Quotes About Discipleship

The Jesus Creed teaches us that a disciple's responsibility is to love God by following Jesus. You only follow someone else when your own lights or sense of direction are not good enough.

The question: What is a Christian? My answer: A Christian is someone who follows Jesus* My former answer: A Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus, and the Christian life focuses on personal practices of piety.

The ways of reading Revelation that spend time speculating about the questions When will all this happen? and Who is the antichrist? fail the church in discipleship. Instead of a discipleship that teaches us to discern Babylon among us and shows us how to live in Babylon as dissidents instead of conformists, these speculative questions teach Christians how to wait for the escape from Babylon.

when we peer into our own hearts, we will have sufficient cause — even laughably ridiculous cause — to see our own sin and be humbled before God. That will lead us to an other-awareness that our fellow disciples and humans are like us, sinners in need of mercy, grace, forgiveness, and patience. This reversal of the proclivity to be gods creates on our part a tenderness in our perception of the sins of others.

There's a difference between focusing on being right and focusing on being a follower of Jesus.

Our churches have not discipled people in the last forty years in Christoform power but have instead discipled them into playing Babylon's power games. They have decided who might be their next king, only to realize that kings become wild things. Instead of giving more and more power to presidents, to senators, to representatives, to Washington DC and states and cities and villages and towns, we need to search again for Christoform power.

In our local context, the pastors and elders and deacons are disciples of Jesus, called to submit first to him and to nurture others into serving one another as Jesus himself served his disciples. The strangest words in the church ought to be the words "authority" and "power.

We are saved by Christ, but Christ saves us into discipleship.

There is one reason the gate is "narrow": it is demanding discipleship.

Revelation "is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world.

The clearest way to put this is to say that Jesus thinks that following him means following the Torah. Those who follow him (and his teaching of the Torah) will be called "great" in the kingdom. Anyone who denies his teachings and teaches others not to follow him (and through him the Torah) will be called "least" in the kingdom.

The end of the Sermon makes it clear that Jesus expects his followers to take up his words and live them out regardless of the cost. I know of no alternative. Take them or leave them, is what I say to myself.

The book of Revelation requires us to take a stand for the Lamb in this world. To read it well we must learn to think "theo-politically," or to say this another way, the entire book of Revelation is about public discipleship.

Perceiving preaching as discipleship gives preachers a more meaningful way of approaching those to whom they speak. No longer are their listeners an audience or even a congregation; they are believers, followers of Jesus Christ, disciples.

You see, like many who grew up in church, I once assumed the gospel was simply what non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, and then afterward we advance to deeper theological waters. But Scotty has helped me to realize that once God rescues sinners, his plan is not to steer them beyond the gospel but to move them more deeply into it—that the gospel doesn't simply ignite the Christian life but is also the fuel that keeps Christians going and growing every day.

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. "Never, Lord!" he said. "This shall never happen to you!" (Matt. 16:22 NIV)

live according to scripture" (1 Cor. 4:6).

The partial fast is of great value, especially where circumstances make it impossible or inconvenient to undertake a normal fast. Certainly it requires no less self-discipline. It can be used as a steppingstone to the normal fast by those who have never fasted before. One of its great advantages is that even after being sustained for a long period, normal eating can be resumed almost at once, which is not the case with the other two kinds of fasting.

In Christendom, Jesus as a political figure was often sidelined. In post-Christendom, the church is rediscovering the political Jesus and exploring anew the political dimension of what he had to say. In Christendom, the behaviour of those who began to recognise this dimension were often referred to as 'radical discipleship', but post-Christendom suggests that we are moving towards the abolition of such distinctions as the ideas of 'radical discipleship' enter the mainstream.

We have observed two common yet flawed views that unfortunately impact a church's likelihood to make disciples that are transformed: equating information with discipleship and viewing discipleship merely as behavioral modification. Discipleship is much more than information and much deeper than behavioral modification.

Real life, for a disciple, is a journey of wrestling with a pattern of faith and loyalty to who Jesus is.

Following Jesus is a foundational concept in the Synoptics, especially in the Gospel of John.

He felt that what was especially missing from the life of Christians in Germany was the day-to-day reality of dying to self, of following Christ with every ounce of one's being in every moment, in every part of one's life.

The questions that are seriously put to us today by young theologians are: How do I learn to pray? How do I learn to read the Bible? If we cannot help them there we cannot help them at all.