their] organizations would passionately like to make, a difference that will have earth-shaking consequences in [their] domain.”

While Hargrove is concerned about leaders, I believe every Christian should take up this challenge for themselves and the churches to which they belong.

In his letter to the Ephesians (3:14-20), Paul dares his readers to accept the impossible dream. Yet, for Paul, the dream does not primarily depend on what do but on what God has done and can do. Yet, it does depend on what we do as those empowered by God.

In this text, Paul continues the prayer he began in 1:15-23. Previously Paul wanted believers to understand, comprehend, and grasp the power available to them—the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. Here Paul prays that God might empower us in our inner being—our core self—who we really are.

This power is directly related to a relationship with God’s presence—the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, this will be played out in our lives because Jesus lives in us—in our hearts. This reminds us of God’s desire for us—the church—to be the place where God lives (see Eph 2:21-22).

We can dream the impossible because God has accomplished the impossible—he has made it possible for him to live in us. This gives us a place to take a stand—to declare the impossible because, in Jesus, we are “rooted and grounded in God’s love.”

God desires for each of us to have impossible power—the power necessary to apprehend what God’s work in the world, power to comprehend how

Wide
Long
High
Deep

is the love of Christ—a love we can fully know because it is beyond knowledge!

God’s impossible dream is that you might experience God fully, that is, that you might partake in the divine nature of God (see 2 Pet 1:4). God has declared for you an impossible dream since his power—which is a work in us!—is able to do abundantly more than we ask or imagine.

So what dreams do you have for your life? For your church? Do they have earth-shaking possibilities? Then, they are probably not God’s dreams for you … remember, more than we ask or image!

Go and Learn: Mercy, Not Sacrifice

Jesus once told the Pharisees to “Go and learn.” He particularly wanted them to reflect on an Old Testament passage, “I want mercy, not sacrifice” (Matt 9:13 and cited again in Matt 12:7, both quoting Hosea 6:6).

The Hosea passage in it original context reads, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6 NRSV). Here the prophet is calling to people to something deeper than just going through the motions. According to Hosea, God is seeking committed love tied to knowing God. He is seeking relational connection, not just obedience at the action level.

So how did we go from steadfast love in the Old Testament to the same text reading mercy in the New Testament? In Hosea’s text, as a further complication, steadfast love is directed toward God, but in Jesus’ citation, mercy refers to how we treat others.

Actually, the move from covenant love toward God and merciful consideration of others had already become linked in the Old Testament.

By the time of the prophets, the mistreatment of people is one of the most direct violation of covenant with God. For example, Jeremiah (in Jer 7) will scold the people for the mistreatment of each other, especially the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

This is one of the main reasons, according to Jeremiah, that God will exile his people from the Promised Land. Living in the Promised Land was one of the most important symbols of being in covenant with God. So loyalty to God is most often demonstrated in loving kindness toward other people.

Jesus certainly tied our love for God directly to our love for our neighbor.

So did the apostle John, when he wrote, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20–21 NIV).

So, today, Go and learn: God desire merciful relationships over rituals of worship.