What is Discipleship? Viv Grigg First published in the REACH Communique, Vol 1, No 3, 1980 modified, 2007 |
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Discipleship begins with a total all-consuming allegiance and commitment to Jesus the Christ. In our next article, Discipleship and Relationships, we will meditate on how this love that precedes all others causes us to hate our self-centered relationships, especially with those close to us, in order to love Jesus Christ undividedly. How can a disciple hate himself or herself? the means is the cross. A disciple is to take up his cross. What is that cross? It is an instrument of slow painful death - a killing instrument. It is an instrument to kill our basic instincts, our self-love, self-protection, self-security. This is a death to the inner being. (concurrent with that death is the resurrection of the Spirit within us). "...And follow me..." If we follow Bruce Lee, we obey his disciplines. In the same way dying to self enables us to follow the "Disciplines of the Master." What are these disciplines of Jesus? Quiet time? Church attendance? Scripture memory? No! These are foundational, but the real disciplines are those of the inner spirit, shown in the beatitudes (See Discipleship and Self) What are you choosing daily? As you measure yourself against the Beatitudes, is your discipleship of the heart or in externals only? Today commit yourself to the Disciplines of Jesus. Today, choose to follow Him into the selflessness of the Sermon on the Mount. Today, choose to lose yourself (John 12:24,25), for in losing yourself, you will find the true self-identity of a Christ-one. In common terms , however, when people speak of discipleship, they tend to speak of the spiritual disciplines, the methodologies that facilitate this relationship, that came down through the pietists and were made famous in the Methodism of John Wesley. These are highlighted in the following use of the Navigators wheel diagram, and its adaptation by Crossroads Church to the development of ministry foci.
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 Discipleship and Self |
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