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April 13 - May 10, 2024
a great deal of what goes into “training them [us] to do everything I said” consists simply in bringing people to believe with their whole being the information they already have as a result of their initial confidence in Jesus—even if that initial confidence was only the confidence of desperation.2
their experiential knowledge of the real person, Jesus Christ, which in our current condition just is the eternal kind of life (2 Pet. 3:18; compare John 17:3).
“Lord, I believe! Help thou my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
In order to become a disciple of Jesus, then, one must believe in him. In order to develop as his disciple one must progressively come to believe what he knew to be so.
To enter his kingdom, we believe in him. To be at home in his kingdom, learning to reign with him there, we must share his beliefs.
we pass through a course of training, from having faith in Christ to having the faith...
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the gospel of Jesus (Mark 1:1)—the gospel of the present availability to every human being of a life in The Kingdom Among Us.
Without that, the gospel about Jesus remains destructively incomplete.
To correctly form a curriculum for Christlikeness, we must have a very clear and simple perception of the primary goals it must achieve, as well as what is to be avoided.
Two objectives in particular that are often taken as primary goals must not be left in that position.
external conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific contexts and profession...
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They either crush the human mind and soul and separate people from Jesus, or they produce hide-bound legalists and theological experts with “lips close to God and hearts far away from him” (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.
Much the same can be said of the strategies—rarely taken as primary objectives,
of encouraging faithfulness to the activities of a church or other outwardly religious routines and various “spiritualities,” or the seeking out of speci...
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like outward conformity and doctrinally perfect profession, they are not to be taken as major objectives in an adequa...
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Special experiences, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is tran...
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when taken as primary objectives, they only burden souls and make significant Christlikeness extremely difficult, if not impossible.
the primary objectives of any successful course of training for “life on the rock,” the life that hears and does, are twofold.
The first objective is to bring apprentices
to the point where they dearly love and constantly delight in that “heavenly Father” made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no “catch,” no limit, to the goodness o...
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(1 John 1:5).
What
is the message Jesus brought, according to us? And then we might also ask our friends and acquaintances. If you do this, and write down the answers you elicit, I think you will be both astonished and enlightened by what you get.
“God is light, and darkness in him there is not, none” (v. 5). That is the message he brought, according to John. It is also, according to him, the message “we proclaim to you” (v. 5).
It is the message we today are to proclaim.
I...
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the message that impels the willing hearer to dearly love and constantly delight in that “heavenly Father...
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And it is the message that, finally, gives us assurance that his universe is “a perfectly safe place for us to be.” L...
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When the mind is filled with this great and beautiful God, the “natural” response, once all “inward” hindrances are removed, will be to ...
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The second primary objective of a curriculum for Christlikeness is to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of “enslavement” (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to th...
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These are the “automatic” patterns of response that were ground into the embodied social self during its long li...
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(Rom. 7:18).
It is not enough,
just to announce and teach the truth about God, about Jesus, and about God’s ...
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If we are to be transformed, the body must be transformed, and that is not accomplished by talking at it. The training that leads to doing what we hear from Jesus must therefore involve, first, the purposeful disruption of our “automatic” thoughts, feelings, and actions by doing different things with our body.
then, through various intentional practices, we place the body before God and his instrumentalities in such a way that our whole self is retrained away from the old kingdoms around and within us and into “the kingdom of the Son of His love” (Col. 1:13 NAS).
“disciplines for the spiri...
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these two “primary objectives” of the curriculum are not to be pursued separately but interactively. We do not first bring apprentices to love God appropriately and then free them from pattern enslavement. Nor do we do it the other way around.
Pursuit of the two primary objectives goes hand in hand. They are to be simultaneously sought.
With regard to our first primary objective, the most important question we face is, How do we help people love what is lovely? Very simply, we cause them, ask them, help them to place their minds on the lovely thing concerned.
We assist them to do this in every way possible. Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that “love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.” And: “Love follows knowledge.”
Though we act, and as intelligently and responsibly as possible, we are always in the position of asking: asking them, asking God, and responding to their responses.
God has placed the only key to the innermost parts of the human soul in its own hands and will never take it back to himself or give it to another.
You may even be able to destroy the soul of another, but you will never unlock it...
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The ...
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will never cease to need to love, which is deeper than the need to be loved.
If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept there in such a way that the mind takes root and stays fixed there.
the question for the first part of our curriculum is simply how to bring God adequately before the mind and spirit of the disciple.
done in such a way that love for and delight in God will be elicited and established as the pervasive orientation of the whole self.
what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action available to us.