The Imperfect Disciple: Grace for People Who Can't Get Their Act Together

by Jared C. Wilson

we now see prayer as an act of worship, done not to push God’s buttons like he is some cosmic vending machine but out of response to his initiative in our relationship.

Prayer in its essence is simply that: daily explicit worship of the one who loves you more than anyone else does and saved your life as no one else could.

intentional prayer is the daily, private worship service of those who are awake to the amazing greatness of the gospel.

Look, prayer is spilling your guts. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t have to be tidy.

Spilling our guts in prayer is how we process God’s words to us.

Prayer is how we interact with our friend Jesus.

He is, in fact, more eager to listen than you are to speak.

Kingdom prayer is prayer that is preoccupied with God’s glory.

In prayer, we take on the right spiritual proportion—needy, helpless, dependent, faithful—that the glory of Christ might more fully fill us.

Holiness comes only from God.

I have experienced no greater motivation in intentional prayer than encountering the incredible fact that Jesus Christ himself—God Almighty himself—is bearing my prayers to the throne room of Father God Almighty.

And the gospel tells us that Christ died for hearts not inclined toward him.

know Ray experienced that grace and power by listening to God and spilling his guts.

He’d gotten off the treadmill of routine religion and found the rhythms of the kingdom. And it made him good friends with Jesus.

The gospel is a family meal.

The life of Christian discipleship is designed to be lived in community,

We have opted for being a mirror rather than a light.

Many of us choose church communities not because of brotherhood

or relational connection or submission to the idea of community itself but rather because the music is better, the services are at more convenient times, the youth ministry is well-resourced, or some other appealing feature.

When we’re all there for ourselves, not only do we not reap the best benefits of Christian discipleship but we’re barely even a church.

There is no concept of the church in the New Testament as a collection of individuals with individual ambitions and preferences.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but they all boil down primarily to the fact that American Christians

don’t want to experience community. Or, at least, they want other things more.

To abide in Christ necessitates embracing the body of Christ as God’s plan for the Christian life.

And the further good news is that embracing kingdom rhythms becomes easier and more sustainable when it is done alongside others.

A lot of disciples flit around on the periphery of church life, showing up when it’s comfortable, pitching in when it’s convenient, speaking up only when we stand to lose something.

We treat the church the way we hope Jesus never treats us, keeping us at arm’s length because we’re weird or messy or socially awkward.

In communal prayer we reveal the

desires and depressions of our heart.

A message of grace will attract people but a culture of grace will keep them.

So it stands to reason that the more we press into the gospel, the more the gospel takes over our hearts and the spaces we bring our hearts to, the less we would see those things.

Instead of coming with a desire for our own fulfillment, we seek the flourishing of others.

And this means approaching the community of faith not as a consumer but as a contributor.

The gospel gives us oxygen and space to breathe.

Biblically speaking, the power of our obedience and the source of our holiness is not our efforts but the finished work of Jesus Christ.

The same gospel that empowers our conversion empowers our sanctification (Titus 2:11–12; 1 Cor. 15:1–2; Rom. 8:30).

It is Jesus who both authors our faith and perfects it (Heb. 12:2).

It is God...

who is faithful both to start the work in us and to compl...

Paul is helping us to understand that the kind of living that honors God best is the kind that comes by walking in the Spirit of the gospel. So he writes this:

But in the Bible joy is both a command of the law and an implication of the gospel.

This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. (Ps. 118:24)

Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. (Rom. 12:12)

The world is set against our peace.

Paul says that the Spirit grows peace inside of us. Over time, as we walk with Jesus, we begin to see more and more of the ways he is loving us and more and more of the ways he is working in the world, and the cross looms more largely over our sin and the empty tomb looms more largely over the mess and dysfunction of the world. And the impulse to rest in him becomes more immediate. The heart’s “muscle memory” toward the gospel gets quicker and stronger.

Peace between us and God comes through propitiation, and if we are at peace with God and have peace from God, what in the world should we be afraid of?

Coming down to see that the ground is level at the foot of the cross helps us regard others with more thoughtfulness—and more patience.

The gospel is an exclamation point.

In ourselves none of us stands justified. In Christ we are justified. In the gospel his goodness becomes ours.

If the essence of Christianity is not justification by “being good,” it could be rightly said to be this: justification comes by grace alone, received through faith alone, in Christ alone.