discipleship

So highly revered was commingle, that the Jews called him "the beauty of the Law".

Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.

Today, we have many ways of defining success in life. Some define it as being a sports hero, others as being wealthy, others as being popular and well liked, and still others as being happy. How does God define success? He defines it as being spiritually mature!

It is by suffering that Christ brings it in to the kingdoms of this world

I experienced the Church to be this refuge within and beyond myself.

Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.

After her initial conversion as a teenager, the author writes, "I was sent back into a world that no longer looked familiar to me. I had to relearn how to do everything.

We advise disciples not to follow anyone. Let them follow themselves. Each one should follow his resplendent and luminous inner Being.

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships?

Humility is the earmark of God's genuine servant.

The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.

Good disciplemaking requires both intentionality and relationality. It means being strategic and being social. Most of us are bent one way or the other. We__e naturally relational, but lacking in intentionality. Or we find it easy to be intentional, but not relational. We typically tip (or sometimes lean) one way or the other as we begin the disciplemaking process. But tipping and leaning won__ cover the full picture of what life-on-life disciplemaking requires. It__ not just friend-to-friend, and it__ not just teacher-to-student. It__ both. There is the sharing of ordinary life (relationship) and seeking to initiate and make the most of teachable moments (intentionality). There are the long walks through Galilee and the sermons on the mount. Disciplemaking is both organic and engineered, relational and intentional, with shared context and shared content, quality and quantity time.

I didn't know how faith felt when it grew incrementally.

Nothing but the infinite can ever satisfy me; I am such a great sinner that I must have infinite merit to wash my sin away;" but we have had our sin removed, and found that there was merit to spare; we have had our hunger relieved at the feast of sacred love

Let me be on my guard when the world puts on a loving face, for it will, if possible, betray me as it did my Master, with a kiss.

We need to be making disciples telling people about Jesus & move them beyond conversation into a heart relationship with Him in the fullness

Abiding time is extravagant daily time with Jesus. This extravagant time is the center of abiding. Not legalism, not dry discipline, not manufactured spirituality, but joyous soaking in the presence of Jesus, lavish spending of time with Him who is most precious, Him from whom all life flows. In a world that is over-connected yet lonely, frantically busy yet accomplishing little of eternal value, super-informed but egregiously ignorant on what really matters, abiding gives Jesus the best of our time, in which He leads us to the best of times.

Men and women of God through the centuries have lived out this abiding truth. There are no heroes of the faith who did not live out this extravagant lavishing of their time on Jesus. When we examine their private lives, we see that they needed to abide for strength and for wisdom. They were addicted to extravagant time in the presence of Jesus because it gave them life and joy and was the only thing that fulfilled them.