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November 13, 2025

Mentored

“Follow me, as I follow”. It is interesting isn’t it, that the best of leaders tend to be the best of followers?

Paul’s invitation language makes something clear. His offer to model the faith for the “Christ-disciple wannabe” is a statement flowing from humility, not arrogance. After all, this man Paul is the Jesus-hating ‘Saul of Tarsus’ of yesteryear. His resume reads in part, “Paul – the worst of sinners”.*

The Difference Jesus Makes.

Saul of Tarsus had met the Master of masters. His life-altering collision with God in Christ on the Damascus Road initiated a hundred-eighty-degree turn. The former homicidal Pharisee plunged into the deep end of Christ-centered discipleship. With Paul, as with others (Matthew, Peter, James. . .) he took up an apprenticing posture under the direct tutelage of his savior, the Lord Jesus. So that a while later, Paul’s transformation still ongoing, he wrote younger believers in the faith, offering his invitation: “Follow me as I follow Christ”**. Walking purposefully – one day after the next after the next – in the company of his welcoming mentor, the trainee had grown suited to train others. Paul the apprentice (never ceasing to be follower) led.

Continuing to follow after – striving himself toward Christlikeness (“that I may know him”***) – the humble disciple-maker could speak from his established identity in the Lord.

His life one of mentoring, instructing, of modeling Christ.

Electrician apprentices (when intentional in their cause) get transformed into electricians. French language understudies who, over the long haul, devote themselves to the cause, advance in time to become easy conversationalists. . .even in Paris!

Whether a person is Italian tenor Adrea Bocelli, Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, or Okmulgee’s dustbowl-escapee-turned-Journeyman Plumber Clyde Lout. Each of them is marked by a feature that keeps propelling them forward.

Intention.

November 6, 2025November 5, 2025

For Good Measure

Apprenticing through Practice.

“Measure twice, cut once.”

Carpenter-trainees know the phrase well. When setting out to cut a piece of lumber, the worker employs his time wisely, even when extra seconds of time are called for. By taking care to measure and mark the piece – not once but twice – the craftsman guards against mistakes (some can be costly!) and avoids senseless waste.

The “measure-twice” phrase loops in the head repeatedly during an apprentice’s early tutoring under the guidance of their craftsman-teacher. The mantra, being revisited again and again over time – in both mind and bodily action – transforms an important quality inside the carpenter-wannabe. They are never the same, and happy for the change.

The carpenter apprentice might at first regard the “measure-twice” action as a pointless waste of time. But not for long.

Any successful tradesman in any field has applied himself to (firstly) pay attention to instruction and (secondly) to practice – practice – practice.

We don’t have to look far within Scripture to spot a seasoned follower aligning himself to the way of Jesus Christ.

What does Paul coach the believer in, once they are challenged to reframe their thought life toward things of “excellence”? As a spiritual journeyman, so to speak, Paul invites the following:

“What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”

October 30, 2025

Crossroad

Life-altering decisions call for action.

Once I choose to lay aside poor patterns of living in favor of speech and conduct that better reflect God’s life in Christ, I must engage my will. I take action. I come to terms that I am shifting from spectator mode. I’m in the game for real.

Thinking will play an important part in moving into a better kind of living. But mental pondering alone over a crossroad lying before a traveler fails to get them a centimeter onto the new direction.

The fork has appeared in the road ahead, and I know I must act on my decision. Taking “the road less travelled”, I engage a powerful thing known as the will. My will.

Willpower alone lacks the necessary energy to bring about spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, the long journey of change into Christlikeness will never occur apart from my will – and my ongoing actions of choice stemming from it as I pursue him. And my pursuit of him marks the terrain where my will and the Lord’s companioning presence merge. I have willed to begin letting him be in charge.

Jesus supplies his powerful presence, but even so, he avoids seizing the steering wheel of my personal volition – my will. He offers his presence and his power right along with his offer of partnering with me throughout our good and marvelous life-altering adventure together.

It is so with all his disciples – each one a work in progress – God’s beloved children. We engage. We yield. Shifting our posture, we set our feet in motion alongside his companioning presence. It is when this happens that the load becomes light.

When the economic crisis of 2008 descended on the United States, several industries were broadsided. Among those profoundly impacted by the financial earthquake was the oil industry. Several of our international friends who had been majoring in Petroleum Engineering at our city’s university were swept into an academic crisis. Career-altering decisions were made in a matter of days. At a major crossroad, their futures felt at stake

Almost overnight graduate students at the PhD and Masters levels found themselves redirecting their attention to very new fields of research. Fresh learning curves met them at every turn, sharp and steep!

While these scholars were endowed with very keen minds, to shift from their petroleum engineering specialty to another demanded of them not only a new focus but a new set of disciplines. The students could not make the daunting change by merely wishing for it or by thinking it into being. Learning of and then entering into a new set of practices had to be embraced. Whole careers rested on this proposition.

In a similar way, when a Christian proceeds past something called their profession of faith, and embraces their actual identity as disciple-of-Jesus, they have embarked upon a life-altering path. Profession of faith becomes Practice of the faith. Humbly and decidedly with both will and their yieldedness in place, they strike out on the new path. A decision has been made – one of many lying ahead of them.. They have chosen the with-God life.

October 23, 2025October 22, 2025

Pulsing Cries

Ruth Haley Barton, author and consultant who specializes in bringing clarity to otherwise murky waters for individuals and ministry teams alike, offers this,

“Your desire for more of God than you have right now, you’re longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation then you have experience so far, is the truest thing about you.”*

Isn’t it interesting how quickly we can point to features about ourselves and mistakenly assume they are the things that most accurately define who we are?

Ruth continues,

“You might think that your woundedness or your sinfulness is the truest thing about you or that your giftedness or your personality type or your job title or your identity as husband or wife mother or father somehow defines you. But in reality it is your desire for God and your capacity to reach for more of God than you have right now that is the deepest essence of who you are. . . From this place we cry out to God for deeper union with him and with others.”

The Apostle Paul, who penned a large portion of the New Testament, voiced his own longings, even after long years had piled up in his companioning journey with Christ.

“For my determined purpose is that I may know Him, that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly. . .”**

His words were not an expression of mediocrity. We may wish to pause a moment, draw in a slow breath, and re-read them.

This single-focused messenger (Paul) surely yearned that the same kind of longing he knew might characterize every Christ-follower getting introduced to the way of the Master,

“My little children. . . I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!***

Such pulsing cries breaking from the heart of those early messengers (and the many who followed after), call the believing world to run after the resurrected Lord. Marking those who do as a people given over to desire.

This gives me pause. Some of my desires can use some realigning. Others, if I am honest, likely call for drastic action. Some may well need killing. Getting soon replaced with desires that are worthy of the name.

October 16, 2025October 15, 2025

The Chase

“Practice makes perfect”, so goes the saying.

Aiming for Christlikeness, in the sense of fully mirroring Jesus’ faultless nature, is likely a reach too far. Still. Every believer can go, and is welcomed to go, a meaningful distance in narrowing that gap.

The late Brennan Manning stated with refreshing candor: “When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. . .”

A Franciscan priest, and author of *The Ragamuffin Gospel, Manning noted that God’s gift of grace brings to us: “Power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is sheer gift”.

The priest further lays his heart bare in characteristic self-disclosure, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”

In A.W. Tozer’s list of qualities he found reliably present in the nature of God, noted that one of them is God’s Immutability. God’s nature is reliable. He doesn’t change. God loves, and he loves without deviation. His love is immutable, always in “on” mode. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases” (Lamentations 3:22)

So, we ask the question. Do I wish to grow to be more like Jesus. . . that is, to love as he loved and called us to love? Or, short of this, could I bring myself to sincerely whisper, “I want to want to love in this way”?

Either position can be a perfect place to begin and to proceed forward from.

October 2, 2025

Starting Point

My friend Mark is a poster boy to the power of love. Abused, then abandoned by his drug-dependent parents, Mark was found years later, languishing on city streets and in alleyways – dysfunctional and angry. A kind-hearted gentleman named Paul discovered him. Paul – just the father-figure Mark needed – took him under his wing. The journey had its setbacks, but authentic father love comes as a tenacious force.

Fast forward. Fifteen years in Mark himself routinely comes alongside men that are barely surviving at the fringes – every bit as broken as he had once been. Mark, like the rest of us, is far from perfect. A yielded Christ-follower, he’s a work in progress. Bearing God’s love.

The beckoning of Jesus to live the great commandment (love God fully, love others as myself) is not only called for, it is doable in a fuller measure than one might imagine.

It can be argued (and often is) that loving fully – i.e. for the most part with all of one’s being – is the mark of a person becoming fully human. God wishes this for us and, since his hopes are for our betterment, he himself enters the fray, lends aid. What aid it is!

But if a person would align himself with this venture (becoming one wholly given to love) they must want it and want it strongly. The hard truth is, few of us start out with that kind of “want to”. The process of being formed to Christlikeness starts (thank God), not with ourselves, but with him, with God.

God is Love.

Who among us would not want to be a loving human being? What person would look at authentic love and react with a ho-hum, “I’m not interested, thank you.”?

So, even though we do not start out all fueled and fired with an appetite to love God in the great commandment way, Christ himself tenderly invites us. He knows that we must begin where we are, not where we aren’t.

I want to want.

Some of us reach a place of saying, “I want to want what I presently do not want, and I want to not want what I presently do want”*.

This kind of simple honesty brings us to the needed “readiness of soul”. Since we cannot experience life transformation by ‘willing’ ourselves into readiness for it.

We begin where we are, not where we aren’t.

September 25, 2025September 24, 2025

One Driving Force

I imagine myself trying to distill to a single phrase the one driving force meant to mark the life of every Christian believer. While surveying this, I picture a gathering of people. I am present and Jesus is speaking to us all. He is giving his own answer to the very question (what most marks the disciples’ motivation, his drive, in living life?).

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. . . .and you shall love your neighbor as yourself”

Love.

God Is Love, the sacred text reads.

The earliest followers of Jesus were utterly taken by the love of God, witnessed nonstop through the sheer volume of words and actions issuing from his Son. They saw it in him. . . saw it demonstrated through him. . . love, at every turn.

When he pardoned and blessed the woman that was dragged into the public square, shamed and condemned by her accusers. And the other instances.

Stretching out a hand, bringing healing to a leper (the untouchables, the shunned of their day). Conferring dignity and high worth on little kids (the unsophisticated and marginally noticed). Assigning honor, even friendship, to a diminutive, tree-scaling government scoundrel.

Small wonder that the Westminster Shorter Catechism answers as it does the question, “What is the chief end of man?”

Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

I quiz myself. Have I ever met such a person who carries out that pair of assignments well – consistently, virtuously? Other than the itinerant Nazarene preacher, human embodiment of the divine?

As with Jesus, so with us. Agape alone supplies fuel for knowing God and for extolling him as beautiful and transcendent Being of the cosmos and beyond. Day in and glorious day out.

Little surprise the tentmaking apostle’s analysis. . . the greatest of all that remains is love. Surely, indeed – given the savior’s gasping prayer over his executioners,

“Father, forgive.”

September 18, 2025

Best Thing Ever

The artificial intelligence gurus are the first to confess in these early stages that A.I. is not always the ideal source of garnering accurate information. That said, in curiosity we floated a phrase to the Web, wondering if A.I. had it in her to crank out an “intelligent” response. The phrase submitted is:

Life in Jesus, the great treasure.

A.I. shot back:

“The idea is that a life centered on Jesus brings a deeper sense of joy, purpose, and fulfillment than any temporary earthly pleasure.” (how does one high-five a mechanism that mimics the human brain!?)

In one publication John Piper asks, “What is Christ to us if he is not our all-satisfying treasure?” His article continues,

“The primary point (in Jesus’ parable) is that Christ, in his kingly greatness, is supremely valuable. The secondary point is that the way to have Christ as our treasure is to experience such a joy in his value that he is more to be desired than all our other possessions put together. Receiving Jesus as our treasure really does imply joyfully treasuring him.”

The statement rings true. Yet, as we know, coming to joyfully treasure another person does not usually happen overnight. Typically, we grow to value the special person more and more as we give time getting to know them. We learn who they are, their character, their personality and values.

Ann and I will, by year’s end celebrate the 58^th time circling the sun together as husband and wife. While it was certainly love that found us pledging our vows before the minister those years ago, we have, along the way grown deeper in our relationship. We treasure more fully this marital union, and this spouse (continuing to stand alongside) “for better or for worse”.

In a similar but even richer way, the disciple of Jesus comes to know their Lord more intimately over time. The apprentice comes to joyfully value and treasure the person of Jesus.

The follower of Christ happily echoes a line made famous by gospel singer James Cleveland,

“Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to me”.

September 11, 2025September 9, 2025

Assured Gains

When twenty-seven-year-old Jim Elliott and his friends set out to reach a remote people group of the Amazon Basin, none of the missionaries envisioned the cost that lay before them.

It was a few months after my tenth birthday when Life Magazine broke the news story. The five young men had died at the hands of Waorani tribesmen as they tried making contact with them deep in the rain forest. The men’s hope had been to, over time, share the love of God and message of Christ among the Waorani. I still recall learning the heart-rending news of their deaths.

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.

The spread of the statement that Jim Elliott had penned in his personal journal served to awaken missionary passions across a fresh generation of young men and women. A new wave of ‘Great Commission Jesus-followers’ to serve in cross-cultural mission work was born.

Jim Elliott’s “he is no fool” phrase came to challenge prevailing worldviews of many across the landscape of conventional Christianity. His statement leaving a question to ponder at a deeper level. . . What sort of things in life do matter most?

Indeed, what did Jim and his four friends (Nate, Pete, Ed, Roger) actually ‘gain’ in the yielding up of their hearts, talents, treasures, and very lives?

And, when the fellows in Jesus’ provocative parables opts without hesitation to let go of all they have in order to obtain the “gain”, just what is that gain?

The New Testament pharisee-turned-apostle sings, The treasure is Jesus! With an ever-growing nearness and loving obedience to him.

“For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”*

September 4, 2025September 4, 2025

Value Assessment

For most of us the thought of dying every day does not generate fond images. At least, at first.

I was young when the term “fool’s gold” entered my vocabulary. While playing outside one day I came upon a chunk of rock that grabbed my attention. It was the glitter that beamed from it as I turned it in my hand under direct sunlight. Learning that the alluring item had an unflattering nickname brought disappointment. Insult was added to injury. . . who likes being labeled “fool”?

Addressing a crowd of people one day Jesus launched into a parable The short story, given to provide some instructive insight, was followed by another. Then yet another. The rabi was on a roll.

Two of his stories – paired closely as if to emphasize his point – carried a single theme. Both stories – Parable # 5 and Parable # 6 – must have struck a chord with his listeners. Each narrative focused direct attention on the unexpected discovery of some extraordinary treasure – (no “fool’s gold” here.) Either one of these stumbled-upon prizes would have qualified as any treasure hunter’s dream find.

Seeing the items – one a rare treasure, the other an exquisite pearl – the discoverers went breathless with excitement. Each knew that acquiring such riches would require a trade-off. Of some kind. In order to gain the treasure, something of their own current possession would be let go. Yet, whatever the price, nothing they would offer could match the worth of this! Neither man balked.

Making such a discovery, each man – likely at breakneck speed – darted off to gather up whatever belongings he called his own. And liquidated all of it without a blink. You could say he was “dead” to everything except his new find. The single thing that mattered was the thing of priceless value – the treasure, the pearl.

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” **