Discipleship as Character Development

Good Afternoon!

It's not Monday, I know.  Eventually I knew my blogging schedule would get blown up, so I'm a day late, but I'll hope to get back on track with the Monday blog next week.  Since I'm already behind, I'll skip all the fluffy details, and we'll just jump right into the topic for the day, continuing to work with the metaphor of a story for our concept of discipleship.

2.  Discipleship as Character Development

Every story needs characters.  The good stories get us to identify with the characters they portray.  God's story is no different.  We resonate with the characters we read on the pages of Scripture, and then realize that we are also characters in the unfolding drama that God has been telling throughout history.  The question we must ask ourselves is:  "what kind of a character am I in this story?"

Discipleship is about allowing God to show us our character, which can often be a pretty painful thing to see.  As we live in relationship with him and the Scriptures he reveals our hearts, our motives, our desires - and what we see as a result becomes the impetus for us to change the direction we are taking.  He does not reveal these things in order to condemn us, or to drive us away from him, but rather so that we would draw near to him, and cause our lives to more fully conform to his image for us.

It's almost as if we yield the destiny of our character to the hand and pen of the author writing the story.  Rather than fighting him, and seeking to write our own story, in our own fashion, with our own objectives, we trust that if we allow him to, God will write a better, more beautiful and courageous story than we would have written ourselves.  This, of course, is tremendously challenging for us because we'd like nothing better than to perpetuate the illusion that we are in complete control of our lives and our destiny.  But to be bound in discipleship to Jesus is to agree that we will follow where he leads, and we will give our lives to his purpose.

To be a disciple is to be with Jesus, and to allow him to press into our hearts and lives in such a way that we come away from the encounter bearing his image to a greater and greater degree.  We see the heart of God beating in him, we see God's deepest desires for the world and those who live in it, and by our closeness to Jesus, we begin to bear that heart ourselves.  The things which move his heart move our own hearts.  We see more as he sees, hear more like he does. 

So we must begin to ask ourselves the kinds of application questions that are the meat of discipleship and interaction with Jesus and the Scriptures.  How does what I see here in the words of Scripture need to shape my life?  My relationship to my spouse?  My kids?  My work?  My church?  How would my character in this story that God is telling be different if I were to begin living this way?

Next week we'll look at the ways in which God is inviting his disciples to collaborate with him in the plot of his story - the plot of the advancing Kingdom of God.