Called to Discipleship
Jesus had a bunch of people called disciples whom He had gathered around Him. Disciple simply means one who comes to experience and learn life at the hand of a master. Jesus – THE Master -- spent a lot of time teaching them the way of the Kingdom of God. Then, after He had been raised, Jesus told those same disciples to go into the world and make more disciples, with the help of the Holy Spirit. This, then, is the job of the Christian church: to help God make disciples. This is also the task of every human being who walks this planet: to experience and learn the life of the Kingdom of God – to more fully become disciples of Jesus Christ.
You don’t simply become a disciple. Rather, you becooooooome a disciple. You can become a Christian pretty quickly, and many people do. In doing so, we make Christ the be-all and end-all of our lives and our salvation is assured. To become a disciple, though, is a lifelong process. Our church feels God calling us to help Him make disciples, people who gradually know, follow, experience, then know more, follow further and experience more deeply the way of God.
Here’s how that might look for some people:
- You experience a hunger for something more out of life, or a sense that there’s a bigger truth out there than you’d ever dreamed of.
- You go to a church. There you discover a bunch of people on the same search.
- You start to live life with them – serving the world, loving each other, learning from the Word of God, and spending time with God in prayer.
- You feel God leading you to become a Christian, and are baptized.
- You keep going to that church. You keep studying Scripture. You join a group of other Christians (and maybe some folks who are thinking about becoming Christians), and they help you to grow deeper in your faith (and you help them)
- You open yourself up to what God is trying to do in you, and seek to change and grow according to God’s leading.
- You keep doing that for the rest of your life!