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To quote the tech philosopher Jaron Lanier, “What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”[5]
For
those of us who desire to follow Jesus, here is the reality we must turn and face: If we’re not being intentionally formed by Jesus himself, then it’s highly likely we are being unintentionally formed by someone or something else.[6]
The philosopher Dallas Willard used to say, “There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.”
There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.
Contrary to what many assume, Jesus did not invite people to convert to Christianity. He didn’t even call people to become Christians (keep reading…); he invited people to apprentice under him into a whole new way of living. To be transformed.
Your life and teaching were your credentials.
Of course, saying that Jesus was a rabbi is about as insightful as saying that he was Jewish (although that’s another truth copious numbers of people forget). But sadly, very few people—including many Christians—take Jesus seriously as a spiritual teacher.
“What lies at the heart of the astonishing disregard of Jesus found in the moment-to-moment existence of multitudes of professing Christians is a simple lack of respect for him.”[12]
Of course, to call Jesus a brilliant rabbi is not to say he was just a brilliant rabbi. The sign hanging above Jesus’ head when he was crucified said King of the Jews, not Guru. It tells you a lot about Jesus that his enemies perceived him as a political threat.
Contrary to popular opinion, Jesus did not invent discipleship. Rabbis with a small coterie of disciples were regularly seen walking around Galilee.
by the age twelve or thirteen, most kids would have the entire Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—memorized.
By the age of seventeen, they would have memorized—wait for it—the entire Old Testament.[15]
You would leave your family, your village, your trade, and follow your rabbi twenty-four seven.
Put another way, disciple is a noun.
“Learning wasn’t so much about retaining data as it was about gaining essential wisdom for living, absorbing it from those around him. This was…the ancient method whereby rabbis trained their talmidim, or disciples.”[21]
not one time in the entire New Testament is disciple used as a verb. Not once.[24] Grammatically speaking, then, to use disciple as a verb is bad form.
Please hear me: This is not just semantics. Language matters.
Here’s why: If disciple is something that is done to you (a verb),[25] then that puts the onus of responsibility for your spiritual formation on someone else, like your pastor, church, or mentor. But if disciple is a noun—if it’s someone you are or are not—then no one can “disciple” you but Rabbi Jesus himself.
Just to make it crystal clear… Christian: 3x Apprentice: 269x
Could it be time for Protestants to lovingly delineate between Christians and “practicing Christians”?
As Saint Maximus said in the seventh century, a time not all that different from our own, “A person who is simply a man of faith is [not] a disciple.”[32]
The problem is, in the West, we have created a cultural milieu where you can be a Christian but not an apprentice of Jesus.
The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who…are identified as “Christians” will become disciples—students, apprentices, practitioners—of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.[35]
You see, Jesus is not looking for converts to Christianity; he’s looking for apprentices in the kingdom of God.
But what if this crisis of discipleship is a feature of evangelicalism, not a bug? What if it’s exactly what we should expect based on how many people understand the gospel itself?[37]
What if the mark is union with God? What if it’s the healing of your soul through participation in the inner life of the Trinity?
What if it’s adoption into the Father’s new multiethnic family through the saving work of his Son, Jesus?
For Jesus, salvation is less about getting you into heaven and more about getting heaven into you.
One way to judge the veracity of your gospel is by this simple acid test: Would someone hearing your gospel naturally conclude that apprenticeship to Jesus is the only fitting response?
But Jesus didn’t go around beating up on self-effort. As the saying goes, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”[46] Don’t conflate the two.
In this word picture is a simple but revolutionary idea: The Way of Jesus is not just a theology (a set of ideas that we believe in our heads). It is that, but it’s more.
love this from the Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware: Christianity is more than a theory about the universe, more than teachings written down on paper; it is a path along which we journey—in the deepest and richest sense, the way of life.[49]
the Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson once said, “The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life.” He then concluded, “Jesus as the truth gets far more attention than Jesus as the way. Jesus as the way is the most frequently evaded metaphor among the Christians with whom I have worked for fifty years as a North American pastor.”[51]
a rule, a rabbi would never risk rejection; he would do the rejecting. Not Rabbi Jesus.
“I don’t believe in God,” replies Dantès. Then comes the priest’s haunting line: “It doesn’t matter. He believes in you.”[57]
You can’t just slip your hand up at the end of a sermon. It’s a high bar of entry: It will require you to reorder your entire life around following Jesus as your undisputed top priority, over your job, your money, your reputation—over everything.
It comes as no surprise that Jesus began the formation of his apprentices by simply calling them to “come, follow me”—to just walk alongside him on the Way.
This is the first and most important goal of apprenticeship to Jesus: to be with him, to spend every waking moment aware of his presence and attentive to his voice. To cultivate a with-ness to Jesus as the baseline of your entire life.
So, the Father will give us another one of Jesus? To be with us? To help us and intercede for us? Exactly.
All of us are abiding. The question isn’t, Are you abiding? It’s, What are you abiding in?
What do you return to in your quiet moments? Where do you go to find solace and joy? What would it look like for you to make your home inside God?
W. Tozer called it “habitual, conscious communion” and said, “At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His presence.”[16]
with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees before the Blessed Sacrament.[20]
This will not just happen. But listen, it can happen, if you practice.
You can say with the psalmist, “I have set the Lord always before me.”[24] Or with Paul, “Set your minds on things above.”[25]
“This simple practice requires only a gentle pressure of the will, not more than a person can exert easily. It grows easier as the habit becomes fixed.”[29]
You can do this—if you are willing to practice. As apprentices of Jesus, you and I have both the ability and the responsibility to set our minds on him. To direct the inner gaze of our hearts onto his love.
abiding is not just about our thought lives or even our emotional lives. It’s about a level of with-ness to Jesus that goes beyond our thoughts and feelings. It’s about love.
Meaning, we become like what we gaze at—Jesus. “With ever-increasing glory,” meaning, we become more and more beautiful, like Jesus, over time, through simple, daily contemplation.
