For a disciple, time in the teacher’s presence is vital, because it is in his presence that the disciple learns to do what the teacher does. You could compare the disciple to the modern day apprentice.  Some things are taught in an apprenticeship because they are best learned in the field alongside a master. We could learn about building a house or wiring a home in a classroom.  We could probably learn about these things by reading a book, attending a seminar, watching a video, or listening to a podcast, but none of these methods match the depth of learning experienced in an apprenticeship.

The apprentice learns directly from a master in the midst of real life as he watches the master in action.  The classroom is sanitary, but the real world is messy.  The apprentice has the opportunity to observe the master responding to the unexpected, the bumps, and the messiness of real life.

These same characteristics are present in the relationship of the rabbi and his disciples.  The rabbi’s disciple learns from him in the midst of everyday life, not the classroom.  He doesn’t tell his students how to live; he shows them.  He doesn’t teach about theoretical pain.  He teaches in the midst of pain.  He doesn’t teach about dealing with an imaginary enemy, he demonstrates it as he responds to an enemy.

There is a saying in the Mishnah that reads, “Let your home be a meeting-house for the sages, and cover yourself in the dust of their feet, and drink in their words thirstily.”  In the first century a rabbi might travel from town to town teaching in people’s homes.  The roads they walked were dry and dirty, so their feet had a tendency to get caked with dust.

This blessing encourages the reader to sit at the rabbi’s feet as he teaches, drinking in his words as if they were water to a dry and thirsty soul.  But what if we take the meaning a little further?  What if the dust on his feet is a metaphor for the long and many roads he has walked in his life.  What if the dust represents the experiences and lessons he has learned as he journeyed with God?  In other words, could the dust of the rabbi’s feet represent his life and his wisdom?  This is the essence of intentional discipleship, taking on the character of Jesus as we walk closely with him.

The first of AA’s twelve steps is to admit you are powerless to bring about change in your life, and the second step goes hand in hand with it, to believe there is a “higher power” who is able to facilitate the change you desire. These are also the first two steps in the life of a disciple.  We must be willing to admit that we are powerless to plant and cultivate the seeds of kingdom life in our own hearts, and we must submit to the only one who can.  By choosing to be a disciple, a student, we admit that we need to be taught.  Without this beginning in humility and surrender, the fullness of the abundant kingdom life will elude us. Humble submission to the creator of the universe is the foundation of intentional discipleship.

Surrender is a recurring theme in Jesus’ teaching. Over and over he teaches that clinging too tightly to our own ways will prevent us from experiencing the kingdom life.  He says, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other.” (Mt 6:24) He tells one rich man that his attachment to wealth is keeping him from the kingdom (Mark 10:17-22), and he turns away three would be followers in Luke 9:57-62 because they are unwilling to give their whole lives to be disciples.  Over and over Jesus confronts the divided loyalty of people, and over and over he says they cannot follow him without full devotion.

If we are going to enter the kingdom of God, we must be willing to leave our own kingdoms.  Land is a part of one state or another, one country or another.  There are no overlapping territories, and the same is true in the kingdom of God.  As long as I insist on living in my kingdom, I will not enter the kingdom of God.  There is an incredible home for each of us in the kingdom, but for some reason we keep paying rent on the dilapidated studio in our own kingdom.  As long as we do, the beautiful kingdom house is just a dream.

Even Jesus experienced surrender. In Philippians 2:6-11 Paul says that Jesus emptied himself and became a servant even to the point of dying one of the most horrible deaths imaginable.  Perhaps the most dramatic examples of his submission to the Father’s will comes in Luke 42:22.  For some time Jesus has known what awaited him in Jerusalem.  As he made his way down the dusty paths from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus spoke often of his death, and I suspect it was constantly on his mind. Yet when the time came, he sat alone in a garden praying, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”  Moments before his arrest and hours before his death, even Jesus had to surrender his will to the will of his Father.

Surrender is not primarily a matter of obedience.  Obedience is a part of it, but I would rather look at obedience as the outcome rather than the starting point. We surrender to the will of the Father because of who he is.  He is God.  He is creator.  He is love.  Living a life of surrender means that we acknowledge that we are the created, and we cannot live the lives we were created to live under our own power.  We acknowledge that the one who can cultivate within us the life we so deeply desire is God.  We acknowledge that he is the creator of all things, that he loves us, and that he alone has the power to bring about our transformation.

Without intentional discipleship we may be able to grit our teeth and struggle our way into behavior that matches our teaching, but over time, our real hearts will begin to show through.  We can only try our way to changed practices for so long before we revert back to what is true inside.  If, however, we engage in intentional discipleship our inner lives begin to transform, and when our lives are transformed, we begin to live the lives we were created to live.  When we are transformed, the abundant kingdom life becomes an inner reality that influences everything we do and flows out like streams of living water.

We have said that a disciple is a student, a student of the master, but since we can’t follow Jesus in the same way the Apostles did, what does it look like for someone to follow Jesus today? What are the characteristics of a modern, intentional discipleship?

I’d like to suggest that intentional discipleship is surrendering to the Father’s will and walking in Jesus’ presence constantly.  This surrendering and walking brings us into the kingdom by cultivating within me the life I was created to live.  I become the person God created me to be by the transformation of my inner character into the image of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit.  I believe this understanding of discipleship encapsulates the key elements of following Jesus.  Over the next few weeks what do you say we spend some time unpacking this definition?

Jesus was a rabbi, a spiritual teacher.  We often think of him as someone who strolled out of Nazareth into the life of the Messiah and rarely pause to consider the cultural and physical realities of the world in which he walked and taught.  Based on what we see in scripture, Jesus was an itinerant sage.  He traveled, taught in people’s homes, relied on the support of others, and had a group of people who followed and learned from him.  Over and over he was called by the title “rabbi,” which means teacher.  The language he used, the way he lived, taught and called people to follow him line up with the life of a rabbi.

Jesus certainly took seriously the Mishnah’s encouragement to make many disciples.  There were the twelve apostles who were his closest students.  There were another seventy-two that he sent out to spread his message. (Luke 10:1)  The story of his miraculous feeding of the five thousand demonstrated that many came to listen to his teaching, and that they would travel a great distance to do so. (Matthew 14:13-21) Many hearts were stirred by Jesus’ kingdom vision and chose to be his disciple in order that they might walk into the kingdom life.

What does this mean for us today?  Does Jesus expect us to be his disciples today, and if so how can we be expected to follow someone who is not physically present with us anymore?  There is no doubt that Jesus expects us to be his disciples in this day and age.  His final word before his ascension into heaven was to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Jesus didn’t say, “Go and make converts of all people.”  He didn’t tell us to make sure we believe in him or have the right theology.  Jesus said that we are to make disciples of all people.  His desire is that the same disciple-teacher relationship he had with his followers would mark our lives as well.  So, practically speaking, how do we do this today?  How do we follow Jesus when he is not bodily present with us today?

What is discipleship?  What do you think when you hear the word?  Do you think about something that gets a new believer up to speed?  Do you think about a class, or developing a relationship with someone who has been a Christian for less time than you?  This lack of clarity has kept us from fully understanding discipleship and therefore has gotten in the way of our practice of it.

Do you want to hear something interesting?  The word “discipleship” never appears in the Bible.  That’s right.  Do a quick search of biblegateway.com if you don’t believe me.  Your search will bring back exactly one result, the section heading for Luke 14:25-33.  If that doesn’t sound quite right, let me point out something else. The word “disciple” appears in the Gospels and Acts 260 times!

Because of this, there was once a time when I tried to eliminate the word discipleship from my vocabulary and replace it with disciple.  “Discipleship is something you do, while a disciple is something you are,” was my thought.  Of course that became a grammatical nightmare, and I quickly abandoned the struggle.  The struggle, however, got to the heart of our misunderstanding of discipleship.  God doesn’t want us to practice discipleship.  We are not called to DO discipleship.  Jesus wants us to BE disciples.

At a couple stops on the tour they decided to wear their shirts, emblazoned with a large WC, instead of their normal fineries, and the ladies of the Wheaton College Women’s Chorale quickly discovered that their European audiences didn’t think the design was all that clever.  You see, in Europe a restroom is often called a water closet, and signs marking their locations often abbreviate that with a large “WC.” There’s nothing like singing the Hallelujah Chorus while wearing a shirt that says “bathroom.”

The ladies of the Wheaton Women’s Chorale are not the only ones who have made cross-cultural communication blunders.  Poor translation once led Schweppes Tonic Water to promote “Schweppes Toilet Water” in Italy. Sales of the Chevy Nova suffered in South America until GM realized that Nova in Spanish means, “It won’t go,” and the “Got Milk?” campaign asked an unintended and rather personal question in Mexico, “Are you lactating?”

We have similar communication issues in the church.  We toss around words and phrases that I’m not sure if we fully understand.  We say things like, “Turn it over to God.”  “I know God has a plan for my life.”  “Jesus is always with me.”  Each of these phrases communicates a truth, but do we really know and believe what we are saying?  Do we really believe that Jesus is always with us?  What does it mean to turn something over to God?  What would it look like for us to actually live as if God has a plan for our lives?

The first is from Donald Miller.  I love his recent posts with the handwritten notes.  This one is especially great.

Next is a quote from Beuchner that a friend posted on her blog.

The final one is a benediction from another friend’s blog

May the child in the feeding trough, rejected from birth by family and royalty, call you softly into His presence this Christmas and remind you that because of His presence you are redeemed, because of His rejection you are accepted, and because of His death to come you are now alive. May the love of God the Father, incarnated by the life of Jesus Christ and implanted within us by the Holy Spirit go with you now and throughout this blessed Christmas.

Amen.

Have a blessed Christmas!

But this morning is different.  There is an unusual feeling in the air. The businessmen who typically hurry by in their own worlds making big money deals on their iPhones are now walking together.  They are smiling.  They are laughing.  They are talking to one another. They are carrying gifts.  And they are noticing our little drummer. They see him. They make eye contact with him.  They smile at him, and even give him a coin or two.

One drops a coin at his feet and looks in his eyes.  “Aren’t you coming, son?” He asks.

“Excuse me, sir? Coming where?”

“To meet the newborn king. You should come and see,” he says and turns to rejoin the crowd.

The boy drops his sticks and wonders if he is dreaming.  People are noticing him, acknowledging him and even speaking to him.  And now he is invited to visit a king?  How is this even possible?  With not a little bit of excitement he tosses his beat up old drum into a backpack, jumps up and runs to join the throng of pilgrims.

It is not until he is fully enveloped by the crowd that the dilemma of a gift occurs to him. “These men are all bringing expensive gifts, but I don’t have anything.  I beg for nickels on the corner. What could I possibly offer to a future king?” He considers abandoning his journey and returning to his corner until his ten-year-old curiosity gets the better of him, and he continues with the crowd.

The people before him come to a stop, and those behind continue to press forward.  They must have arrived.  He is too small to see past the people, but his size does allow him to squeeze and wiggle toward the front.  The closer he gets the denser the crowd grows and the harder he must push to get through.  With one final lunge he bursts free of the others.  No more than a few feet in front of him is the royal family themselves, but he is surprised by what he sees.  They are hardly what he expected.  This family is like him… poor.

For a few moments his surprise keeps him from noticing that everyone is staring at him, but as soon as he does, panic begins to fill his belly, his chest and his face.  He is sure that he looks like an idiot and everyone must be wondering why such a ragamuffin is standing before them.  For years he longed to be noticed, but all he wants now is to sink back into anonymity.

He looks around and sees the expensive gifts the men around him are carrying. “What could I possibly give?” He wonders. “All I have is a handful of coins, but these men have handfuls of hundred dollar bills?  What do I possibly have that is worthy to give a king?”

He lifts his head preparing to apologize and slip away but is surprised when he sees the mother smiling.  Her smile doesn’t mock or belittle but radiates warmth and love.  Her smile reminds him of his own mother’s.  He remembers the smile on her face when she gave him his drum or when she watched him play.

Hardly realizing what he is doing he pulls his drum from the backpack.  Without taking his eyes off of that warm, beautiful smile he sits and begins to bang out a simple rhythm.  “What am I doing?” He thinks, “I play my drum for coins not kings!” And then he looks at the baby king.  “Is that a smile?  Did he just smile at me?”

A boy, a little drummer boy who thinks he has nothing to give doesn’t bring a gift of gold or silver.  He doesn’t offer fine foods or spices.  He offers his drum.  He offers his talent.  He offers to the baby king himself.  What do you have to offer the king this season?

My two-year-old son, Caiden, is a truck boy.  He loves cars, trucks, trains, and vehicles of all kinds.  He can identify and call by name an excavator, bulldozer, backhoe, scraper grader, cherry-picker, forklift and the list goes on and on.

I don’t know what kind of kid I was, but these days I am a ball kid, so I am ashamed to admit that I walked away from this conversation disappointed that Caiden is into trucks and not balls.  To be fair, he does line up behind me like a half-pint halfback, take a handoff and run into the kitchen to spike the ball while yelling, “Touchdown!”  He’ll also run around with a hockey stick and follow Eddie Olczyk’s advice to keep his stick on the ice, but none of these activities compare to his love of anything with wheels, and as sad is it sounds, this disappointed me.

I want to share my love of sports with Caiden.  I believe there are great lessons to learn from playing sports. They teach us the value of teamwork, healthy competition and how to win or lose well, but at this point (excuse me while I vault to a conclusion), Caiden is more likely to be a mechanic than an NHL d-man.   If you are judging me and picturing the future destruction of my relationship with Caiden as I force him to play a sport he despises, please know that my response to this conversation made me sick.

In the end, I am grateful that this conversation uncovered my feelings. It has helped me to think through how I want to handle Caiden and his desire to play sports when he gets older. You see, I love Caiden like crazy, and I believe the most loving thing I can do is allow him to decide which sports, if any, he will play.  I will allow him to choose his own path even though it may not be what I would desire, and I do this because I love him.  Freedom, it turns out, flows from love.

I wonder if there is a parallel here with God’s love.  What if God’s great love is the guiding reason for free will?  Is it possible that because of his crazy love for us, he allows us to choose whatever path we will, even if it means not following him, rather than force us into a life we did not choose?

Advent is a season of expectation, a season of reflection on the coming Messiah.  That the Messiah would come was a promise, and a promise fulfilled! But let’s not forget that the Messiah’s arrival is only half the equation.  Many expected and watched for the Messiah with hope in their hearts, and yet when he came there were only a few that recognized and chose to follow him.  The Messiah has come, but we must respond appropriately.  Advent is a season of expectation and preparation.  Take some time today to prepare your heart for the coming of Jesus.