Becoming A True Follower Of Christ

For far too long we have misunderstood or maybe just misread this passage of scripture known as The Great Commission.

Our interpretation and understanding has told us that we need to get people saved and them bring them into our church membership. In only doing this we in turn commit a great sin. A sin of omission.

Dallas Willard says in his book the great omission, that what we omit is the making of disciples when that should be the first thing that we should do with new believer and then allow for other things come in.

And secondly, we neglect to take our convents through the necessary training that will help then better discover who Christ is and how to do what He directs them.

In The Salvation Army when an officer completes their seminary training he or she is commissioned as an officer and given an opportunity to go out and feed the hungry, help the helpless and preach the word of God.

We all leave the halls of training school on fire and ready to save the world for Christ. Once one arrives to their appointment they go for it. I mean they go full force but only to eventually become disappointed. Why is my church small? Why are my people uncommitted? Did I make a mistake in following this path this calling?

After this if not dealt with properly at a spiritual level, we may find ourselves going from one appointment to the next feeling as a failure and merely holding things up. Maintaining the status quo, but never discovering our full potential in Christ.

Sadly enough this seemingly helpless way of thinking which is self center and not Christ centered is not just limited to pastors, but every one that calls him/herselves a follower of Christ (a Christian) will experience this. If they do not come to grasp what it truly means to be a true follower of Christ.

As I have tried to understand my own apparent short comings and inabilities as a servant of Christ, I have discovered that the key to these deceiving and unrealistic failures, that the devil tried to make me believe, is that many of us have never made a conscience choice to follow Christ.

Sure we have accepted his free gift but have never signed on to His team. You see obedience and training go hand in hand if we are to experience success in our Christian walk.

Yet for most of us we have been obedient to His calling of Salvation but have earnestly refuse to enter into training, to be intentionally discipled so that we may discover our true potential in Him.

I do not know if this describes you. That is between you and God, but the scriptures do remind us that by our fruits we will be known. So I ask you, do the fruits of your life reflect the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit? But even then what kinds of fruits are they?

I was eating some orange with my children last night and I read a small label on the side that read, seedless oranges. I think this is the only country where we produce fruits that do not have seeds. You have seen them. Oranges, grapes even watermelons.

As much as we may enjoy this version of fruit which unnaturally does not contain any bothersome seeds, we find ourselves in a bit of a conundrum or an unsolvable riddle.

If you had the last orange in the world and it was a seedless one, once you ate it then you would no longer be able to enjoy its sweet taste.

In the age that we live the Gospel of Christ itself has been water down, it has had its seeds remove, to illustrate the mere love of God. But what has happened is that as we have shared this gospel with others, though it has been a good fruit, those who received it have not been able to reproduce it to others.

True that the scriptures say that by our fruits we will be known, but I do not believe the Apostle

Paul could have ever imagined a day when fruits could be grown without seeds.

Our faith must be known by the fruits, or the products that we produce, but we must make sure that it is a meaningful fruit, a purposeful fruit, and a life changing fruit that other can take make their own and share over and over again with others and not merely become a one time, wonderful experience that will soon fade away.

You see the great commission does not end in Matthew 28:19 but it includes verse 20 as well, where we read, "teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you."