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

by Jared C. Wilson

while the storm of Romans 7 rages inside of us, the truth of Romans 8 has us safe and sound. Within the spiritual ecosystem of God’s saving sovereignty, in fact, our struggle is like the little squall stirred up in a snow globe.

introduce the truth of Romans 8 to every corner of the room, every dark place in your heart, as often as you can, as much as you can, as fiercely as you can.

The prophet Isaiah says that “all we like sheep have gone astray” (53:6), and I wonder if it’s because he wasn’t around cats very much. Sheep tend to go astray because they are dumbly distracted. That’s a little like us. But cats go astray because they are smug investors in their own narcissistic autonomy. That’s a lot like us.

I take a look at my messed-up soul every day. I feel completely overwhelmed and underequipped. And so I hold on to the gospel. I pour some gospel into my soul. I am good to go another day. I might be crawling through that day or I might be balled up in my bed, unwilling to charge the Valley of Elah that is my life, but the smile of God is over me continually. Day and night his steadfast love sustains me.

And it’s not just the sins that don’t seem to go away; it’s the wounds too. These two things are not the same! We have to get that straight, first of all. Too many foolish teachers in the church equate wounds with sins, and vice versa, and this needlessly frustrates people’s following of Jesus. We further traumatize victims when we tell them their wounds are sins, and we demotivate repenters when we tell them their sins are wounds. But this confusion is somewhat understandable in that both sins and wounds linger. Our deepest wounds and our deepest sins are both awfully persistent.

working through the routine maintenance of grace, untangling sins from wounds, sorting out her responsibilities from her vulnerabilities, distinguishing what she owed from what was owed to her.

What is discipleship, then, but following Jesus not on some religious quest to become bigger, better, or faster but to become more trusting of his mercy toward our total inability to become those things?

One of the subtle dangers of the way many Christians “do discipleship” is that they are always somehow looking at Jesus and yet never really seeing him.

To behold something is to “hold” something in our vision, to let the weight of it rest on our mind and heart.

When our vision is constantly occupied by small things, we are tempted to yawn more at the glory of God.

And so it turns out that the direct route to God-honoring behavior is born not of good behavior but of good beholding.

our ability to actively and persistently follow Jesus will be centrally driven by our comprehension of his glory.

If we find it difficult to love Christ, the problem is not with him; it is with us.

To be blunt: I think the spirit at work in the suburbs tends to smother the Christian spirit. I know this personally because I have spent most of my life there. The message of the suburbs, in a nutshell, is self-empowerment. Self-enhancement. Self-fulfillment. Self is at the center, and all things serve the self. (Self-service!) The primary values of suburbia are convenience, abundance, and comfort. In suburbia you can have it all—and you can get it made to order in a super-sized cup with an insulated sleeve. Whether we realize it or not, the values of suburban culture affect us. They shape us. They slyly dictate how we think, how we act, how we feel. And how we follow Jesus. (Or don’t.)

What we are talking about here is the process of formation: allowing ourselves to be formed a certain way. Most of us have already done great at being formed by the consumer culture we’re immersed in. We have adapted quite well to the rhythms of suburbia and even stuck a Jesus fish on some of them. To cultivate Spiritual* formation, then, means to find ways to immerse ourselves in the work of the Spirit—to re-sync ourselves to the rhythms of the kingdom of God.

In essence, we chuck prayer because the results of prayerlessness are not immediately felt or seen. However, if prayer is not just another thing for the checklist but rather the thing that makes the checklist doable, and if we looked not for “results” in prayer but relationship, we might find it more appealing.

Since prayer is acknowledged helplessness—spilling our guts—the more we pray, the more we are abiding in the strength of God alone. The more we pray, the more we are surrendering thoughts of our own glory and the more we are unbusying ourselves with the enterprise of our own glory. Every day we are building our own Babel Towers, and in prayer we lay down our bricks and trowels and let God knock those towers down.

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. The whole enterprise is driven from the outside by the Spirit of God and mechanized on the inside by the unity of community.

What we see in Acts 4 is the full concert of the rhythms of the kingdom in their proper context: the Christian community. The Acts 4 church listens to and feels Scripture together, prays together, joyfully fasts together, and serves others together. Today’s church should do no less.

From corporate prayer in worship services to shared prayer in small groups, we learn to pray by learning to pray together. There can be no more intimate moment with our brothers and sisters in Christ than approaching together the throne room of God through Christ and in the Spirit. In communal prayer we reveal the desires and depressions of our heart. We reveal what matters most to us. We share our burdens. We connect to each other as we connect to God.

We must embrace both gospel-driven proclamation (light) and gospel-driven servanthood (salt), for both are vital to the ministry of reconciliation. The call to salt and light is a call to a two-fisted gospel, a call to crucify the idols of self and comfort and convenience and relevance and give ourselves away. Think of the brightness such light would have. The gospel is power and must be wielded with a whole heart. The two-fisted gospel supposes one fist is to take out the prince of the power of the air with the revolutionary news that the risen Christ is Lord, and the second fist is to bring justice to the captives with the embodied news that God is love.

none of us is far from real discipleship. We don’t have to be experts, just converts pointing each other to Jesus.

The real church isn’t Instagrammable. But you can’t dismiss it with a swipe. It endures forever. It may not look like much, but it’s hellproof.

Dos and don’ts accomplish nothing resembling biblical Christianity when they are detached from the done of the gospel. The gospel gives us oxygen and space to breathe.