Tag: apprentice

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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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En Route

What does a Christ-loving disciple look like?

Imagine for a minute being assigned the task of people-watching for a day, having one focused objective as the aim. Locate and identify one or more persons within your neighborhood or town whose natural disposition is one of consistent selflessness. You are looking diligently to spot such a selfless, caring person wherever you go today – the marketplace, school, office, in traffic.

In your investigative people-watching quest you’re especially on the lookout for responses these persons give as they encounter life’s circumstances and people. Facial gestures, body language, speech come under the microscope as you watch for the exceptionally selfless person amidst the rest. You might recognize them as “Jesus-like” in this one regard. Selflessness.

Gaining this rare kind of closeup look at people’s lives in numerous settings and conditions might prove revealing, right. (a creepy exercise, yes. We’re only imagining, remember).

Carrying our imaginary survey a step further, at the end of the day you review in your mind the parade of individuals you have ‘spied on’ (we assume you’re a benevolent spy).

By now you can identify dispositions (observable attitudes) of a good number of run-of-the-mill Sallys and Joes for this one day. Giving it your best shot, you might now zero in on two or three of the ‘most impressive subjects’ you’ve tracked. Lovely dispositions, all.

Your new assignment – soon ending the creepy espionage game – you undertake the first task once more. Now, however, you are tracking only the one or two people you’ve deemed as ‘high-ranking’. For them the disposition test will now run not for just a day but for seven days, a full week.

I must offer a confession here. While writing the imaginary scenarios above, I felt my interior self ‘looking over my shoulder’. Let me never be so observed or evaluated! A further sensation is one of feeling immeasurable gratitude to the One whose regenerating love covers “a multitude of sins.”

Can we hope that the illustration, flawed as it is, might bring home a couple worthy lessons for us as we aspire to closer kinship in our apprenticing walk with Jesus. Stay tuned.

© 2022 Jerry Lout

 

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Bring it

Our old self is the self of rebellion. The prophet levels the charge without apology, “We have turned – every one of us – to our own way.”

Change must come. God through Jesus would bring it.

The Spirit of God has a way of very often beckoning us nearer in toward himself. The closing pages of scripture supply us a touching image depicting this, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone would hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and have fellowship with him and he with me.”*

Jesus is a bonifide historical one-of-a-kind person. This brown-skinned itinerate messenger, his voice carrying a middle-eastern accent, brought the reality of God to earth in tangible form. He is relevant as ever.

Living out his righteous, unique, generous life among us, Jesus gave himself to all humanity as God’s offering, paying in his sacrificial dying the penalty for all our wrongs, our sins. His crucifixion death secured complete freedom from guilt as well as from judgment in the afterlife for those who trust their lives to him.

For the Jesus-follower this all marks the beginning point, because to know Jesus is to grow in Jesus. In bringing us to himself he has ushered us into a brand new kind of living. It is companionship-centered. Jesus has laid claim to our present and future. He “companions” us, as children of the heavenly father into growth toward and into his own likeness. Once again, the thing Jesus brings to us is change. Beautiful, essential, transformational change.

We don’t easily drift when remaining near enough Jesus to feel his breath. The word plateau is a foreign term to those entering God’s kingdom with the aim of keeping company with the kingdom’s king, to train or apprentice under him in the way of love. The journey ahead is not static but dynamic.

Jesus came to change us. Are we In?

While it’s true the change begins the minute we first turn and yield to him, Jesus sets out to transform us day by day, little by little. If transformation is to happen at all it will mostly come by centimeters not yards. The Serenity Prayer suggests an appealing pace,

“Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time”.

* Revelation 3:20 ESV

©2022 Jerry Lout

 

 

 

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Observing

Observe

Watching my Suzuki dirt bike hoisted onto a wobbling, home-built canoe at the edge of a flooded river, gave me pause. Did I make a smart move?

My unsettled mind calmed the next few minutes as the two tribal men skillfully executed their self-assigned duties. I looked on in growing admiration.

These fellas know a thing or two about rivers. And of cargo management for home-built canoes.

The reflection in my head took form after I witnessed a donkey traversing those waters under the young men’s management, emerging at the opposite shore, her hee-haw still intact.

In a similar way I’ve found it often only takes a little observing to appreciate praiseworthy qualities in people – their dispositions, skill sets, personalities, their manner.

In this respect, Jesus has become my favorite subject in people-watching.

Indeed, he himself – this son of a blue-collar worker growing up in an unexceptional middle-eastern village – honed his own set of observing skills. Sharpening them as keenly as he did the carpentry tool finding its home in his saw-dust-sprinkled grip.

Engage

“Here, Yeshua, see how we mark the place just this side of the knot hole? This is where we cut the plank. Now, watch closely where I position the saw. . .” Papa Joseph patiently tutored the youngster, modelling for him the carpentry craft.

To excel at a thing – to move little by little into expertise – any person ever trained in a skill knows the drill.

  • Watch (observe) the trainer, listening, paying attention as they do their work
  • Imitate the manner and movements of the mentor while he looks on, coaches, corrects
  • Do the work – produce ‘fruit’ reflecting the quality of the master’s own workmanship and of his character

Jesus did this. Jesus trained his friends while adopting for himself role of trainee. Remarkable, really. The writer of Hebrews offers a pithy insight about Jesus, “He learned.”

Paul the apostle followed suit, the Damascus-road convert boldly recruiting others to ‘board his gospel canoe’:

“Follow me as I follow Christ.”

Become

I want to become like Jesus.

Through the years the yearning has ebbed and flowed in my deep interior.

Not in me alone. The cry is common to Christ-followers all around. Common because nothing else slakes our thirst for meaning. A cry because, at the core, this is our design. We are made for it – for apprenticeship to Jesus. Made to be formed into a likeness very much resembling him. In  character. In life.

How does such a life-altering enterprise get underway?

My boyhood days growing up on a farm stirs a thought.

©2018 Jerry Lout

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Follow

For years my faith was out of sorts. Not that it lacked truth. Or strength. Or substance (though this could be a subject for another day).

My faith bobbled and wobbled from a lack of understanding how it was meant to be applied. . . or not applied. Especially where actual life formation was concerned. How I was meant to grow – tools to move me there – actual steps to Christlikeness.

A car-towing venture in Africa during the ‘60s might illustrate (a blog entry at this site labeled Drag Race, relates the drama in full).

Two men. Two cars. One of the vehicles, a Jeep, has its engine running. It’s towing the other – a disabled Volkswagen Beetle.

All went well until, navigating a long, downhill slope of dirt road, the less-seasoned Beetle driver – his car gaining speed – elected to pass the Jeep. Yes, to move in front of the lead car. . . Tow rope secure, in place.

His act was not one of the better options open to him. The driver was abruptly schooled in a basic principle. The tow rope would prove a friend as long as its use was rightly applied.

In my hopes of maturing in areas of Christlikeness I failed (like the VW pilot) to position myself rightly in relation to my leader.

It is the wise Jesus-follower who keeps the Rabbi’s sandal-prints in view. Simply moving forward as apprentice-in-training, eyeing the master, taking signals from him. Rather than the alternative – charging. . . or meandering [the speed doesn’t seem to matter] – off independently.

Actions taken in the hope of life transformation fall to two categories. Dallas Willard offers one of them as the clear choice, stating that effective life-change for the good rests on this critical approach – Training vs Trying.

Like the poor, distracted driver, I’ve spent a lot of my energy trying to keep myself aright, often inattentive to a useful point. The fellow in the lead has a better view of the landscape, holds the necessary power at his disposal, and knows just where we’re headed.

Entrusting my understanding to his recommended way – the power needed supplied in full and within easy reach – I might enter a more hopeful process. Not apart from effort, to be sure, this further journey into his likeness. But surprisingly effective, richly hopeful and actually less labor-intensive. In the Rabbi’s language – an easy yoke.

I was at last entering a means that may help me avoid the wrong use of my lifeline, sparing my ‘mobility’ being toppled sideways in the dust.

The rabbi-teacher inviting me to a better means.

“A more excellent way” – 1 Corinthians 12:31

©2018 Jerry Lout       [Ian Espinosa  photo credit. Crossroads]

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Gain

“I hustled”.

The strong declaration sprang from my father’s lips. Clyde Baxter Lout was near seventy and I near forty as we chatted. Morning coffee had brewed and I was offering up questions about his early years as a working man.

“Hustle” is an old word. It comes with several different meanings. My father used it for just one.

He applied the term the way Collins English Dictionary does – “If someone hustles, they try hard to earn money or to gain an advantage from a situation.”

Counted among my closer friends are several engineers who came to America’s shores as students from far away places. . . Asia, the Middle East, elsewhere.  They hustled.

Getting schooled in Oklahoma, most had arrived at Tulsa University after finishing undergraduate work in their own homelands. Making their way to my state from places few Oklahomans ever see – Bangalore, Beijing, Chenai, Tehran, these friends had grown up in cultures separated by long miles and diverse languages. But they carried this thing in common.

In their daily hustle, the bright young men labored energetically, sacrificing sleep, going after carefully-defined goals.

They apprenticed.

In time job fairs came along. Industries took notice. Meanwhile, for several of the internationals, another kind of shift had come. Discovering the Christian faith through friends in Tulsa, a number trusted their lives to Jesus. So life in another dimension began. A bigger life, one in Jesus’ kingdom.

On the other hand Clyde Baxter had started off as an orphan.

Though lacking formal schooling beyond tenth grade (cotton fields calling him to scratch out a living in the great depression years), he hustled. Fleeing Oklahoma poverty on rumbling freight trains, he moved westward, and landed his first California job as a ditch digger. When a “plumber’s helper” ad caught his attention, the young Okie went for an interview.

“Young man, if you will give energy and attention to it, we will make you an apprentice.”

“What is an apprentice?”

©2018 Jerry Lout

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A New Coach

The apprentices did not tire of their hardships in the company of the carpenter-turned-rabbi. Roughing it with Jesus deepened them somehow. And, while his parables and assignments at times perplexed them, they were never at risk of getting bored.

As he labored at offering up truth and clarifying it where needed, Jesus remained always-present to them. His favorite moments seemed to be found engaging these clearly flawed but hungering men. The rabbi taught with warmth and wit and they would catch the occasional upturned smile in the flicker of a crackling night fire. At other times his voice was marked by a distressful tone. This would not often pass unnoticed, their searching eyes exploring his troubled features. Clearly he knew things – deep, disturbing, wonderful things – not yet ripe for sharing.

While they at times tracked his sayings with clear-eyed understanding, the recruited apprentices weren’t always the keenest of trainees.

He could leave them feeling uneasy by his prescriptions for living life. Sometimes they were utterly baffled over a point he seemed bent on making. In these times, to his credit, he never demeaned them. Rather, the rabbi gently drew them in. . . to reflecting, to pondering, in ways the best educators through history have commonly done.

Jesus’s first team of trainees numbered just twelve. The wildly-diverse company of personalities with their contrasted backgrounds walked with Jesus, under his tutelage a good three years and more.

Partly because of his awful and glorious final acts – yielding up himself as a young man in his prime to a voluntary death, then shockingly emerging fully alive three days later from his garden tomb – the rabbi’s handful of followers came to embrace him fully. And, considering their remarkable Holy Spirit-empowering afterward, how could his company of trainee-disciples possibly remain few!

Being fully divine, Jesus remained entirely man. Human, subject to weariness, to pain, pleasure, hope. Yet he stayed blameless, flawless-of-character, good.

While Jesus was surely qualified to mentor craftsmen in the skills of carpentry and construction, he knew well that his mission lay elsewhere. It was a mission spanning eternity and with all tribes of the human family in view. It was a call of cosmic dimension, an assignment in transforming communities out of all earth’s cultures and languages, into persons remarkably like himself.

While the word apprentice hasn’t always sprung readily to mind when reaching for a label to tag a “Jesus-follower”, it may come as close as any to best portray this mentor-mentee relationship.

Jesus was a master teacher. Beyond this, Jesus supplies not only knowledge for learning but the power needed to effectively apply life-altering truths to raw, in-the-trenches daily living. Bringing his disciples forward into a life as his own, he leads as friend.

A few years back I happened onto the writings of a gentleman in whom the term “apprentice to Jesus” had found a welcome home. He referenced it often. The apprentice word fits Dallas Willard like a favorite pair of gym shoes fits an athlete.

We can likely learn some things from a seasoned Christ-follower apprentice – who, on entering the process, found an entirely new life emerge.              

                               “Follow me as I follow Christ”     – Paul, the apostle

         ©2018 Jerry Lout