Tag: Discipleship

Prepare As Jesus continues his Sermon on the Mount, he shifts his focus from God’s character and wide blessing to the character of disciples. He proclaims they “are the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world” and encourages them to act accordingly (Matthew 5:13-14, NRSVue). Verse 16 is commonly used in Lutheran baptismal liturgies as a way of proclaiming that this same identity and calling, first given to Jesus’s earliest followers, now belongs to those who are newly baptized and to us as his followers today. But Jesus also reminds his disciples (ancient and modern) that what…

Prepare (This section is preparation for the leader, not content meant for the whole group.) Luke 14:25–33 gives us two of Jesus’ hardest sayings: that anyone who doesn’t “hate” their family and life itself cannot follow him, and that disciples must give up all their possessions. These statements sound extreme, but some context helps. At the start of the passage a large crowd is following Jesus. Crowds have been gathering around him since the very beginning of his ministry in Luke. Each time, Jesus makes it clear that following him is costly. Here, he uses deliberately shocking, hyperbolic language to…

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth. –II Timothy 2.15 For a long time, I’ve thought of reading and doing theology as an act of sanctification and discipleship. How else is the Christian supposed to act rightly (orthopraxis) without knowing rightly (orthodoxy)? These are bound together in a dialectical bundle whilst the one implicates the other, and vice versa. In short: without the work of prayerful and worshipful study before God there cannot be any Christian growth. When the disciple does a word…