Discipleship - Part 8

Introduction

Jesus said: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23)
 
We now reach the last in our series on Christian discipleship and I am very grateful that the late David Watson's book Discipleship has proved to be such a useful and reliable guide on our journey, even though I have often used it only as a jumping off point for my own thoughts on the subjects we have been looking at. Today we reach the final two chapters of the book on "The Cost of Discipleship" and "Abounding in Hope."

My lasting impression from all we have looked at is that being a disciple of Christ is great joy, great privilege and a great challenge! This last part in the series seeks to explore these ideas further.

The Cost of Discipleship

As always, Watson writes nothing if not clearly as he begins his chapter on the cost of being a disciple of Christ. He says, "Jesus never promised an easy life to those who followed him." Those eleven words are enough to destroy any notion that being a Christian protects you, like some kind of spiritual vaccination, from anything bad happening to you. That's simply not the case. Likewise, those words shatter any false notion of the so-called prosperity gospel - that if you are a Christian, you will receive material gain. Again, simply untrue. No, being a follower of Jesus is often anything but "easy"!

As Watson puts it, the church is not a "comfortable club" but "God's agent for the healing of the whole of creation." Think about that for a second. If that's true, a Christian, or more accurately and corporately Christians as the church, no more enjoy a peaceful, easy life, and can no more be said to have withdrawn from the realities of the world than could the staff in a hospital emergency department have been said to have an easy job in a refuge from the world!

The first cost of discipleship is obedience. Once you are a Christian, your life is no longer your own. You are no longer in charge: Christ is in charge. And you cannot surrender yourself to him a bit. He demands unconditional surrender. That means he wants all your trust, loyalty and obedience. It is as simple as this: You cannot claim to be a follower of Jesus while deliberately, wilfully and persistently disobeying his commandments and instructions.

The second cost of discipleship is faith. You cannot really be a Christian without faith. It would be like trying to be a swimmer without water. Being a Christian is all about having an intimate loving relationship with God through Jesus. Everyone knows that trust is the foundation of any relationship, especially any kind of loving relationship or friendship. Faith is simply trust in God. It is far more than merely believing in God (in the sense of believing that God exists). It is even far more than believing in certain doctrines about God. Faith is a lively trust, reliance, dependence and commitment to God. Although faith is different from obedience, faith cannot be separated from obedience. As I think Bonhoeffer put it: "Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedience believes."

The third thing to point out is that the only way to discipleship is the way of the cross. Christian discipleship is the way of the cross because the only way to enter the Christian life and the Christian community is through the cross, in other words through the atoning death of Christ. But the Christian disciple is called to take up his cross daily and follow Christ. So what does that mean? It means that you have to die (and I have to die), at least it means the selfish centre of us, the sinful, ungodly part of us has to be dethroned and destroyed. And in its place Christ takes command of our lives. And it probably means you will face opposition from the world around you.

Watson quotes anonymously what it means for us to be "crucified with Christ" by extending the rather gruesome metaphor like this (incidentally, an Internet search reveals Watson is paraphrasing a very similar quotation from A. W. Tozer here):

To be crucified with Christ means three things. First, the man who is crucified is facing only one direction; he is not looking back. Second, the man who is crucified has said goodbye to the world; he is not going back. Third, the man who is crucified has no further plans of his own. He is totally in God's hands. Whatever the situation, he says, "Yes, Lord!"

Becoming a Christian is like stopping your car and moving over from the driving seat to the passenger seat and letting Christ get behind the wheel. As any driver knows, that's not an easy thing to do. It's not "comfortable". It may feel "wrong". After all, almost from the cradle we are raised to believe that we are in charge of our lives and no-one else. Our default setting is so well captured by the poet W. E. Henley in his famous poem Invictus:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Yet for the Christian, Dorothea Day's poem My Captain based on Henley's poem is what rings true:

I have no fear, though strait the gate,
He cleared from punishment the scroll.
Christ is the Master of my fate,
Christ is the Captain of my soul.

Scary maybe. But you cannot claim to be a follower of Christ if this is not true of your life.

The fourth cost of discipleship is what Watson calls the pain of relationships. Both the Old and New Testaments are clear: no-one is in relationship with God on their own. There are no solitary Christians. God does have a relationship with you as an individual, but it is always also as part of his relationship with his people as a group. The classic covenant expression in the Bible speaks of this "I will be your God and you will be my people."

The trouble is that we often find relationships with people hard. People do things to us. People say things to us. Or people don't do or say things. And quite often we get hurt by what people do or don't do. The temptation might be to walk away. Now of course there are times when we actually do have to walk away. The Christian life is not a call to live in abusive relationships as if everything was okay. Yet even with this proviso when we as Christians experience others who have hurt us, the normal response we are called to is not to walk away but to forgive and go on to a restored relationship with that person. There is a fundamental principle at work here: as we have been forgiven, so must we forgive. We allude to it every time we say the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us." That's not easy, but it is necessary if the church is to show the world that we are really God's people.

God's great plan is to bring reconciliation and peace to all things under Christ. That involves all horizontal relationships between creatures as well as each creature's vertical relationship with the Triune Creator. The church's life is supposed to be a witness to God's grand redemptive plan of cosmic renewal. Indeed as Christians we are supposed to be a foretaste of it on earth now. How heartbreaking it must be to our heavenly Father to see his children squabbling and fighting as much as we do!

Abounding in Hope

Watson concludes his book, as we conclude this series, on a positive note in a positive chapter called "Abounding in Hope".

He begins with a great quotation from F. R. Maltby: "Jesus promised his disciples three things: they would be absurdly happy, completely fearless, and in constant trouble!" And Watson calls this a fair summary of the New Testament church. The point being that throughout the Bible there is a strange paradox that the joy and the suffering of being God's people always seem to go together - along with glory and agony, rejoicing and weeping, life and death. Certainly these ups and downs characterise the earthly life and ministry of Jesus himself.

There has to be autumn and winter as well as spring and summer in the seasons and so with life many of our joys can only exist by coming through sorrows. This might be supremely demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Christ, but it applies equally to most things in life.

One thing that thrives during our seasons of winter is hope. Just as we hope for the spring in winter, not as a vague possibility but as a sure and certain expectation of what will come, so our hope in God for the future is waiting for what we know is certain to happen. In this hope we are also freed up to live in God's love and work in God's service for him and for other people.

This in some ways is the very essence of being a Christian disciple. It is a task in which we need not be fearful. It is a role in which we need never be without hope. There is a great quotation on hope from C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean we are to leave this present world as it is. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next...Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.

You see it is precisely when you don't have to worry about the future because it is all safe and secure in Christ that you can jump headlong into working for God in this life. And that is what Christ is calling you and I to be for him: disciples who are absolutely committed to following him without fear and overflowing with love.

The American missionary, Jim Elliott, who was killed for his faith in South America in 1956 wrote: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot loose."

The question is: Do you have this hope in your heart? Are you ready to be this kind of radical disciple? May God give us all the grace to answer yes to both questions.