Discipleship 1

[HKHaugan]

Discipleship 1
Walking in the Word
The Disciple’s Manual

As we go through Scripture we have to always keep in mind that Jesus the person, Jesus the Son of God, Jesus, God in the flesh, is the funnel, the tunnel, the narrowed middle of the hourglass, through which and through whom every word, phrase, paragraph and chapter is filtered. If we approach the Word with the need to grasp and understand it so that I can say ‘My mind has control of it’ you have missed its purpose. It was not amassed to give you control but to open you up to risk everything in faith. Every part of the Bible is an invitation to let the Holy Spirit take you into every next moment in faith, in faith that the Lord is in control of your life revealing Himself and your growth in every next moment. It is always something new awaiting as you let Him influence who you are.

Jesus is the context for thinking. If we attempt to separate a passage, a word, a theme or even a book from the whole and interpret it apart from Jesus and the Holy Spirit it becomes a cold, somber and restrictive religious document. That’s right. It is no longer about a personal relationship with God but a religion, a denomination, a cult, another furtive effort to control God and others. This is the result of the wandering away from God’s Word in Genesis 3 when the devil asked Eve, “Did God really say…?” and sin replaced the Spirit in mankind. The devil distracted us and distracts us from God our Creator through sin.

We actually believe apart from God we can take what is “pleasing to the eye, good for food and desirable for gaining wisdom (Gen.3:6)” and be our own god. We think we are gods and so we assume His place in mind and heart. We dabble in the food of intellectual fantasies from our imagination and devise complicated philosophies. We insert our own fascination and rationalization feeding on what gives us pleasure and we believe we gain wisdom by analysis and reason apart from God.

But Jesus comes and scratches the surface of our obstinacy. He tells parables to scratch the itch in the mind and penetrate the heart’s anxieties. He heals bodies, walks on water, challenges frightened leaders, breaks religious barbed wire and teaches about God in a way that confronts the self-assumed deity we have become. We either reject Him, avoid Him or finally come to the conclusion that God is the One from whom He comes. He is the King of the Kingdom He proclaims and that He, His Father and the Spirit are in fact One. And it is all there in His Word, the Word that brings life, real life, eternal life.

But grace reigned and still reigns to override the hearts torn from the Lord’s presence by giving every person the opportunity to see, accept and return to the Lord in person through the Holy Spirit.

It is by grace through faith that the invisible expanse of thought, principle, ethic, choice, decision and person is a reality that supercedes the limited physical universe holding us in a singular time and a singular place. It is that into which God chose to limit Himself to be the hope, the anticipation, the reckoning center for each mind and heart. It was a severe self-restriction self imposed, self-chosen, to bring His very nature into the fomenting saliva of man’s confusing and isolated personal wilderness. That nature, His love, deemed it necessary to enter the emptiness, that lonely death embracing stretch of self-consciousness that searches for meaning and purpose, to bring the alienated images of Himself back to Him.

Conceived by His Spirit, fleshly born, Jesus came among us. It is here that God demonstrated something new for His forlorn Creation---living by faith, desiring to place all things in the hands of His Father, to serve Him, to please Him and to die for Him, to give us a new life, a spiritual lifestyle in a perfect and perfecting relationship. Thus the broken fragments of what it meant to be an image of God, family, friendship, labor, the intellect, emotionality, the inner spirit, community, world, universe and every aspect of existence, fall back into place. Real life is no longer temporary, the space between birth and death, the searching and unresolved questions, the battle for personal supremacy and mastery over mind, heart and spirit. Real life is seen, felt, touched and caught within as we allow Jesus to break down the barriers of pride, fear and self-protection covering our mind and heart. That allowance is faith in Him, His Presence and His Spirit. It comes through His Word, the master key, the Master’s Key to the Kingdom, His Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.