Be Fruitful and Multiply Disciples
Historically, movements have stopped because they were primarily leader-led information dumps. Information isn’t a bad thing, but information-driven movements are limited in influence. Why should we create disciple multiplying movements? How can we create them? It's What We Were Made For In the garden of Eden, we see that image bearers of God we were made to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:22, 26-28). By issuing his first "great commission," God did not merely intend for us to have more people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Rather, he wanted his beautiful image to fill the entire earth through the multiplication of his image bearers. But through Adam, we sinned and were separated from God.
In the attempt to author our own story, we sought center stage--pushing God's goals for us aside. We sought to multiply our image for the sake of our own fame rather than God's fame.
When someone repents and turns to God, it is our responsibility to show them their new mission by pointing back to the garden. We must show how their mission is all about multiplying for the sake of God's glory not multiplying a life that is all about them and their legacy.
Most small groups in churches believe their goal is to get to know each other or form a close bond. If this is the goal, multiplication will never be desired. Drawing close to one another is not the goal of missional community, but making disciples who make disciples is (being fruitful and multiplying images of Jesus). Drawing close to one another happens because Jesus has given us the same Father, and we are a part of the same family. So, forming a close bond is a bi-product rather than the goal of living together on mission as family.
This Must be on Our Lips If our goal is to make disciples who make disciples (to be fruitful and multiply), then this must be on our lips constantly. I tell those who aren’t even followers of Jesus yet, that we desire to see communities like ours across the world doing the same thing. So, when they join our community as a follower of Jesus, they’ve already been discipled to know that we desire multiplication.
But it doesn’t stop there. We continue to talk about it as a group and continue to seek to hear from the Spirit on his timing and his power to send us out. The best way I can describe this is by relating it to your child. Do you desire to see your child stay in your house until they die? Or do you desire to see them leave the house and have a family of their own? Do you then wait until they are 18 and spring this on them and then kick them out? Or, do you continue talking to them about it, train them and seek for them to be ready when the day comes to leave your house and go and be fruitful and multiply with their new family? This is the same thing we need to be doing with our church families. We need to seek to see them grow in maturity and grow in the gospel so that they too can lead a family of missionary servants to live out the effects of the gospel with those around them.
People often ask me how I make it easy for our groups to multiply. I say the same thing every time: You must regularly talk about multiplication and train the next group for its certainty. It must always be on your lips and prayers, and always on your people’s lips and prayers. If it’s not, then it will be very difficult when it happens--like kicking out your unsuspecting child and telling them it’s healthy.
Transforming and Transferable You will do well by building the foundation of multiplication. You will also do well by regularly talking about it and listening to the Spirit in the process. But what happens if you have no leaders to lead the multiplication? This is where many groups and movements fail. The reason is that people in the group look at the leader and think, “There’s no way I can do what he’s doing. This takes too much time and too much theological knowledge.” Not only that, but you’ve merely spoken about multiplication without transforming people’s hearts to seek it out.
Merely talking about making disciples is sometimes fun and it’s a great theological exercise for the mind. But mere talk and theologizing rarely inspire people to make disciples.
If you desire to see others gripped to make disciples, you must not only penetrate their intellect. You must also aim at their hearts. If you merely aim at their heads with theological reasons why it’s good to make disciples, people will always come up with reasons why they are not convinced of its realities.
I think of Jonathan Edwards when he spoke of God’s holiness and grace and compared it to honey.[1]
In this way, he says, there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former, that knows not how honey tastes; but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the latter only by seeing the countenance. When the heart is sensible of the beauty and amiableness of a thing, it necessarily feels pleasure in the apprehension. It is implied in a person's being heartily sensible of the loveliness of a thing, that the idea of it is sweet and pleasant to his soul; which is a far different thing from having a rational opinion that it is excellent.
So, we must, as leaders, show others what it means to make disciples. When a follower of Jesus sees new disciples being made, and they are a part of it, their heart will rejoice. And like honey on the lips, they will desire more honey instead of merely talking about honey. Jesus did the same with the blind man in John 9. He healed him, so that the blind man would taste and see that the Lord was good. Then he supported that heart-transforming act, to theologically tackle the implications of who Jesus was afterward in John 9:35-41. Notice the way the blind man desired others to taste and see that the Lord Jesus was good--because his heart was transformed.
Not only do we seek to transform, but we must also make sure what we do is transferable. I have many things I can share from experience that I believe are transferable for my people, but you must ask yourself these types of questions:
- Do I need a theological degree to lead the community like I do? Remember, not all people like to read and study as much as many of us pastors do. If we want to create a movement of disciple-making, then we have to move away from leading from a position of “trained” men, into leading like “untrained” men. (By the way, I’ve never been to seminary, nor am I paid by the church.)
- Do I need to be paid by the church to have the time to do what I do? See above.
- What resources are available to give future leaders so that they don’t feel like they have to think of new topics to discuss and study in their Missional Community? I do not do any book studies in the Bible that cause me to do an immeasurable amount of study and reading on my own. If I do, then people will see the group as one that can only be led by someone with my capacity. Instead, I use easily transferable studies (e.g., check out www.bild.org)
- How can I model all of this, so that I am going to be able to transfer leadership, instead of being the functional savior for our groups? Make sure you lead as you want others to lead. Don’t do studies that can only be led by a seminarian. Don’t do so many activities that can only be done by those with a job inside the church. Remember, as you lead, you are discipling those in your group on what it looks like to lead a group of disciple-makers. You can’t say one thing and model another. They’ll see right through that.
Because I have worked hard to hear the Spirit’s leading in this, 80% of those that are a part of the Missional Communities in my expression within Soma Communities desire to lead MCs at some point. When I baptized a new disciple, he first desired to lead a group of disciple-makers. He saw this as the only option for someone who was a follower of Jesus and, that it wasn’t anything special. In spite of being a new disciple, he didn’t see this as some “high calling” only for a few.
Since we want to lay the foundation of multiplication, we regularly talk about making disciples who make disciples. We seek to do this by modeling it for them in ways easily transferable. New disciples often can’t wait to lead others in the making of disciples who multiply to make more disciples.
So, go! Be fruitful disciples of Jesus by multiplying his beautiful image everywhere.
1 http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/edwards_light.html
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Seth McBee is the adopted son of God, husband of one wife and father of three. He’s a graduate of Seattle Pacific University with a finance degree. By trade Seth is an Investment Portfolio Manager, serving as president of McBee Advisors, Inc. Today, he’s a preaching elder, City Church leader and coach with Soma Communities in Renton, Washington. In his down time he likes to watch football, cook BBQ, host pancake ebelskiver breakfasts at his home and many other neighborhood events in his hometown of Maple Valley, Washington.
The Challenge of Making Disciples on Campus
Jesus’ message to his followers was to “make disciples.” This is a huge, all-encompassing command. We evangelize, worship, teach, gather in community, and show mercy—but in doing all these things, we are to be making disciples. If we are not making lifelong disciples of Jesus, we are doing the wrong things or doing them in the wrong way.
If we are making disciples, then what we do will last for eternity and result in greater glory to God.
This is a particular comfort and challenge in the field of college ministry.
As we see in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), evangelism was never meant to be divorced from discipleship, and neither of these can be divorced from mission. Many ministries are discovering that making on-mission disciples is the best evangelistic strategy they can initiate. Still, making lifelong disciples is a challenge, a truth to which any of us who have wrestled with our students drifting away from the church and Jesus after graduation can testify.
Therefore, we should be asking the question, “How does what we’re doing make disciples?” If we’re serious about ensuring we’re on mission, we will evaluate every program, every meeting, every event, every dollar we spend, and even every staff position by asking how each one serves to make disciples. Some aspects of our ministry will be affirmed and bolstered, others will need to be tweaked, and some will need to be axed if they don’t serve the goal of making disciples.
Why Is Making Disciples Such a Challenge? Making disciples is a challenge for many reasons. The “tyranny of the urgent” is particularly strong in college ministry, where life-shaping conversations, processes, and events are crammed into fifteen-week semesters. There is always a lot going on. In this context, if making disciples isn’t built into the DNA of who we are, it will get shortchanged. Yes, we might talk about discipleship, but not everything we do contributes to it.
Campus ministry can’t be concerned only with the programs, events, or activities that are happening next week. We must focus on the spiritual formation of students for the missio Dei, a lifetime of following Jesus and joining him in his mission, making our goal to make disciples for the mission of God. After all, wasn’t that Jesus’ goal? Jesus proclaimed the good news that his hearers could join him in a new way of life. More than simply offering a message of personal salvation, Jesus invited his followers to participate in God’s redemption of the world. Our approach to articulating a vision of discipleship ought to be based upon Jesus’ own call to discipleship.
What Is a Disciple? Perhaps we need to start by demystifying the term “disciple.” A disciple is a Christian, and a Christian is a disciple. Because of our modern obsession with compartmentalizing, we have acted as if there are two kinds of people in the church—Christians (the ones who “asked Jesus into their heart”) and disciples (the ones who are more serious, more disciplined about their faith). But this isn’t a biblical distinction. There is no such thing as a Christian who is not following Jesus. There is no allowance for someone to have Jesus as their Savior but not Jesus as their Lord. There is no such thing as a Christian who does nothing but sit around, passively absorbing content. The word “disciple” is used 230 times in the gospels and twenty-eight times in Acts. It is by far the most common way of referring to the people who followed Jesus and placed their faith in him.
Being a disciple means following Christ. More than that, it means responding daily to Jesus’ instruction that “if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
This is a comprehensive following: it means to follow him in everything, even unto death. Where discipleship is involved, there is no room for a simple decision of faith divorced from genuine commitment and the rigors of following Jesus.
To be a disciple is to obey everything Jesus taught us. It is not merely to give cognitive assent to a set of truths, but to belong to a community. It is to be increasingly conformed, by grace, to Christ, and means joining him in his redemptive mission and heeding his sending and discipling commands. Similarly, the essence of discipling others is to say with Paul, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” Being a disciple is always about Christ.
The concept of discipleship Jesus introduced ran counter to the prevailing notion of the teacher-disciple relationship. Jesus was not making disciples who would learn of him, become independent of him, and then make disciples of their own. His goal was that his disciples would make disciples not of themselves, but that they would go forth to make disciples of Jesus. The extent to which we enter the picture is only the extent to which we are conformed to Christ. This conformation must include following him in his redemptive mission.
“Do vs. Done” Discipleship Because we follow Jesus Christ, true discipleship is always centered on the liberating and radical grace extended to us through him. I can’t overstate how crucial this is, because our failure to keep discipleship gospel-centered is the very reason so many Christians find it distasteful. The gospel is about what Jesus has done to save us, not what we do to save ourselves. Gospel-centered discipleship is about living into our identity as accepted, adopted sons and daughters of God, and following Jesus by the strength and power he provides. The discipleship that many of us have experienced is often about self-control, self-reliance, self-righteousness when we “succeed” and self-reproach when we “fail.” Gospel-centered discipleship is about celebrating and growing into our acceptance, while works-centered discipleship is the ill-fated, soul-sucking, burnout-inducing attempt to earn God’s approval.
The kind of discipleship that results in campus-saturating movements doesn’t rely on people trying to prove to God, others, and themselves that they are worthy. Gospel-centered discipleship tells us we’re not worthy, that we can’t measure up, and it’s only by grace that we’ll become like Jesus.
While works-centered disciples spend most of their time looking down on everyone else or themselves for not measuring up, gospel- centered disciples spend their time looking up in wonder at the grace they have been shown. While works-centered disciples are usually arrogant or depressed, gospel-centered disciples radiate joy and exude a holy confidence. While works-centered disciples are profoundly self-focused, morbidly introspective, and narcissistic, gospel-centered disciples are Christ- focused and radically others-focused. While works-centered disciples try to run on the fumes of self-effort, gospel-centered disciples are propelled by the grace and power of God. To follow Christ works the same as being saved by him—by grace, through faith.
Have you ever watched one of those home improvement shows? A few years ago, some friends of ours were on Trading Spaces. This was before the days of tear-jerking extreme home makeovers, so with the make- over team, they just performed some cosmetic changes that consisted of buying new pillows, adding a fresh coat of paint, and rearranging furniture. But despite their TV home “makeover,” their home looked pretty much the same. It wasn’t until years later, when they had a huge addition put on, that their home was transformed.
Works-centered discipleship—the kind for which we have such distaste, the kind in which the Pharisees and every legalist since them have indulged—makes cosmetic changes but fails to truly transform. It cleans things up a bit and makes for a good appearance, but nothing is really different. On the other hand, gospel-centered discipleship works from the inside out to truly transform someone. The emphasis is not on the external behaviors or the rigor with which we perform them. It’s on receiving the grace of God, which alone can save and change us.
The Problem with Small Groups “But wait,” you might be saying. “We already work hard at making disciples. In fact, we have a number of small groups designed to do just that!” The problem is that many of our small groups are not doing all that we need them to. The reason we fail to not only make new disciples, but hold on to the ones we have, is that our discipleship processes often lack essential missional foundations. This is particularly the case in what we could call Just Small Groups Syndrome, or JSGS.
JSGS emphasizes intellectual/cognitive knowledge instead of whole-life conformity to the truth. We’ve compartmentalized the learning from the being and doing. In the college ministry realm, we’ve implicitly told students that they can’t “do” until they’ve learned enough. But Jesus taught his disciples through doing. What constitutes a successful small group? A team of people who would win Bible Jeopardy, or people who don’t just hear the word, but do it? JSGS creates consumers instead of disciples. It creates people whose only expectation is to get fed, people who feel threatened if we call them to more than that. JSGS creates inward-facing, self-concerned communities instead of outward-engaging teams of missionaries.
What if discipleship weren’t viewed apart from mission? What if one of the ways we grew in the gospel was not only through community, but through being embedded in a community in which people are on mission together?
We need more than small groups. We need missional communities — teams of students who share a burden for a particular people group and come together for the shared purpose of reaching that group together. They come together in community to preach the gospel to each other and to help each other share it with others. They come together for prayer, encouragement, and equipping. They come together to model the kind of community into which they’re inviting others. They’re not a once-per-week meeting, but a team or band committed to a common purpose. Groups that do this well are gospel-shaped communities on mission, and it is groups like these that God uses to transform lives, campuses, and the world.
This is an excerpt adapted from Stephen Lutz's book, College Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture.
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Stephen Lutz is a pastor with Calvary Baptist Church in State College, PA and a campus minister with CCO at Penn State University. He is the author of College Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture, a book written to help college students and ministers recover the missional nature of college ministry. Steve is a native of the Philadelphia area. His interests include reaching college students, starting churches, innovation and entrepreneurship, and Penn State and Philly sports. He lives with his wife Jessica and their three children in Boalsburg, PA. He blogs at http://www.stephenlutz.net and tweets @stephenlutz.
Change is a Community Project
He’d passed up the opportunity a hundred times before. But, taking himself by surprise, he decided to go for it today. He spluttered something about having something to say. Now he was beyond the point of no return. There were four other people around the table at their lunchtime prayer meeting, all looking at him warmly. He took a deep breath and told them, confessing years of sin.
For Stephen, it was the turning point. Three years later that moment is still etched on his mind. But those three years have been years of joy and freedom and growth.
God is in the business of change, and he’s placed us in a community of change. The church is one of God’s means of grace to reinforce our faith and repentance, but it’s also a channel for the other means of grace. I’m holding a book on holiness in my hand that has a picture on the cover of a person walking alone along a beach. The message is that holiness is about me and God. But change in the Bible is never a solo project. Change is a community project.
A Community of Change Paul talks about the church as a community of change in Ephesians 4. He begins by urging us to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” Through the death of Jesus we have become a home for God (2:22) and a showcase for his wisdom (3:10). Your local church is that home and that showcase in your area. This means that change is a community project.
Change is a Community Process Change is a community project because it’s a community process as well as an individual process. When Paul talks about becoming mature, he’s talking about the body of Christ as a whole (4:12–13). It’s the Christian community together that displays God’s wisdom. We make God known not just as individuals, but through our life together and our love for one another (John 13:34–35; 17:20–23). That’s why Paul urges us to be a united community (Ephesians 4:2–6). Our aim is to “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (v. 15).
Imagine one of those children’s books that have pictures of different people with the pages divided so you can mix and match different heads, bodies, and legs. You flip over the pages to match up the pictures, enjoying the funny combinations as you go. Paul says the church is a body with Christ as its head. Our job is to change the body so that it matches the head. And we can’t be the body of Christ on our own. We can’t be mature on our own. Change is a community project.
This means sin is always a community concern. My sin impedes the growth of the community as a whole. It stops us from growing together as the body of Christ. It has an impact on all of us. Even our private, secret sins affect the community. No one knew Achan had kept the robe, silver, and gold from the defeat of Jericho, but his sin led to defeat for God’s people (Joshua 7). My sin stops me from playing the role God intends for me in the way God intends, and this means that the church doesn’t grow and reflect its head as God intends.
Community is the God-Given Context for Change The Christian community is the best context for change because it’s the context God has given. The church is a better place for change than a therapy group, a counselor’s office, or a retreat center. We grasp the love of Christ “with all the saints” (Ephesians 3:18). Christ gives gifts to the church so we can grow together (4:7–13).
What does Christian maturity look like? It looks like Jesus (4:13, 15). One of the great things about the Christian community is that it gives us models of Christlike behavior. Of course, no one is perfectly like Jesus, but other Christians help us see what it means to walk with God. It’s not just godliness we model for one another, but also growth and grace. We model growth as people see us struggling with sin and turning in faith to God.
Every Sunday in our church we give people the opportunity to talk about what God has been doing in their lives during the past week—answers to prayer, comfort from God’s Word, opportunities for evangelism, help in temptation. In so doing, we reinforce our belief in a God who is alive and active among us.
One reason the ascended Christ gives the Spirit to the church is to equip each of us with a special gift—our contribution to the life of the church community (4:7). Everyone’s contribution matters. “From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (4:16, niv). We all have a part to play in building a home for God. We need one another in order to be a healthy, growing church. This means that everyone else needs you, and you need everyone else. You need to help others change. And you need to let others help you change.
Together we extol Christ to one another, and we each bring distinct harmonies to the song. We comfort one another with the comfort we have received (2 Corinthians 1:3–7). Our different experiences of God’s grace become part of the rich counsel that we in the church have for one another. Moreover, in the Christian community there is a collective persistence that’s stronger than any individual can manage. When I grow weary of speaking truth to a particular situation, someone else will take up the baton. We’re like a choir singing the praises of Jesus. No one can sustain the song continually on his or her own, but together we can.
Paul particularly highlights the role of those who proclaim, explain, and apply God’s Word (Ephesians 4:11). That’s because the Bible is the source of the truth about God, which counters the lies behind our sin. But notice that these leaders don’t do all the work of God in the church. Their role is to equip God’s people for works of service (4:11–12). It’s all God’s people who together build up the body of Christ. We work with one another and for one another, so that together we can be mature and Christlike.
Paul says that Christ “makes the whole body fit together perfectly” (4:16, nlt). Your church is not a collection of random people. Christ has specially selected each one to create a perfect fit. You may have chosen other people for one reason or another. But God placed these people in your life to help you change. As my friend Matt said when we were talking about this passage, “I need to give everyone in our church a new merit in my life.”
Paul isn’t talking about an idealized church with idealized people. He’s writing to a real church with real people. He’s talking about your church. You can’t say, “That’s fine in theory, but my church is never going to be like that.” God has given these people to you so they can care for you and so you can care for them. If your church isn’t what it should be, then start changing it. Start sharing your struggles, and start “speaking the truth in love” (4:15).
Verse 31 says, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” These behaviors all have two things in common. First, they all involve other people. Second, they’re all symptoms of thwarted and threatened sinful desires. Often we can’t spot sinful desires. But when they’re threatened or thwarted by other people, we respond with bitterness, rage, anger, brawling, slander, and malice. One of the great things about living as part of a community is that in community people walk all over your idols. People press your buttons. That’s when we respond with bitterness, rage, and so on. And that gives us opportunities to spot our idolatrous desires.
God is using the different people, the contrasting personalities, in your church to change your heart. He’s using the difficult people, the annoying people, the sinful people. He’s placed you together so you can rub off each other’s rough edges. It’s as if God has put us, like rocks, into a bag and is shaking us about so that we collide with one another. Sometimes sparks fly, but gradually we become beautiful, smooth gemstones. Remember the next time someone is rubbing you the wrong way that God is smoothing you down! God has given you that person in his love as a gift to make you holy. Sinclair Ferguson comments, “The church is a community in which we receive spiritual help, but also one in which deep-seated problems will come to the surface and will require treatment. . . . We often discover things about our own hearts which we never anticipated.”
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This is an excerpt from Tim Chester's book, You Can Change: God's Transforming Power for Our Sinful Behavior and Negative Emotions.
Tim Chester (PhD, University of Wales) is pastor of the Crowded House in Sheffield, United Kingdom, and director of the Porterbrook Institute, which provides integrated theological and missional training for church leaders. Chester also coauthored Total Church (Re:Lit) and has written more than a dozen books.
6 Resolutions of the Gospel-Wakened Church
1. We Resolve to Love Our Neighbor
Gospel wakefulness is not truly experienced if it does not open our hearts to others. A completely inward wakefulness is false wakefulness. While what Christ has done is the grounds of the gospel’s content, what Christ commands is the reference for the gospel’s implications, and from his own mouth we know that the greatest commandment is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself ” (Luke 10:27).
The gospel-wakened church resolves to live for those outside its walls, to give herself away in love and on mission
The gospel-wakened church resolves to live for those outside its walls, to give herself away in love and on mission. She makes Christ’s business to seek and save the lost her business. When awe of Jesus captures a church, her people become missionaries to their own communities and contexts, making this vow: “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” And there is no greater good than Christ, no firmer foundation than him.
Jesus was so passionate about this mission that he followed its trajectory to the pouring out of his very life. Gospel wakefulness facilitates Christlike mission, because it creates both the humility and the confidence intrinsic to willing sacrifice. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.” (Rom. 15:3)
2. We Resolve to Look Foolish
What do we see in Romans 15:3? Jesus was so aligned with God that he took our animosity toward God upon himself. He takes the reproach from God for sin. Paul is quoting Psalm 69:9, a rather powerful gem of Scripture, if you think about it:
for zeal for your house consumes me, and the insults of those who insult you fall on me. (niv)
Are we so consumed with zeal for God’s presence and his kingdom—for God’s house—that we are willing to take the hits meant for God himself? Are we willing to so identify with the Christ who identified with us that we will take up his cross, the object of scorn and shame and derision?
A gospel-wakened church is a resolute church that embraces the loss of her reputation for the gain of God’s glory. She is willing to look stupid, irrational, impractical, silly . . . for the right reasons. She will be dragged into the street, absorbing the insults of those who insult God, in efforts to turn the world upside down. She will spend as much or more time and money on others as she does herself; she will send her people into the farthest reaches of the world to die; she will eat and drink with sinners; she will welcome the broken and weary; she will favor the meek and lowly; she will cherish the powerless; she will serve and suffer and savor the sweetness of the good news.
A gospel-driven church resolves to look foolish to those to whom the cross is foolishness. Because she knows it is the power to save. Those who are astonished by the gospel aren’t more interested in anything else, so they are willing to take criticism, ridicule, and even persecution for the cause of Christ. He has become all-satisfying, which makes him of surpassing worth to any other loss. For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. (Rom. 15:4)
3. We Resolve to Trust God’s Word
Gospel wakefulness endures, and it produces endurance. The gospel-wakened church doesn’t burn out, but instead commits to that which is eternal—namely, the word of God. We find our encouragement there, and our hope. The gospel-wakened church returns to being a people of the Book. She relies on the external word from God, not the internal word of creative ideas.
The gospel-wakened church doesn’t burn out, but instead commits to that which is eternal—namely, the word of God.
The gospel-wakened church has come to the end of itself and finally beheld the sustaining power of the Savior. She knows where truth is, she knows where hope is, she knows where wisdom is. She trusts no other words but the Scriptures. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus. (Rom. 15:5)
4. We Resolve to Live in Christ-Centered Harmony
The gospel-wakened church knows that self-help doesn’t work. The concept of self-help is like putting your broken hand in a garbage disposal, flipping the switch, and expecting it to be healed. We know that help comes from outside of ourselves, from our loving God via the alien righteousness of Jesus Christ dispensed by the Spirit who is not our own.
Gospel wakefulness brings us to the end of ourselves, but also to the beginning of our true selves, the image of God in us that is being restored and begging for reconciliation not just with God but with our neighbors.
The gospel-wakened church pursues unity, then, as an appetite, as an instinct. She needs no artificial program or incentive of success. She is awakened to love, compelled to reconcile, so she does. With Christ’s glory beheld by mutual vision, the gospel-wakened church is harmonized, each distinct voice and gift joined in the unity of the gospel. That together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 15:6)
5. We Resolve to Be Worshipful
The gospel-wakened church can’t help but worship. Her affections are renewed, her sense of worship is wakened to the one true God above all gods. She has seen the antiglories of her own degradation; she has felt great shame. But she has experienced the covering approval of Jesus Christ. She has been healed! So she rises, walking and leaping and praising God. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. (Rom. 15:7)
6. We Resolve to Glory in the Gospel
How did Christ welcome us? With grace, despite our sin. With embrace, despite our demerits. With cover, despite our shame. With love, despite our animosity. With sacrifice, despite our unworthiness. That is how Christ welcomed us. The gospel-wakened church welcomes each other in that way, for God’s glory.
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An excerpt from Jared Wilson’s recently published book, Gospel Wakefulness.
Jared C. Wilson is the pastor of Middletown Springs Community Church in Middletown Springs, Vermont. He is an award-winning author whose articles and short stories have appeared in a number of periodicals, and has written the popular books Your Jesus Is Too Safe and Gospel Wakefulness, as well as the curriculum Abide. Wilson lives in Vermont with his wife and two daughters, and blogs daily at GospelDrivenChurch.com.