Discipleship continued...

Good Afternoon!

I was really hoping for Spring to take full effect this week, but it's started out this morning feeling downright wintry.  I went to bed early last night, slept a good amount, but I'm still feeling tired today.  The second cup of coffee just finished brewing (Guatemala Antigua, picked out by Aislinn on our last trip to Starbucks) and so I'm ready for a caffeinated infusion of life and energy. 

If you're looking for sermon audio this week, my sincere apologies once again.  Last week I didn't make the connection between sound board and laptop for recording.  This week I didn't turn on the microphone transmitter, so it was all hooked up, but no juice for the microphone.  One of these weeks, I'm going to get it right, I promise!

Last week I shared some practical thoughts on our discipleship by immersion into the Scriptures and their story.  This week, I want to share a couple thoughts on discipleship as character development, and how we can make it real in our own lives and the community life of our church.

It's one thing to get into the story of Scripture, it's quite another to get the story of Scripture into us.  But that's what has to happen in order for us to have our character shaped to reflect the heart and desire of God in the world.  Our character makes all the difference in the world.  It matters whether you embody qualities like faith, hope, love, gentleness, kindness and self-control (I always read Galatians 5 hoping that somehow that last one will fall off the page, but it never does...). 

This means that character development in the way of Jesus is the really painful part of the process.  It's probably the part of the process that we'd most like to skip because it requires us to take a look in the mirror and have Jesus reveal our hearts.  When that happens, we see the things that we don't like.  Maybe you see greed, or lust, or laziness, or apathy, or pride, or fear, or doubt, or any number of things that are preventing you from living the life that Jesus wants you to live.  Jesus does not expose our hearts to drive us away from him, but to get us to draw near to him so that he can shape us more fully into his image.  In theological terms, it's the work of sanctification - the Holy Spirit producing Christ-likeness in us - and it's an often neglected part of discipleship.

Character development is what happens when you walk away from the sermon on Sunday and ask yourself what you're going to do with what you heard.  Sometimes God grabs our attention, and we hear or see something so clearly for a moment, but then by the time we've gotten to Tuesday morning, we've forgotten all about it because we haven't been intentional about developing that area of our character. Look, I'll be honest, I don't remember a lot of sermons, and you probably don't either.  I'm ok with that reality.  I'm not really concerned with whether you remember the sermon from yesterday or not.  I'm concerned with whether you heard God speaking to you, and when you did, that you decided to act on it this morning when you woke up, or when you had that difficult conversation, or when you faced up to that person you've been avoiding for the last month. 

Character develops over time, and I don't think it's a process that you can rush through.  You'll spend your entire life developing your character, so make sure you do it well; make sure your character develops in the way that Jesus wants it to.  That might mean you take a month or even a year to focus on an area of your character that he is speaking to you about.  DO IT!!  Don't say you'll get around to it later.  Don't give up a week in because it's too hard.  Don't pretend it's not there.  Deal with it, or it will not go away.

I've been working out in our backyard, trying to clean it up and get ready for summer (we have a beautiful spot, and I want to enjoy the summer here!).  Saturday Rita and I worked for a few hours raking and trying to beat back the undergrowth that is encroaching on the yard.  We kept encountering this vine that wraps its way around the trees all over the yard - it chokes out the trees and just takes over everything.  We were uprooting it, and trying to get rid of as much of it as we could.  Rita kept saying it reminded her of sin - that if left unchecked it spreads all over the place, and chokes out good growth in our lives.  I couldn't agree with her more.

Part of developing our character is identifying those areas in our life that are out of line with God's way of living - otherwise known as sin.  You've got to deal with it sooner or later, and the sooner you do, the better it will be for you.  If not, you'll end up with a character that's being devastated by your own unwillingness to deal with what God is trying to uproot in you.  That's the first part of character development - allowing God to uproot the things that are not pleasing to him.  We'll talk next week about the other side of that, which is then allowing God to plant things into our lives that are good, and beautiful and pleasing to him.