In this episode Matt and Luke discuss one of Christ the Redeemer's core values: Discipleship
Welcome to the Here Below podcast, a ministry of Christ the Redeemer in Greenville, South Carolina. The great doxology exclaims,
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise him, all creatures here below.
Praise him above ye heavenly host.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
This is our attempt to do just that, to join our voices with that great heavenly chorus, providing reflections that are grounded in Scripture, formed by the great tradition, and oriented towards spiritual formation in the everyday stuff of life here below. Enjoy the episode.
Welcome to another episode of Here Below podcast. Again, my name is Matt Wireman. I'm one of the pastors at Christ the Redeemer Church in Greenville, South Carolina. And I've got the privilege again of talking with my good friend, Dr. Luke Stamps, who is a faithful member at Redeemer as well as a community group director, which is jargon for our small group ministry at Redeemer. And he also serves as what is the exact title now? Is it associate, assistant, full? Full professor. You're a full professor. Wow. And I am just an associate or an assistant, whatever the second level is. I don't know. You should call me Dr. Stamps. Yes, yes. And you can call me Reverend Dr. Wireman. That's right. Doctor, doctor.
But today we're going to be talking about really our second core value. So we're going to use these first five episodes of the Here Below podcast to just explain what we mean when we say different words. And in large part, that's really the work that we want to set out to do is to bring clear definitions to the words that we use so that as we go forward on this journey together that you'll know what we mean when we say the word, for this time, discipleship.
And so we're going to just talk as two good friends. As we were talking before we hit record, that we're just going to treat this as a couple good friends who are talking through these core values, talking through various things that will come up inevitably as we talk together. And we're really excited about talking about this extremely important, and I think in large part in the American church, and I typically put that qualifier on as the American church because I don't want to presume to speak for the church in Africa or in Asia or what have you, but you'll hear me say that a lot.
But there are definite problems that I have seen, and I'm sure that you've seen too, Luke, of problems in the American church stemming from a lack of or I would even put poor discipleship. So we're discipling others in some capacity. The question is whether it's healthy or unhealthy, good or bad in a lot of ways, because we're always leading people and mentoring, so to speak, in the ways of Jesus. And a lot of times those are not really the ways of Jesus but are contrived understandings of what it means to be a Christian.
So all that preliminary is all preliminary work, but I wanted to ask you when I talk to folks, I have a certain concept in mind of what I mean when I say discipleship, but how would you explain what discipleship is? And maybe even better before that, like what is a disciple would be a good place to start.
Right. Yeah, so we get our word disciple from the Latin word discipulus. So it's just a transliteration of a Latin word that means student, learner, even schoolboy in some contexts. It's similar to the Greek word that's used in the New Testament, mathetes. It just means learner.
So this is the Great Commission of Jesus, right? I sometimes say if Baptists had a life verse, the way that many Christians adopt a life verse, I feel like the Great Commission of Matthew 28, 18 to 20 would be pretty close to what it means to be a Baptist. And for many evangelicals more broadly, not just exclusively to the Baptists, but Jesus tells us to go into all the world and make disciples. So that's the verb form of this word, to make disciples.
A disciple is just a learner. It's building on the ancient Jewish practice of disciples who would attach themselves to a rabbi to submit to the rabbi's interpretation of the Torah, the law, to submit themselves as the kind of apprentice to their way of life. And so Jesus is building on that.His disciples refer to him at times as rabbi, which means teacher. So to be a disciple is to be enrolled in the school of Christ, we might say. It's related conceptually to the New Testament term doctrine, didache, or didaskalia in Greek. So to be a disciple is to be a learner of doctrine. I think sometimes we have a kind of allergy to the word doctrine, because we might associate it with people who are kind of overly scrupulous about the specifics of some theological system. Or, you know, we sometimes hear people say doctrine divides, and sometimes it does. Sometimes that division is necessary. Sometimes it's unwarranted. But doctrine or teaching, the body of truth that we have received in Holy Scripture, is part of what it means to be a disciple. To be a disciple is to be a learner, and what we learn in the school of Christ is sound doctrine. That's how Paul describes it. It's sound. It's healthy. There's a life-giving, health-giving teaching about God, about creation, about humanity, about sin, about the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection of Christ, the way that the Holy Spirit applies the work of Christ to our lives, the life of spiritual growth that issues forth from that.
So Paul in Titus 2 talks about teaching what accords with sound doctrine, which as he spells it out there in Titus has to do with the way older men are to conduct themselves in the church and younger men, older women, younger women, servants. So sound doctrine has to do with the way that the teaching of the gospel is lived out in the concrete particulars of our lives. So doctrine produces health. It produces life. As we come to understand the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, so as we follow Jesus as our rabbi, it turns out he's much more than that, right? Jesus is not just another life coach for us. We're not just doing self-help in a life of discipleship with just a Christian veneer. But to be a disciple of Jesus is to submit to him as he reveals himself to be, which is to say as our Lord and Savior, as the eternal Son of God made flesh, the one that we worship, the one that we submit to for our eternal life, the one that we are conformed to by the power of the Spirit.
So discipleship really is just a way of describing the whole Christian life as we learn what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a human as we follow the Lord Jesus Christ.
Yeah, I want to go back to something you said a little earlier. You said that, you know, the popular phrase that doctrine divides. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that became a popular phrase? What divides if it's not doctrine then?
Right. Yeah, so I mean as the adage goes, doctrine divides and ethics unites. So I think a lot of times people think that, you know, we disagree about all these things as Christians, as different denominations. If we could just focus on loving our neighbor, loving our enemy, following the moral demands of Jesus, then we'll avoid the kind of divisions that we see in the church whenever we focus too much on doctrine. And I just think that's not an option available to us, right? Again, to be a disciple is to be a learner. But we learn a sound doctrine and we also learn the ethical implications that flow from that. So it's all of a piece. It's all part of the same thing. And certainly doctrine can divide, as I mentioned, in some unhelpful ways, right? Whenever we end up treating secondary or tertiary doctrines as if they were primary doctrines, then we can kind of have a fundamentalist mindset.
Yeah, what do you mean by that? That needs some definition as well. I mean, originally the term fundamentalist comes from the fundamentals, which was a collection of writings edited by R.A. Torrey, an evangelical leader in the 20th century, that basically was describing the fundamentals of the faith. So the virgin birth of Christ and the penal substitutionary death of Christ, the inerrancy of the Bible, things that are really, really important to affirm and that were important, especially in those times, to affirm in the face of modern liberal theology. Basic building blocks of what right doctrine is.
Right, yeah. And so in that sense, I'm happy to wear the label fundamentalist if we're talking about the fundamentals of the faith. But the way fundamentalism came to be lived out in the context of late 19th and early 20th centuryAmerica, still has residual effects today, was a kind of sectarianism where it's not enough just to affirm the fundamentals, but we have to, I mean, it's really kind of similar to the Pharisees, kind of building a hedge around the law so that we don't disobey it. So you get all these extra biblical rules that are associated with fundamentalism. You can't wear pants if you're a woman, or you can't play cards, or you can't go to the movies or listen to secular music or whatever.
Fundamentalism also came to be characterized by a principle called second degree separation. So it's not enough just to separate from the liberals, but you also have to separate from Christians who are conservative in their theology, but who are insufficiently separated from the liberals in your mind. So like Billy Graham, whenever he would come into town to do a crusade, he would cooperate with any church that wanted to, including some mainline churches that may be teaching things that Graham himself didn't agree with. But the fundamentalists opposed his crusades because they thought that he was insufficiently separated from these other groups.
And so you have in the post-World War II era, the emergence of a new kind of fundamentalism that was no longer, that was seeking to no longer be sectarian and separated from the world, but wanted to be re-engaged with the world, re-engaged with scholarship, re-engaged with art and politics and culture. So you have leaders like Carl F.H. Henry and Billy Graham and John Stott and J.I. Packer and many other names that come to be associated with what came to be called neo-evangelicalism, what we just today would call evangelical.
So we make a distinction between evangelical and fundamentalism, not really based on what they believe, but on their posture. How they practice it. Yeah, exactly right.
So yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just gonna say that to bring it back to this idea of doctrine divides, I mean, there is a kind of fundamentalism that treats all doctrines as if they were sort of equal in the hierarchy of belief. Could you just give us an example of what you're thinking?
Yeah, so for example, if you think that what you believe about the timing of the tribulation is as important as what you believe about the deity of Christ, then you tend to separate along those lines in some unhealthy ways. So in that sense, doctrine dividing can be the fruit of just sort of flattening out the system of Christian belief and treating every doctrine, every belief that you have as if it were of primary importance.
Whereas there are some doctrines that we hold with more certainty because they're more clearly revealed in the Bible. There are other doctrines that we hold more loosely. There are some doctrines that we hold with such conviction that we believe that we should separate into different churches and denominations. We think about, for example, the subjects of baptism, who should be baptized, believers only or believers in their children. So that's an important enough doctrine for the practice of the church that it will likely cause us to be separated into different denominations. But we can still have a spirit of charity and openness to other Christian traditions who differ with us on those things.
And so doctrine does divide. I mean, and sometimes that's inevitable. We should seek to divide from unbiblical doctrine.
Yeah, I was gonna say not all division is bad, right?
Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Jesus himself distinguished himself from the teaching of the Pharisees. He says, no, I'm not the same train of teachers and I'm not the same kind of rabbi that you have been.
Yeah, and he even says, like, I don't think that I came to bring peace but division, but a sword to divide even within a family.
Yeah, so we're not advocating like mushing it all together and say, you know, it's not that important. Actually, division is not necessarily a bad thing, but we overly divide ourselves over things that don't matter all that much.
Right, or even if they really matter, they're complicated enough that Christians believe in the same things about biblical authority and interpretations and different ways of putting the pieces of the puzzle together. I mean, I think about something like Calvinism, which divides so many churches and denominations. I mean, I think the doctrines of grace and the doctrines of human responsibility and free will are reallyimportant. And the way that we put those things together really matters for how we think about missions and evangelism and the Christian life. But, you know, they're complicated enough that we should have some humility, you know, and some charity towards people who sort things out differently.
I'd like to just, because I would love for us to riff more on some of the complications in our current cultural milieu that we find ourselves in, but I think before we get there, to continue to tease out the idea of discipleship, particularly I'm thinking of the work by Jamie Smith, or James K.A. Smith, as he writes his books under that name, James K.A. Smith, in Desiring the Kingdom, and he's got a trilogy on this concept of we are liturgical beings, or to put it another way, we are whole people that are body and soul.
And so much within modern evangelicalism, well, I don't think this is always, I think within certain circles of modern evangelicalism, there is a, what he calls, we are heads on a stick. So we can, a lot of times, if, you know, if I were to ask somebody, hey, how's your relationship with Jesus going? A lot of times people will dip into, well, I'm learning X, Y, and Z, and it's cognitively based, as opposed to affectionately based or emotionally involved in that, and that's not to trump one over the other, but it's actually to say, okay, how is your cognitive learning affecting your emotions? Or even more so, how is it affecting your physical life?
Like, if you know that the, you know, swindlers won't inherit the kingdom of heaven, are you swindling? You know, are you doing things that are antithetical to the things that Scripture teaches? So how would you explain to someone this holistic understanding of a disciple that a lot of times instead of, or not even instead of, but how do we bring to bear the fact that we are embodied souls, right? We are souls with bodies and bodies with souls. Like, we're not, we don't have just a shell that we're getting ready to put aside, and then we're going to really worship Jesus in spirit, but we're actually going to be resurrected people with bodies and how the body plays into this concept of discipleship.
Yeah. Yeah. One of the reasons why I jumped to the passage in Titus 2, right, is because that this is how the Apostle Paul thinks about sound doctrine, is that it's lived out in the concrete particulars of our embodied existence. He addresses old men who have certain, you know, expectations, certain callings, certain temptations, younger men, younger women, older women, so that there is no spirituality apart from the body. You are your body.
I mean, I think we need to do some work to try to recover a biblical theology of the human person as an embodied soul, learned and souled body. Christians sort that out differently, you know, exactly how to work that out theologically and philosophically, but I think we can say you are your body. Your body is not just a tool or a shell that you contingently possess, but you are your body. And there is no spirituality apart from the body. Everything you do in the spiritual life has an embodied manifestation.
When you hear the word preached, it's echoing off sound waves, and it's reaching the bones of your inner ear. A preacher is up there opening a text or at least looking at a screen or whatever, something that is physical. Obviously, we emphasize at our church, and consistent with the church's practice for 2,000 years, that the ministry is both word and sacrament, right? So we don't just hear, but we also see and smell and touch, taste and feel.
We are in the school of Christ as disciples, but what that means is to be with him and to follow him. And those are embodied realities. One of the things that you said a moment ago was, and you mentioned that there were actual vibrations that hit our middle ear and hit the stirrup and what are the different parts of the... The hammer and the anvil.
Yeah, exactly. Bill also had physiology. Yeah, but the only way that we actually know God is through our physical body. That's the only way we know God, is through our physical body.And that goes back to Paul's teaching that how will people know unless someone goes and preaches to them? Well, the assumption is that you're going to hear this person saying this with your physical body. There's no like secret Gnostic knowledge that you have to commune with that only a select few can get when their spirit is wedded to the great spirit, right?
And I think as Christians, we should really reckon with what our discipleship looks like in real time, that it's not just a matter of knowing things. That is one piece of the puzzle, but teaching them to obey everything that I've said. How do you obey? You obey with your body.
And I do think just a deeper understanding that our doctrine is our ethic, right? Orthodoxy always leads to orthopraxy. What we know by virtue of it being God the creator speaking will always create something, will always have effect in something.
And one of the practical applications of that is that discipleship is not just spiritual disciplines. Spiritual disciplines or spiritual exercises are crucially important for drawing near to God, prayer and meditation and silence and fasting and service and the things that we normally think about with regard to the disciplines. But discipleship is also just cleaning up the dishes after dinner. It's a happy heart. Right, yeah, right. Serving your family, going to work, doing your work with diligence.
And again, that's why Paul is emphasizing in the household codes, as they're sometimes called, like in Titus 2 or Ephesians 5 and 6, this is what discipleship looks like on the ground. It means that:
Children should obey their parents in the Lord.
Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
Wives should submit to their husbands.
Servants should be dutiful and masters should be merciful.
So it has to do with, again, the concrete particulars of our lives. That's all grounded in a living relationship with the living Lord, which is fostered through the disciplines and drawing near to God and through the ordinary means of grace in the church. But discipleship is just life. It's not something other than our lives lived before the face of God, seeking to glorify God, to love and serve our neighbors for the sake of God.
So it's not something that we just do like whenever we meet with other believers to do Bible study and ask questions of accountability. Those are hugely important things. But it's also just going to work. It's taking care of our bodies. It's making sure we have enough sleep and enough water and good nutrition and enough exercise and taking care of our property.
I had a professor in seminary who said that one of the best things that you can do for your spiritual life, or one of the way he put it was one of the biggest diagnostics that I can tell about whether someone is living wisely is the state of their car. If your car is a complete wreck, you just throw trash. And I was convicted by this because my car is not always clean and we have five kids, so that doesn't help things. But it was an interesting way of evaluating our discipleship: is your life in order?
I think one of the reasons why Jordan Peterson has struck a chord with so many, and I don't know enough about Jordan Peterson to be an ardent advocate or critic. I have read a little bit of his book, 12 Rules for Life or whatever. But one of the things that I think he is tapping into that resonates with so many is just exercising our own agency in our lives. Like before you go out to conquer the world, you might want to ask if your own life is in order. And there's some creational wisdom in that.
I don't know where Peterson is in his spiritual journey. I know he's taken some gestures towards Christianity. You may want to cut all this out of the podcast if you don't want to talk about all that. That's fine. Because again, I don't have like a strong opinion about Jordan Peterson one way or another. But I do think there's some creational wisdom in the idea that you should make your bed, that you should wake up and live intentionally.
And I think that we have tosay more than that, obviously, in Christian discipleship, because Christian spirituality is not just natural spirituality. It's not just, you know, again, it's not just self-help with a Christian veneer. But it does build upon those natural principles and include them in the grace that's been given to us in the gospel so that now, having been regenerated by the Spirit, having been redeemed by the work of Christ, we have new reason, new motivation, new direction for living our creational lives, like living as the created beings that we are, the embodied beings that we are, which will include some, you know, some insights from natural personal development. But it's framed in the gospel, lest it become a kind of works-based righteousness, right? So we're not just trying to improve ourselves or transform ourselves in discipleship. But the discipleship that Christ brings about in our lives, the transformation that he brings about in our lives, implicates the whole of our lives. It's not just something we do on Sundays or something we do in a Bible study, but it has to do with our daily tasks.
Yeah, you mentioned one of your seminary profs. I have another seminary prof in Old Testament. We were walking through the book of Proverbs. And, you know, the book of Proverbs says these are generally true. Like there obviously are exceptions to the rule, but the exceptions prove the rule in a lot of ways. And one of the things he said that was really profound, and obviously it stuck with me. Wow, am I going on 25 years now? Like 20 years ago was that the interior life will always work itself out to the exterior life. He says this is not always the case, but more often than not, if I look at somebody who's exterior life, like they have unkept hair, whether it's popular or not, you know, but you can have unkept hair that's fashionable, I guess, or not any hair for my case, and that keeps things really simple. But you look at if somebody is bathed, if they bathe themselves or if they shave or they don't, you know, like if they're taking care of, he says that will tell me a lot about their interior life. If there's order in there, because the order inside will work itself out both explicitly by trying, but then also implicitly by not trying. It'll just begin to take effect in how we conduct ourselves. If your interior soul has quiet and peace, it's going to be really hard to start yelling, you know, or start, you know, there's going to be an integrity between your soul and your body and how it works itself out. And that's always stuck with me. Obviously, it's not always true, but it more often than not is true when you look at somebody's life on the outside that is in shambles. A lot of times it's because there's a lack of tending to the interior life.
And anyway, I don't want to riff too much on that because I do want to keep us to this concept of, you know, I think a lot of churches would say they are all about, like they want to be about discipleship. And in fact, when I go through our membership class, I tell folks, hopefully these first two core values aren't anything new if you've been in a church. Hopefully community and discipleship would be part of that. But I do wonder, I look at the landscape, the church landscape in America, and I do wonder what we are producing. Because you've got issues with deconstruction, which is not a new thing. It's a new term for an old thing of apostasy or of drifting from the faith or all these other terms. But within our own day, there are a lot of folks who grew up in really, quote unquote, strong Christian homes who are starting to say, yeah, I don't want any part of that, you know. So in line with that, what would you say that a lot of churches are producing? If it's not disciples, namely folks that know the Bible and live the Bible, how would you, and maybe I'm being a little too harsh because I can be that way as well. I don't want to be that way. And yet I do wonder like so much of the issues that we see in our current culture with, you know, Christians not knowing how to talk about certain issues in the politicalsphere or not being able to know, you know, what the Bible teaches on any number of topics, which seems to be a large swath of biblical illiteracy in the church of being able to sit down and just read their Bible. because it is good to commune with God. I mean, how would you, I mean, do you think I'm being a little too harsh or do you think there's some validity to what I'm saying?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say that we do have a crisis of discipleship. I don't think it's necessarily the case that churches are failing to disciple. We are forming and shaping people in some way or another. But it's to what end and in what direction, right? I think that we have, in the evangelical church, I feel like we, in some cases, have emphasized evangelization to the exclusion of discipleship, right? These things aren't really separated. The Great Commission is the call to make disciples. So we can distinguish evangelism or evangelization as a component of that, right? But we're not just trying to win converts and then throw them in the church and go out and win more converts. You know, like the goal is to bring people to Christ, to bring them to the biblical Christ into a living relationship of love with Christ.
And so I think sometimes we can emphasize evangelism so much, and you can't overemphasize evangelism. That's not what I'm trying to say, but you can emphasize the front end of discipleship and not the back end, you know? And sometimes our worship services are like that, you know, where it's all about casting the net, making the call, bringing people, you know, trying to convince people to answer the invitation and so on. And we're not really building people up in the faith, teaching them, you know, the truths of the faith, teaching them the practices of the faith.
And there's no panacea. I mean, you could teach people all of that and people still have free will and can walk away, you know? So there's no silver bullet, you know, that will solve the problem of people leaving or, you know, abandoning the faith of their youth. But I do think it would go a long way if we more intentionally catechized or instructed, right? That's what catechesis is another word that we probably need to define. But every church is catechizing or instructing their church members in some way. We just want to be more intentional with that, more robust with that, more deeply biblical with that, more informed by the Christian tradition in that.
And so, you know, we have some work to do to catechize, to instruct people in the faith once delivered to the saints, to know what they believe and why they believe it, to know why we practice what we practice, to understand as we've been emphasizing the embodied nature of our discipleship. So it's not just what you learn, but it also has to do with your desires, having your loves shaped by certain practices and habits. That's really what we're after in discipleship is virtue formation, which takes place through habits, which takes place by following exemplars, you know? So we need mentors in this.
And so some of those things I think we need to shore up in all of our churches. No one is really exempted from this. We have a lot of work to do to catechize, to model, and to instruct people in what we believe, what we practice.
Yeah, we're walking through the book of Acts right now in our church. And in Paul's first missionary journey with Barnabas, and I would actually argue probably a second missionary journey. That's for another time, another day. But I drew attention to the fact that Paul and Barnabas are going into this frontier, right? They're going out and spreading this great gospel and they're seeing people come to know Jesus and they're establishing these locales of people meeting in each other's homes and dedicating themselves to the apostles' teaching and the breaking of bread and all these things.
But there's a moment where they've kind of come to the end of that first missionary journey and they're like, it's actually good for us. Let us go back and return to the places where we first preached the gospel and make sure the churches are doing well. I think a lot of times we overuse the metric of quantity and we don't use the metric of quality. Or to put it another way, faithfulness and fruitfulness, right? A lot of times people say, I'mjust being faithful to the gospel and I may not see a convert. And it's like, well, actually, if you're being faithful, you will be fruitful. Maybe not in this life, and obviously I'm not talking about frontier missions and all the, again, speaking about generalities and generally true, that you need to have both.
Or put it another way, I could have a grapevine that has tons of grapes on it, but they could just be measly little grapes. And I don't want just, I want a lot of grapes, but I also want a lot of healthy grapes.
I think that in a lot of ways, when we think about discipleship, you're right. I think a lot of times we can say, oh, well, a thousand people just came to know Jesus. Well, that's awesome. But then you need to start digging down into who is Jesus? Because when the flaming arrows of the devil come to tempt people, or the cares of this life choke out that seed that was sown, that it sprouted, and you can rejoice over the sprouting that's happening, but you need to do a lot of work of amending the soil.
And I would say that Peter talks about this, to add to your faith all of these virtues, right? And to not just let your faith be something that you did when you were 12 years old. But I oftentimes, in our church, actually last summer, I walked through the book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzaro. And in that, he tells of a story of a guy who came up to him who says, you know, I've been a Christian for 20 years. I think it's 20, 2022 or something like that. 2022 years. He says, but instead of being a 22-year-old Christian, I've been a one-year-old Christian 22 times. In other words, he didn't exercise self-awareness enough. He didn't cultivate the inner virtues of a self-controlled life, a gentle life.
When you think of the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and so forth. That takes work. And it takes Spirit-empowered work, but it still takes work that we are co-laborers with God in our own development as disciples.
Because I don't think... A disciple's goal, if I were to put a fine point on it, the goal of a disciple is to look and act and talk and think like Jesus. Jesus called the disciples so that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach. Well, he was the one preaching. So implicit within that is disciples begin to take on the accoutrements or the characteristics of their rabbi, of their teacher.
And I think that if we have that concept in our mind of... I know that a lot of people like to lambast what would Jesus do, but I think there's a lot of great truth in that. We need to ask ourselves, what would Jesus do in this situation? Well, he probably wouldn't yell. Or he might yell, right? There's a certain prudence. He excoriated the religious leaders, so it's not that he's always meek and mild. But then at the same time, he didn't yell at the woman caught in adultery, for example.
So what would Jesus do, I think, does have a place in our discipleship as opposed to just totally saying, oh, we can't save people. It's like, well, we're not calling people to save people, but we are calling one another to follow my example, as Paul says, follow my example as I followed the example of Christ.
So there's this shaping that has to be done in our interior life and then in our ethic. And you can't have one without the other.
Right. Which is, I mean, the goal of salvation is not just the removal of the obstacle or sin and guilt. That's foundational, and that's absolutely crucial. I mean, without that, we wouldn't have any hope, right? But the goal is having removed that obstacle to be restored to friendship with God and to have our natures renewed and to serve God.
I read as a part of my morning prayer most mornings the Benedictus of Zechariah, his song of praise in Luke 1. And the goal of the salvation that he praises God for there is that we might serve God without fear. The goal of the salvation is that we would serve and worship God. It's not just that we can have our sins forgiven, but the goal is that we might serve him, right?
And part of that, not only is Jesus our representative and substitute, living a faithful life in our place, dyingan atoning death in our place, but he's also our example. And I think sometimes we can miss that, that emphasis on the imitation of Christ. This really is what Christian spirituality is. It's having the character of Christ formed in us by the power of the Spirit through the Word of God in the fellowship of the saints. That's really what we mean by discipleship, like you said.
Another author that you and I know have both benefited from is Dallas Willard. I think it's Willard who says that the Christian life is basically asking what would Jesus do if he were living my life right now, or something like that. A great book that I would recommend on some of these issues we've been talking about is The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard, where he emphasizes things like the spirituality of the body and so on. I'd recommend Renovation of the Heart as well. That's an excellent one by him.
But just answering, if Jesus were living my life, I mean, Jesus had his own unique calling as the Son of God, which meant that he wasn't married and he had this utterly unique mission as the incarnate God to die as the sinless sacrifice. So obviously he doesn't have my precise vocation. But if he were living my life, what would Jesus act like as:
A husband to my wife
A father to my children
An employee to my employer
What would the character of Christ look like if it were incarnated in the specifics of my life? That's really what discipleship is. And going back to Paul's example, that his goal is to present the people that he cared for and he loved and he sacrificed for to full Christian maturity, is what he says.
And if you think even about Jesus' own example of being born again, it doesn't make sense like Jesus would just say, that's all we need. We just need a lot of babies. He wants them to develop into full, mature Christians, right? That is the real goal of looking, really reclaiming and living out of that image of God that we have been created in that has been marred by sin. But then Jesus has been able to forgive us of that to then be able to live the life that we were created in the beginning to live in the first place.
And that's the real beauty and power is that this imagery of you were a slave and the implication is now you're free. Now go use your freedom for the benefit of others, laying it down for other people. And it takes a lifetime. I think that's one thing you need to emphasize is that the life of discipleship has many fits and starts. It has many seasons of advance and sometimes seasons of regression because it's life. And all of us go through phases.
You mentioned the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality book and one of the things that he picks up in that book is what Saint John of the Cross calls the dark night of the soul. The way that Scazzaro, is that how you pronounce his name? Yeah, that's at least the way I pronounce it. I think I called him Tony Sachere or something to you one time. You were trying to make it really, really. No, but Scazzaro, he refers to the dark night as the wall and all of us hit the wall at some point in our life where we may be even doing all the things that we know to do that are reading our Bible, praying, going to church, maybe walking in, you know, where we don't have any unrepentant of sin. And you reach this point in your life where it just seems like God is as far away as the distant galaxies. You don't feel God's presence at all.
It's comforting to know that that is a nearly universal experience for the great spiritual masters in the history of the church. Everyone goes through that kind of experience, the dark night as Saint John of the Cross calls it. And then you might break through in advance and you might hit another wall. There's more than one dark night. And maybe the other side of that same wall. You may have just done a U-turn at the other side. Yeah, exactly. And so it's not just like a strict linear progression. We're kind of describing an ideal here of people who are informed by sound doctrine, living a life of faithfulness in our embodied existence and all the arenas of our life. But all of us, me, you, everyone goes through seasons of wandering, seasons of sin, seasons of dryness. And that's all a part of discipleship too. The goal is just to heed the callof Jesus to come further up and further in. And that takes a lifetime to pursue. Yeah, I know I'm excited to take people on this journey as. Yeah, no, I'm excited to take people on this journey because there's inevitably going to be things that we revisit. And we're reading together, you and I, The Ascent to Truth by Thomas Merton. And he argues, we're not going to, I'm just putting a pin in it for us to talk about later and to kind of whet people's appetites, that his argument is that the mystics, particularly John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, that they were deeply embedded in a rich theological heritage, namely of Thomas Aquinas.
A lot of times the mystics are seen as just, they roll their eyes up in the back of their head, and they just stand on the top of a pillar for 30 years or whatever. And I think that's just a misnomer of what the mystics were after. And if you read Teresa, and if you read John of the Cross, you see this deeply abiding understanding of orthodoxy, of having a clear understanding of who God is. They weren't trying to make God in their image. They were deeply committed to having certain understanding of God is a triune God. And it's not just whatever they thought as they were in some kind of entranced state.
But in the same vein, it is healthy and good to be so enveloped in the love of God and the person of God that we do find ourselves in a place of entranced love. There ought to be moments where we have spiritual uplift, where our emotions are affected because that's what happens when you're in a genuine relationship. And so you have the, as it's been said, the fodder of doctrine so that you can have the flames of practice.
And I think that, so I just am whetting people's appetites for what's coming down the pike, because it's deeply embedded in our understanding of discipleship and what does a mature Christian look like. We're not talking about absolute perfection in this life, but we are talking about what the early church fathers called theosis, or being made more like our maker, made into the divine image, the divine image that we enjoy, and the divine nature, even as Peter calls it, like you are participants of that divine nature.
So what does that look like? Well, we're not going to answer that on this episode, but we're going to answer it in part, as we see in part on future episodes. But any final words that you might have as it relates to the gracious work of discipleship that we are called to as Christians?
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I would want to emphasize about discipleship is to always ground it in the gospel, lest it become a new law that we think we have to keep in order to please God. You know, I had someone email me just the other day who was talking about something I had written on the spiritual disciplines, and he was just wondering if he was up for it. You know, he'd been so battered and burdened by life and by his own sin that the idea of having a new list of things to do just felt overwhelming.
And I think that one danger whenever people get really interested in spirituality, spiritual formation, spiritual disciplines, is the temptation of moral transformation. I read an article with that title or something like that several years ago, or a year or so ago, the temptation of moral transformation, where we think that we have to do this on our own, that we can actually manufacture our own transformation if we just follow the right formula. And this doesn't work. It won't work. And, you know, you can try and you will fail because you can't manufacture transformation in your life or anyone else's.
And so the goal is to ground this in the grace of the gospel, to just be reminded again and again and again, day by day, that God has begun this good work in us, and he will see it to completion. And returning to the well of grace is what motivates us, empowers us, enables us to continue a life of discipleship. We follow a rabbi who's not just a rabbi, but one who at the end of the story dies on our behalf and is raised to new life. And it's only in him, by his spirit, that we can even begin to make the first steps. And he is stubborn enough that he refuses to let usgo, right? And he will complete the work that he's begun in our lives. And our aim in discipleship is our willing ascent. It's just you and I are also reading this book by Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart. Whenever we recommend books here, we're not necessarily endorsing every jot and tittle. I should probably make that qualification as well. And movies if we recommend movies, or music for that matter. Yeah, for sure.
But Keating says that the goal in, he's talking about prayer in that book, but the goal of prayer is not to make it happen, but just not to stand in the way, you know, not to prevent it from happening, you know. And in a way, the same thing is true of all discipleship. The goal is not to manufacture it, but it's to give our willing ascent, our yes to God, and not stand in the way of his transformation of us. Or as Bono has said, we need to surrender. There you go. That's his latest memoir is Surrender.
And I do think that the spiritual disciplines take on a whole different meaning when you start with the crucified one who loves you and gave himself for you. And you become so enamored with his love for you that you are compelled day in and day out to pray without ceasing. That doesn't become a burden anymore. It becomes a life that you commune with God as you're washing the dishes, as you're walking the dog, as you're doing any number of quote unquote mundane tasks, you realize that they are actually replete with the very presence of God, that he is, because along with that, he says, "Never will I leave you nor forsake you." So every moment is a moment to commune with God, but it doesn't become burdensome when you start with the one who loved you and gave himself up for you.
And the great joy, and there is no greater privilege than to contemplate the divine, to spend our lives with God here, right now, not in some time in the future. That is true. Eternal life is not only in the future though, but eternal life is meant to be enjoyed right now. Like you are children of God right now. This is life on earth can be a reflection of life in the hereafter.
So, well good. Well, we got to, for the sake of time, we'll end with a word of prayer and then our next episode will be on liturgy. So that's episode three as we kind of keep hashing through our core values as a church. And our goal too, I'll just reiterate, is to serve both our church of Christ the Redeemer, but then the church at large. Because inevitably there are people that are going to be listening to this podcast that are not members of our church or attending our church. And we want to be a blessing to them as well.
I've shared with Luke and I know he also gets correspondences. Even just a couple of days ago, actually yesterday, I got an email from a guy in Australia who found our church in some way and wanted to use some of our resources. I was like, yeah, you can totally use our resources and I will fly down to explain them if you'd like. Have a nice free trip. But there are inevitably people that are on this journey and that are wanting to see what does a Christian life look like that's informed by the history of the church, the tradition of the church, sound doctrine, but also a desire to earnestly follow Jesus' ways.
And so at Christ the Redeemer, we're trying to serve our church, but we also want to serve the church at large. So that's our hope in this. And so as we begin these first five episodes, those are our core values. And then we're going to kind of develop that more as we continue to go along.
And if you have questions, you can actually just email us and we'll maybe treat one of those questions in one of our episodes. And I'll just give you, you can right now, you can email, this is always dangerous, but you can email pastors at redeemergreenville.com. Again, that's pastors at redeemergreenville.com. Actually make that admin. Sorry, I'm doing this off the cuff. This is dangerous. Admin, A-D-M-I-N, admin at redeemergreenville.com. And our administrative assistant will compile all that. And maybe we'll treat one of those questions on our next podcast.
So with that being said, Luke, would you mind closing us in a word of prayer?
Lord Jesus, we longto draw near to you and to be with you where you are, to know you in your word and through intimate prayer. Heard and through intimate prayer. prayer, and then to rise from our quiet hours with you to serve our neighbors for your sake. Father, we ask that you would help us to follow your son by the power of your spirit. Forgive us for the ways that we failed you and give us grace and a desire to please you more and to walk with you daily in all of the specifics of our lives. In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Thanks, brother. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Hear Below podcast. You can visit us online at RedeemerGreenville.com and you can drop us a note, a question, or comment there. And who knows, we might use it on one of our next episodes. We do hope that this has helped you in some way in your offering in the great doxology here below.
Until next time, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his glorious countenance upon you and give you his peace. Amen. Amen.