Tag: disciples

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Crossings

When Mr. Tang joined our luncheon Bible study, he was met with welcoming smiles. Before our weekly sessions would draw to a close, Host Cathy would give opportunity for voicing prayer needs. A few weeks in, Mr. Tang politely raised his hand.

“I wish to have you pray, please. I have been smoking cigarettes for a long time and I have tried to stop the habit many times but with no success. Can you pray for this?”

“Certainly,” Cathy smiled.

A few weeks passed. Again, Mr. Tang’s raised hand.

“I just want to say that from the day of praying about my smoking problem, I have not wanted a cigarette and I have not smoked one since.”  Once more smiles met him – this time in happy celebration.

The journey into faith takes as many routes as there are disciples trekking them. Each story unique.

For Mr. Tang – the thoughtful scholar who had competed with his daughter over a picture-story Bible – his narrative continued unfolding, step by gentle step.

“I’m glad you could come, Tang.”

The doctoral student was attentive as he sat with Ann and me, taking in our Sunday morning worship service. The preaching message highlighted God’s servant Joshua leading his people across the Jordan River into the Promised Land. At the close, Pastor Morgan extended an invitation,

“If anyone might be at a place where you sense you are ready to venture into new territory – a new place in your life in God, we welcome you to just come to the front area here for prayer. Jesus Christ will meet you today. God will lead you forward.”

Sensing Christ at work as Mr. Tang moved toward the aisle, I followed him forward. There in the Lord’s house, a quiet setting void of fanfare, I was privileged to lead my friend in a simple prayer as he offered himself to God.  A formidable divide was breached.

When the service ended and we had made our way to the lobby, Mr. Tang slowed and turned my way.

“Jerry, when we were there at the front and praying, I felt something. It felt like. . .” He paused to find expression. I never forgot his words – fitting language for a science major, I afterward mused,

“It was like liquid electricity coming into my head and flowing down through my whole body”.

I sensed the sacredness in his tone. We lingered a moment in silence. There was nothing to add.

©2024 Jerry Lout

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Choice Pattern

It is God who is at work in you, causing you to want to do his will and enabling you to do his will* (paraphrase)

Young Benjamin Solomon Carson heard his mother’s admonitions often. Choosing to heed her counsel, Ben took up the practice of reading, of intentional study. He figured out that most anyone could do at least this much. He chose to apply himself.  His mother, Sonya Carson – a praying woman, a single mom – anchored her life and security in God. She invoked his blessing over her two young sons as she labored at multiple jobs through their growing-up years.

“She never made excuses”, retired Neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson recalls, “and she never accepted an excuse from us.

“If we ever came up with an excuse, she always said, ‘Do you have a brain?’ And if the answer was yes, then she said, “Then you could have thought your way out of it.”

The pathway to flourishing in Christ is not a venture in teeth-gritting self-help. Yet, each of Jesus’ disciples does invest his or her own measure of effort into the enterprise. They have skin in the game as did Sonya Carson in the raising of her children.

Jesus did not stir passion among his audiences by churning out motivational slogans. What did he offer that sparked in his followers the passion and the resolve for living well?

By his own purposeful, routine actions he supplied them with a pattern. Today, as then,  Jesus’ own day-by-day personal practices serve as a kind of template for entering into and living from “the good life”.

In his humble reliance upon God the Father, Christ modeled for his followers the best kind of living available to humans everywhere. Such living comes through embracing and routinely nurturing common habits that were practiced by Jesus.  So that we his disciples may enter the un-anxious rhythms of our Lord’s own whole and beautiful life.

“For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure”*

©2023 Jerry Lout                                                                       * Philippians 2:13

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Living Springs

What now should be done?

For quite a good while my Christian journey centered on “shoulds”.

I had believed on Christ  in my youth. I knew he had pardoned my sins through his sacrifice on a cross. When I turned to him, confessing my wrongs and trusting in him, I knew deep down that I was now his.  The Bible speaks of being born anew from above. That was me.

I also knew in those earliest years of grace that my life in Jesus was not meant to plateau. It was meant to keep changing. I was not meant to live my life any longer on my own. His salvation was to go deeper than just getting me into heaven after this life.

But there was a problem. I lacked some critical knowledge about how that might work.

Over time I came to think and live as though “pleasing God” was the central purpose of my being his child.  Some poor thinking took form, ironically, through things I often heard in church. My understanding of the gospel – God’s good news for all people – had gradually changed to something called  “performance-living”.

I was no longer fully living my faith from the inside out. Rather, becoming Jesus-like seemed to call for taking on the next God-pleasing task assigned me. Such tasks, I was reminded, were what I “should do” if I were indeed a true Christian.

It’s worth noting that none of the Christian performances I undertook were bad. Not at all. They were good, sometimes noble, acts of service.

Like many Christians, as I later realized, many of my “wants” were in the right place. Discovering this brought a measure of comfort. After all, I hungered to please God and longed to be a truly “good Christian”.  One thing that seemed lacking now was joy, the happy measure of joy I had tasted in those earlier God-companioned days.

And too, the sweet empowering love of earlier days began to wane. My good Savior’s springs of abundant living were being traded for an overburdening list of shoulds.

Only later would I recover the way of living Jesus had in mind for his disciples all along. More of a fruit-bearing kind of living. While not all things going forward would prove fun or easy, my way would become characterized more as a joyous, teamed-up partnership with him.

In the company of fellow disciples-in-training, I could move ahead under his accepting, empowering Spirit. The season was to become a very special period of training for me – especially in discovering how eager Jesus was about all this. His label for it, “life in abundance. . . in the easy yoke”.

(c)2022 Jerry Lout

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Help En Route

Taking Jesus Christ as both our destination (our full human aim) and our with-God companion, we soon realize (or likely should) that our basic life focus really must change. To quote John the Baptizer, “He (Jesus) must increase, I must decrease.” After all, a Jesus-resemblance does not naturally spring forth through this jar of clay which God unflatteringly labels “dust”.

We ask God to lend a hand in training us to live as we are designed to live. He does better, not giving merely his hand but his entire self.

Here is how I think this “with-Jesus” living works.

First, he shows to us our need of getting rescued. Next he rescues us through sacrificially dying and then resurrecting. By this means Jesus has supplied us with something incalculable – forgiveness of all wrongs. All.

This is the start.

God now sets us on an entirely new path by which we along with others shall walk. Jesus shares with us his life and his kind of living here, now, in this broken world.

Also, quite amazingly, God introduces another element. He supplies a Helper – a living, empowering personal helper to aid us throughout. Holy Spirit (the Helper) moves into our lives.

Jesus makes clear that his gracious, all-powerful Holy Spirit is now among us to work mightily in shaping us to grow ever more like our master.

Under the Spirit’s empowering and in the guidance of God’s Word, the Bible, we proceed forward taking wonderful baby steps, in living as Jesus lives. Furthermore, we are helped at nearly every turn by other fellow disciples.

Do we tremble a little with fear? Are we uncertain of what our tomorrows hold? Surely.

Still, faith and love tug us forward.  Confidence in him has taken root.

Family members – those other imperfect but forward-moving disciples – travel with us and we with them. We are indeed an imperfect, sometimes struggling company of persons. Some have employed the term, Ragamuffins. Our aim is Jesus.

We want above all else to be with Jesus and to grow to love like him – to give like him, and to laugh and to weep and to serve like him.

The one way this happens is in spending time with Jesus. Often simply one-on-one, but also with him in the presence of those “others” of his family. They need us. We need them.

Our coming to fully resemble who Jesus is in the world is no sprint.

But in the company of his grace we are set. We lean in.

© 2022 Jerry Lout