The PATH of Discipleship
Part II
Isaac Butterworth
October 3, 2010
Mark 12:28-34 (NIV)
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
29 "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: ’Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ’Love your neighbor as yourself. ’There is no commandment greater than these."
32 "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
Last week, we started thinking together about the PATH of Christian discipleship, and, if you were here, you may recall that we were using the word PATH as an acrostic. I suggested that there are at least four steps in the journey of living for Christ, four practices that we need to incorporate into our lives as we follow Jesus.
Each of these steps, I suggested, can be discovered in what we call the Great Commandment, where Jesus says that we are to ‘love the Lord [our] God with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind and with all [our] strength.’
The first step, or practice, was to pursue our relationship with God,, and I associated that with loving God with all our soul. The second step was to answer the call to true vocation, and I associated that with loving God with all our strength. These two steps make up the ‘P’ and the ‘A’ in PATH. Now we’re ready for the ‘T’ and the ‘H.’
BE TRANSFORMED IN YOUR THINKING
The ‘T’ is for being ‘transformed’ and, specifically, it refers to being transformed in your thinking. When I was a teenager, my pastor gave me a little pocket New Testament, bound in red leather. And inside, on the flyleaf, he had written a note. And with the note was a Scripture citation: Romans 12:1-2. I couldn’t wait to turn to that passage and read what it said. If you know those verses, you will recognize the words: ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God’ (KJV).
These words are programmatic for the Christian life. They set the agenda. They represent a plan for living coram deo, before the face of God. (See Before the Face of God [4 Volumes] by R. C. Sproul.) ‘Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.’
The transformed life does not come by accident. Andy Stanley says in one of his books, ‘Direction – not intention – determines your destination (The Principle of the Path: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, p. 14). Your intention, and mine, may be to follow Jesus, but if we are not walking the path he is walking, if we’re not going in his direction, we’re not going to get where he is going. So, the third step on Jesus’ PATH is to think the way Jesus thinks. To return to the Great Commandment, we are to ‘love…God…with all [our] mind.’ We are to think – that is, we are to process reality – in a certain way. We are to develop a biblical worldview. In other words, we are to view the world and everything in it the way the Bible defines it.
To do this is to love God with our mind, and to love God with our mind is, often, to think in opposition to the established order of things. Our thinking will not be ‘conformed to this world,’ but, rather, we will be ‘transformed by the renewing of [our] mind.’
The transformed mind, then, is counter-cultural, because we don’t think along the same patterns laid down for us by the dominant culture around us. Instead, we look at the world through the lens of Scripture. We maintain a biblical worldview.
Our culture, or ‘the world’ as the Bible calls it, subtly but effectively teaches us how to think and how to live. It teaches us, for example, that we have to gratify every desire immediately. ‘I want it, and I want it now!’ That becomes our mantra. Our culture forces us to think we have to control everyone and everything around us. It leads us to believe that the most important consideration in every situation is how it affects us personally. It convinces us that we are to hate our enemies and get back at those who harm us. It says that we are to do whatever it takes to get what we want, no matter who gets hurt. It holds up before us the unholy trinity of money, sex, and power and tells us: This is what life is all about! And, in the end, what it does is: it makes us anxious, self-centered, deformed, and needy.
The biblical worldview counters such notions. Instead of instant gratification, we are told to be patient, to ‘wait upon the Lord.’ Instead of believing that we have to be in control, we are told to yield ourselves to God’s control. Instead of promoting ourselves, we are told to deny ourselves. Instead of hating our enemies, we are told to love them. Instead of returning evil for evil, we are told to return good for evil. Instead of cursing those who insult us, we are told to bless them. Instead of loving things and using people, we are told to do life the other way around. (See Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? by John Powell, S.J.) And we are told that our money, our relationships, and whatever degree of power we have are to be submitted to God and to God’s purposes.
And that’s the bottom line in all of this: the purpose of God. Since the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit and threw the whole creation out of balance, God’s purpose has been to restore his wounded creation.
Remember how, last week, we talked about our vocation, our calling, which is the same for all of us? We are all called to be image-bearers of Christ. Look again at the effects of being ‘conformed to this world.’ Such things as instant gratification, the anxious need to control, self-promotion, retaliation, greed, and all that – they are all evidence of the old order of things, a world out of balance. Now look at the effects of being transformed in our thinking. Look at patience, self-denial, forgiveness, contentment, and trust in God. What are these things evidence of? A new order, right? Human beings renewed in the image of Christ, of people committed to God’s agenda,, of servants of the Kingdom devoted to God’s grand program of renewal!
And so, we have our options. There are two: We can be ‘conformed to this world,’ which is itself broken and malformed, or we can ‘be transformed’ by the renewing of our minds. But if we walk the PATH of discipleship, it is transformation all the way!
NURTURE A HEART FOR OTHERS
That’s step three on the PATH. ‘T’ for a transformed mind. Step four brings us to the letter ‘H’ in our acrostic. The ‘H’ is for heart. Nurture a heart for others.
One of the lies our culture tells us is that it’s everyone for themselves. The good and wonderful gift of individuality has been deformed into the damaging ideology of individualism.
I mentioned Adam and Eve. Look what happened when they disobeyed God. They got caught, and they were ashamed. So, what did they do? They started blaming each other. Adam even managed to shift some of the blame to God! ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree,’ he said (Gen. 3:12). The woman you gave me! The woman, of course, blamed the snake, and we’ve been blaming each other ever since. The sure sign of the loss of connection in any relationship is blame. Blame leads to fear, and fear leads to isolation, and isolation leads to a misshapen existence. God never intended for any of us to be isolated; God never intended for any of us to be alone. God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone’ (Gen 2:18). And the implication is that it is not good for any man or any woman or any child to be alone.
And that doesn’t mean that everyone has to be married. What it means is that God’s intention is that we live in community. And community was what was disrupted as a result of the first sin. And community is what has been disrupted as a result of every sin since then. So, what has God done about it? He has set about to restore community.
His covenant with Abraham was established in order to build a great nation. His covenant with that nation was established in order to build a just world. The nation failed, and the world suffered. So, God sent his Son. God sent Jesus, a descendant of Abraham and a son of that great nation. And what did Jesus do? He called together a small group of people to form a community. In time, he redeemed this community by his death and resurrection, and, as he did, he conquered every sin, every form of evil, every force that is set on separating and dividing people from one another and from God. He even defeated death, the greatest separator of all! And then he sent his Spirit to breathe life into that new community, which, of course, is the church. The same way God breathed life into Adam, the Spirit of God breathed life into the church.
And we are the church. We are the community of faith. We are the people of Jesus. We are the New Humanity. And our life together – I hope you can hear this – our life together is our witness to what God is doing in this world. We are to be a provisional demonstration of what God intends for all humanity – provisional because we will never be perfect at it, but a demonstration all the same. If we who say we follow Jesus cannot be reconciled to one another and live in harmony with each other, then what hope does the world have?
We are the ones who are called to obey what Jesus termed his ‘new commandment:’ ‘A new command I give you,’ he said: ‘Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another’ (John 13:34). If we go back to the Great Commandment in Mark, chapter 12, we will be reminded that we are to love God with all our heart. We are to nurture a heart for others.
When you think about it, our Triune God is himself, in himself, a community of love. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all three, live together in perfect harmony. There is love and only love flowing in and out among them. And we…we are invited to enter into the community of the blessed Trinity and to let the three Persons of the Godhead live their life and love their love in and through us.
‘By this,’ Jesus said, ‘all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another’ – not, notice, by how religious you are – whatever that means – but by the quality of your life together.
d d d
So, what have we said over these past two weeks? To call on Andy Stanley again, ‘Direction, not intention, determines your destination.’ The PATH lays out for us our direction. We are to love God with all our soul, with all our strength, with all our mind, and with all our heart. So, we will continue on the direction of this PATH.
We will pursue our relationship with God. We will answer the call to our true vocation. We will be transformed in our thinking. We will nurture a heart for others. To say the same things again in another way: We will go deep with God through prayer and worship. We will be image bearers of Christ in the world, serving rather than seeking to be served. We will train ourselves to have the mind of Christ, to maintain a biblical worldview. And we will commit ourselves to one another in authentic community. This is the direction we will go. This is the PATH we will take. This the way in which we shall walk. By this means, we will follow Jesus.
