Quotes about Discipleship

Men of the highest education in the arts and sciences have learned precious lessons from Christians in humble life who were designated by the world as unlearned. But these obscure disciples had obtained an education in the highest of all schools. They had sat at the feet of Him who spoke as "never man spake." [252]

Man is to represent Christ. He is to be long-suffering toward his fellow men, to be patient, forgiving, and full of Christlike love. He who is truly converted will manifest respect for his brethren; he will do as Christ has commanded. Jesus said, "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another".

In a single sentence, Gandhi has given me a new way to live with the verse at the end of Matthew's Gospel, which Christians sometimes call the Great Commission. The way to make a disciple is to be one. If your life does not speak, your footnotes will have limited impact. Become worthy of the message, and join the spinning brigade. Why isn't that the Great Commission?

We seem to have a strange idea of Christian service. We will buy books, travel miles to hear a speaker on blessings, pay large sums to hear a group singing the latest Christian songs--but we forget that we are soldiers.

Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. It's that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.

The Jesus Creed teaches us that a disciple's responsibility is to love God by following Jesus. You only follow someone else when your own lights or sense of direction are not good enough.

The question: What is a Christian? My answer: A Christian is someone who follows Jesus* My former answer: A Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus, and the Christian life focuses on personal practices of piety.

The ways of reading Revelation that spend time speculating about the questions When will all this happen? and Who is the antichrist? fail the church in discipleship. Instead of a discipleship that teaches us to discern Babylon among us and shows us how to live in Babylon as dissidents instead of conformists, these speculative questions teach Christians how to wait for the escape from Babylon.

when we peer into our own hearts, we will have sufficient cause — even laughably ridiculous cause — to see our own sin and be humbled before God. That will lead us to an other-awareness that our fellow disciples and humans are like us, sinners in need of mercy, grace, forgiveness, and patience. This reversal of the proclivity to be gods creates on our part a tenderness in our perception of the sins of others.

There's a difference between focusing on being right and focusing on being a follower of Jesus.

Our churches have not discipled people in the last forty years in Christoform power but have instead discipled them into playing Babylon's power games. They have decided who might be their next king, only to realize that kings become wild things. Instead of giving more and more power to presidents, to senators, to representatives, to Washington DC and states and cities and villages and towns, we need to search again for Christoform power.

In our local context, the pastors and elders and deacons are disciples of Jesus, called to submit first to him and to nurture others into serving one another as Jesus himself served his disciples. The strangest words in the church ought to be the words "authority" and "power.