Month: January 2023

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Bridging the Divide

Our cinema van slowed, rolling forward to the shoreline.

Africa’s vast body of water, Lake Victoria, lay directly ahead. If we should reach our destination, Rusinga Island, we must await the ferry here at Mbita Village.

We watched the ferry approach. Soon the Toyota, bearing us two missionaries, a diesel generator, a movie projector and gospel films departed the mainland. We and our cargo floated toward the water-encircled land before us.

Throughout it all the ferry was key. We had no other way to make it there. This was it, the ferry. Just this.

A religious group in the city where I now live set a sign in front of their meeting place. The organization promotes an idea that there are many equally valid “life paths”.

The sign reads, What is the true bible for you?

To the disciple of Jesus, such a question seems odd.

To his delight, the disciple has found that the book of the ages – the Holy Bible – holds in its pages the answers to life’s biggest questions. Foundational truths addressing the deepest concerns of every culture and people through every generation are preserved in the ancient Judeo-Christian texts.

Amazingly, the Bible leads anyone who responds to its invitation to the answer of all life’s primary needs. That answer does not lie in a philosophy or a principle or a creed. Rather, in a person. Jesus.

The earnest Christ-follower stands assured that each broken individual, every fractured, upside-down society can be healed, can be put right. Truths found in scripture supply hope for every soul who lives. What is needed is opening and reading and honestly considering the Book’s words. And responding to God, to his salvation offer of ongoing abundant living with him. In surrender to Jesus.

What Bible is for me?

The disciple has looked carefully at Jesus’ life in the scriptures and says, “I like what I see in the nature of this person, Jesus. I want that. I want it more than anything I have ever wanted, more than anything I could ever want.”

Terrific! It is at this place then, we must meet our challenge. Deep waters lie before us, our complete inability on our own of getting to the place we need to go. It is like gazing across Victoria’s waters to Rusinga Island but with no ferry to get us there.

Good news.

The disciple is not left stranded, the apprentice is given means. A land of the living beckons.

©2022 Jerry Lout

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Aim

Certain words have a way about them.

Through every century since Jesus first employed it the term Disciple has pulsed with meaning.

‘Disciple’ carries a weight, an identity and an assignment. A central aim of Jesus’ life and ministry on earth gets captured by this term. Indeed, the final commissioning words the resurrected Christ offered to his followers on the Jerusalem hillside brings it home,

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”.* He pronounced the assignment to his followers, and was gone.

The phrase is clear. It states what Jesus wants. Go. Make disciples.

So, what does disciple mean? Wikipedia doesn’t always get it right with definitions. In this case it has,

“In the ancient world, a disciple is a follower or adherent of a teacher. It is not the same as being a student in the modern sense. A disciple in the ancient biblical world actively imitated both the life and teaching of the master. It was a deliberate apprenticeship which made the fully formed disciple a living copy of the master.”

Apprenticeship. Words do have a way about them. In his work The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard helps us with the word apprentice.

Two words. . . Disciple. Apprentice. . . their meaning is the same. This is helpful when the sincere believer asks, “What does becoming a follower-of-Jesus look like?”

So Jesus – savior, teacher, trainer – walks along-side his redeemed ones. He is with them every moment in the person of the Holy Spirit under the caring eye of Father God. He is accessible to his children and they to him. The believer may draw on the peace, joy, love and power of the Spirit’s present companionship.

Consider this. What richer offer could come one’s way as we go about living our lives in real time on this earth? The offer is authentic. But it is more than an offer, it is Christ’s commissioning to every believer,

“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children.”*

There it is, right from the New Testament. Apprentice language.

Probably a good early question we might ask of ourselves, “Who am I, as a Christian? Am I a forgiven sinner permitted into heaven when I die? Am I that and only little more?” Or am I stirred somehow toward becoming what Jesus stated he was after – a person easily recognizable as God’s child? One growing more and more to resemble the son of the Father in both character and conduct. Being as he was. Doing as he did.

Increasing numbers of believers are making the shift, growing on purpose into Jesus-likeness. Am I in?

*Ephesians 5:1; Matthew 28.19

©2023 Jerry Lout

 

 

 

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Assigned

I had known him before our class meeting that day in the early ‘80s. But the friendship grew once X-tray Tech Haniel Karithi joined the studies in a theology program I supervised.

Apprenticing to Jesus means – among other things – stretching one’s self. Allowing him to prompt us to God-sized assignments.

Sometime after our many weekly extension classes, Haniel, with his wife, Peninah sensed a stirring. They felt God’s call to relocate.

Young children in tow, Haniel and Peninah would leave their home in the lush, fertile highlands of Mt Kenya. They would begin serving Jesus in a different kind of place. Among a different kind of people.

After long hours of bus travel northward along paved, then dusty roads, the little family arrived at Marsabit town. Then to villages beyond. Life all around them felt foreign. The northern frontier district featured a landscape harsh, dry, brutally hot.

Years before Haniel had applied himself as an apprentice to master skills in medical technology. Now in this new world of strangeness, he (and his wife) entered a different sort of apprenticing.  Haniel and Peninah gave themselves to grow. Learning of and adjusting to new sights and sounds and flavors. Food – Music – Customs – Dress – Language.  Change was tough going at times. They pressed on, praying, trusting, hoping.

The couple yielded themselves more and more. They sensed Jesus’ deep care toward a people group lacking any knowledge of him, or of God’s grace.

Every believer (every follower-of-Christ) is called to discipleship. If the Bible says anything true about Christians it is that they are a people engaged. They pursue the way of God. They do this imperfectly. Yet, God’s Spirit aids them. Their prize and goal is love, always love.

Probably only a few people on the planet are invited by God to change their zip code for the Sahel Region of Africa. Yet, an adventure beyond imagining awaits every single Christ-follower who offers an obedient ‘yes’. Our ‘yes’ is relational at its core.

Yes, I’ll move nearer to Jesus than where I have been lately. Yes, with his aid I will turn my ear toward his voice. Then, do the same again, until a pattern forms.

Common folks like Haniel and Peninah remind us such a kind of living is within reach. Apprenticing to Jesus is doable.

Help me, Lord, would you? Help me trust. Place about my shoulders your ‘easy yoke.

(c)2022 Jerry Lout

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Which Me?

Turning my Sherlock Holmes microscope away from other people’s lives – their habits of mood and attitude and behavior – I nervously aim the instrument to myself. Assuming I am taking an honest inventory, sweat droplets begin beading on my forehead.

In my (imaginary) self-exam mode, I assess how I am doing in a brief series of 24-hour segments.  Suppose that early on, I might register a good day (part of a good day?) where my natural responses to people and circumstances rank pretty well on the ‘selflessness’ scale. I start feeling a little heady over this, start edging toward self-congratulatory mode.

But right when the ego celebration is about to launch, I catch a nagging reminder that this is not all that I am called upon to have brought about in my life. I am a willing and, yes, loving follower of Christ.

I begin drilling down beyond the superficial. And find that the onion surface conceals a lot of layers. I rediscover that I am a whole being – body, mind, heart, will. What if my master, Jesus, is calling me to full-on renovation? That would mean a lot of things.

It would mean the disassembling – portion by portion – of the entire bundle (thinkings, feelings, choosings, etc), followed by the methodical rebuilding of all. His way. After all, if he is set on my growing to fully resemble him (in character, patience, generosity, service, peace, joy, love), a hefty amount of ‘me’ has got to go. Such transformation would mean my being somehow ‘traded off’ for a better ‘me’. Interestingly, someone* wrote a useful book about that very thing, “The Me I Want to Be”.

Pondering all this, I pause a moment and offer a half-whispered question, “Is this what Jesus asks of a disciple? Can the apprentice get to the place the master is leading him toward without the disciple’s all-out surrender to a renovated life? A radically changed life?

©2023 Jerry Lout                                                                                  *John Ortberg