For over a year now I've been meeting with a group of men most Wednesday mornings at 9 to help spur one another on to growth in Christ. We have un-officially adopted Proverbs 27:17 as our theme. "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." We meet usually for about 90 minutes, sometimes we go longer, sometimes its shorter. We share concerns and prayer needs in our lives and the lives of our families. We pray together. We read and study scripture together. It's not fancy. Even during 2020 we met via Zoom several weeks. This time together each week helps me to know there are others trying to follow Jesus, who I can identify with. We don't pretend to be super spiritual. We each readily acknowledge that we need Jesus...desperately. We need grace, because as Brennan Manning said, we know that our cheese is falling off our cracker. I'm thankful for these men, their wives, and their families.
Discipleship is essential for one to grow in our faith. My prayer this Thanksgiving is that you would be able to foster relationships with others that can help sharpen your faith commitment.
I am teaching through James this fall on Wednesday nights at The Gathering and thought I would share some of what I am teaching on here too. Here are just some excerpts from this past week: (note: nothing has been reedited from my notes)
James sees the key to being a person who doesn’t just pay lip service to Christ but a person who does what we are called to do as disciples begins with listening. Listening is truly a gift. Not everyone is great at it, but we all must develop a willingness to listen 1st and restrain our speech, if we do we will find ourselves getting along better with others.
Nobody wants to be around someone who is a hotheaded/temper losing freak all the time. Do things happen in life that make us want to scream and punch the wall, yes, but in those instances we have to remind ourselves that we must listen hard and fast before speaking, because there is the potential that we would say something we don’t really mean, hurt people we love, and sin by allowing our anger to be a stumbling block to others and ourselves.
James commands us to get rid of all the junk, garbage, filth in our lives so that we can live lives of purity and godliness as we strive to follow after him.
You ever been in the shower and the tub starts to drain slow or back up, mine does that sometimes with all the hair that gets caught in the drain! What has to happen in order for you to be able to shower without standing in water? You’ve got to pour some drano or something like that down the drain in order for it to open back up and do what it’s supposed to. The same is true in our lives, if we are going to truly live lives of committed disciples of Jesus Christ, then we must get rid of all the sin in our hearts so that we can truly seek God with our whole heart!
Reread vs. 22-25.
Have you ever been around someone who talked a lot about doing something or doing things a certain way but in reality that never happened for various reasons?
If you and I as Christians read the Bible, here it taught and preached on Sundays and Wednesdays but are never changed and don’t put it into practice then what good is it to us? What good are we to the people around us?
We can’t just be people who encounter the God of the Bible but our lives aren’t changed by that encounter. James says, that’s like looking at your face in the mirror and turning around and forgetting what we look like. Instead of encountering God through the pages of scripture and letting our lives be changed we engage God and walk away as if our lives were exactly the same.
Now I know that many of you guys spend longer than the girls in front of the mirror getting ready and then you walk away from the mirror and find the next mirror you can to stand in front of so that you can check yourself again. What’s that about? Did you forget how you looked over the span of 3 seconds? That’s what James is talking about here.
The contrast is what we need in our lives. We need to look into the perfect law of freedom and be doers of the word and not just hearers. If we hear that God wants us to love our enemies but don’t actually do it we aren’t putting our faith into practice. If we hear that God wants us to show mercy rather than justice but don’t do it then we aren’t putting our faith into practice. If we hear that we need to care for the needs of people around us, especially people who are marginalized (see verse 27, widows and orphans) but don’t do it then we aren’t being doers of the word, only hearers.
If we are going to be serious about living our lives as disciples then we have got to stop just listening to what God tells us to do and actually do it.
The tongue: vs. 26 Controlling our tongues is one of the hardest things in life to do isn’t it?
It may not always be cussing and vulgar language…it may be gossip, or mean/hurtful things that we say to others. We all need to be reminded how powerful our words are! They can build people up or tear them down in a blink of an eye.
I received a preview copy of David Platt's book Radical a few weeks ago. I eagerly digested it, although at times the call to a radical life of discipleship hit me so hard that I wanted to put the book down. I had hoped to actually post something before it went on sale earlier in May but I just haven't had the chance. You can learn more about the book, David Platt, and The Church at Brook Hills by clicking on these links:
Radical is an engaging, yet challenging look at the status of western Christianity, particularly in America. It served as a wake up call for me, a not-so-gentle reminder that the Christian life is not about doing things the easy way, rather it is about the call to pick up our cross and follow Jesus daily. A call that quite frankly most Christians, including myself, would rather not answer most days.
If the status quo of your relationship with God is leaving you wanting more then pick this book up to be reminded of the words of Bonhoeffer, "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."
So I got a pre-release copy of David Platt, pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, book that is to set to release in a week or so and I have been challenged and convicted of how and why we in the west, particularly America "DO" church. The title of the book is Radical. Platt believes that we have bought into the "American Dream" mindset even with our faith and our churches and that we have lost sight of the true gospel...very challenging to someone who is in ministry full-time!
Then this morning after I got to the office I was looking through some mail that came on Friday and saw this quote from Stanley Hauerwas, a renowned theologian who I believe currently teaches at Duke University's Divinity School. The church has lost its ability to be a disciplined community because we're now, religiously, in a buyer's market. Christianity has to bill itself as very good for your self-realization, and that's killing us because we're not very good for our self-realization. We're good for your salvation, which is not the same thing. Quoted in Christian Ethics Today (Vol. 16, Num 2)
Sometimes we in the church have to pull back from what we immerse ourselves with, or sprinkle ourselves for any non-Baptists and ask the tough questions? Is what we are doing really making an impact for the Kingdom of God? Are we following God's desires or our desires? Are we seeking to make disciples or to make people feel good about themselves? Are we just a club that has a cross or a fish plastered somewhere or are we completely sold out to the gospel of Jesus Christ?
I read this today in The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis and it fit really well with what I taught on tonight, Matthew 9:9-13. It's been bouncing around in my mind all day.
This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.
It really makes you rethink what it means to call oneself a disciple and to follow Jesus, no strings attached, wherever he leads...
