December 2025 – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

December 18, 2025December 17, 2025

Learning Curve Cont’d

Those who knew him (directly or indirectly) would attest that Professor Willard modeled well what it can mean to progress over time into a kind of person who would naturally and routinely exhibit much of the nature of the Lord Jesus. Willard, ever a trainee himself and no stranger to challenges of his own along the way, subscribed, with a robust and warm-hearted tenacity, to a foundational conviction. A truth grounded in Scripture and advanced among apprentices to Jesus across the centuries:

“A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do.”

This kind of conviction calls for embarking on a rigorous, adventurous (and as it commonly turns out, utterly satisfying) journey into training.

Among the more weighty (and worthy) thoughts for any image-bearer to ponder may be the following – also penned by the esteemed USC professor.

“The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity.”*

December 11, 2025December 16, 2025

Learning Curve

Christ-followers hold that our amazing “sweet-society God” is the only Divine Being in all the cosmos. He’s the God who through the centuries – indeed, through eternity – has joyfully collaborated within his own triune being. This is a thing that challenges, if not defies, our imagination. Self-existent and self-sustaining, nothing of good is absent. Nothing lacks.

Perfect completeness, it can be attested, finds its definition in God. The triune Father and Son and Spirit relish one another’s presence. Each takes extravagant delight in the others. God requires nothing beyond himself to be. Within himself is utter perfection and completeness.

Yet, astonishing as it may be, God has chosen to insist on bringing along others (we, his own image-bearers who’ve been brought into existence by the Lord himself) into this mysterious, glorious mix. He ever works to mingle and play and collaborate with us in bringing about our inner and outer transformation for the good. (and, what higher good for a family of humans could there be than to come to embody and reflect the pure likeness of the Father’s distinctively beloved Son?)

Partnering with God, of course, involves more than merely being together in the same room. The road to spiritual transformation is one of training. What is one of the father’s primary aims? His goal is our joyous, flourishing growth in becoming the best version of ourselves – just as we were created to be. Easily recognizable as a people continuously brimming to overflowing with the qualities and nature and the very life of our Lord. Jesus – the undiluted, non-pretentious embodiment of love. Such a lofty aim may at times feel impossibly out of reach. Until one gladly recalls they are on a With-God pilgrimage.

December 4, 2025December 3, 2025

A-Team

Camaraderie – Collaborating – Companioning.

The three words share common ground with yet another ‘C’ word – a special kind of word capturing what the others might reflect. Community. And, the very creator offering a believer his companioning presence – what a treasure!

“Faith was never meant to be done alone”.

Whoever coined the line understood, and must have surely prized, its profound truth. It reflects the human order when at its best.

The wonder of collaborating with God as a principal partner in life transformation means discovering that he brims with community within himself.

God’s three-in-one Community – boundless in love, delight and power – defies our capacities to imagine or describe. The nature of the divine trinity – God the Father, the Son and the Spirit – intrigues and stupefies the finite mind.

The old Puritans of centuries past coined a pithy term that calls up the warmth of their image of God. A glorious personal being of extravagant love, joy, goodness and peace. God (the Puritans testify) is, in himself, “a sweet Society”.

May we dare to imagine our sweet-society God, radically partnering with his children in the forever enterprise of shaping us, day by day, into the likeness and nature of Jesus. He, who is all goodness, through and through.