The Disciple's Lifestyle

[HKHaugan]

The Disciple’s Lifestyle

The disciple's lifestyle is the way a Christian lives life. It is the daily pattern, the daily intention and daily attention we pay to being a follower of Jesus. It is a moving reality of personally shifting from thinking like the world thinks to think the way Jesus thinks in order to live like He calls us to live, to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. It is shifting from an unconscious self-centeredness to a conscious Jesus-centeredness, from where I am to where He wants me to be---keeping in step with the Holy Spirit (Gal.5:25). It is a movement from living a self-protecting life of fear to a life lived in the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit. That movement takes time, prayer, fellowship, study and practice.

Before Jesus the spirit of sin, the devil’s spirit, was the prompter. Because sin separated us from God its spirits of fear and pride took over our aloneness. Pride then led us to process life in terms of self-interest thus making the mind a slave to the moment, the heart and spirit motivated by fear. Fear engulfed the conscious moment. Life was absorbed in self-gratification, emotional control and careful interpersonal maneuvering. A disciple of Jesus is aware of this condition and works to shift from fear to faith, from pride to praise and from lust to trust.

Before Jesus we lived from the outside in (1John 2:15-17).
As His disciple we live from the inside out (Luke 17:21).

There are three levels of discipleship, mind, heart and spirit. There is a mindstyle, a heartstyle and a spiritstyle. The mind contains our belief. The heart contains our trust. The spirit contains our faith. Each needs restoration through rebirth, forgiveness through repentance and reconciliation through relationship. We have spent four sessions appealing to the mind. These next sessions will take what our minds have absorbed and literally seek us all to ‘take it to heart.’ The heart is where our decisions and choices are processed. It is in the heart that God invests His concern and love (Jer.24:7). It is in our spirit that faith initiates action. A disciple moves from belief (reasoning) to trust (embracing) to faith (action). Our goal is to free them to work together in the Spirit.

Heartstyle

Here’s where the Holy Spirit really goes to work. This is where the rubber hits the road, living as a disciple from inside out. We have had head knowledge so far, knowledge from the Word. What we need now is the internal drive, the energy, the enthusiasm and the determination to ‘disciplize’ our lives. It’s time to start with the heart and let the Spirit begin His work to transform us from within.

When we asked the Lord’s questions, “Where are you?” and “Who do you say I am?” what were your answers, not just in the mind but down deep within, in the heart? A disciple's heart is honest first with God, then self and then with others. That honesty is called repentance. Repentance is the practice of internal and external honesty. It processes the past with its intentional self-centeredness and resulting guilt. Repentance is simply letting the person of Jesus be the mirror for where we have been, where we are, letting our guilt go to Him and accepting His forgiveness. That is the beginning of taking up our cross (Luke 9:23) day by day.

The Cross Jesus bore had a purpose, to destroy the power of sin felt in guilt. Guilt is a heart killer and only the intentional sacrifice of God the Son could satisfy and cancel the power of sin. Guilt, fear and pride are sin’s power invading our privacy, our aloneness and keep us from being at one with God. He went to the Cross to bear our sin with all its destructive power and then rise from the dead to show His supremacy over it thus restoring us to Him. He showed faith in Him as the eternal personal power to make everyday a new day.

A disciple deals with guilt at the moment of His decision to follow Jesus. You have heard people say and you may have said it yourself, “Maybe the Lord forgives me but I can’t forgive myself. The proof is that I keep remembering the wrong I have done. I can’t shake the memories.” Let’s put this one to bed right now and forever. If you could forgive yourself you wouldn’t need a Savior, Jesus would never have gone to the Cross for you personally and God would be just another mirage in human imagination.

Here are four amazing truths that will cauterize your reason in regard to memory.

First, when Jesus died on the Cross He died personally for you to remove the power of sin. Again, if you could forgive yourself you wouldn’t need the Savior. It is your acceptance of the fact of His blood shed for you as His younger brother or sister that assures you of the removal of past guilt and His cleansing forgiveness (1Cor.6:20).

Second, it is by His faith on the Cross that you are freed from guilt. So now, His faith is His gift to you to justify you as right in the sight of the Father. At the moment you repent you are forgiven. Forgiveness is what God’s grace is all about. He loves to accept, forgive and free you just as you are with no strings attached. This is the kind of freedom for which He died on the Cross (Gal.5:1).

Third, because of the Cross memory has been redeemed. It now serves you to keep you honest (Ps.45:17, Prov.10:7). Further, memory reminds us of Him, His life, His death and His Resurrection that brings us His presence through the Holy Spirit.

Baptized memory also serves Him. It is memory that the Holy Spirit uses to make the Word alive in us. We know where we have been and resolve in the Spirit to be open to His spiking our memory when needed. You may feel you are guilty but now faith is the authority that interprets and nurtures feelings. Feelings, which may have done a lot to condition your past (Is.59:10), no longer have authority. Feelings are governed by faith. Faith cancels the authority of feelings. Your emotionality is now the servant of faith.

Fourth, and this is the ‘clincher,’ God remembers sin no more (Jer.31:34). If this is God’s choice then who are we to hang on to what He chooses not to remember?

Also watch out for the ‘what if’s’ that seem to nag at our fears. Contemplation and imagination about what might happen or about the ‘coulda-shoulda-woulda’s’ of life are tangents, sidetracks, diversions from the practice of faith. These are hypotheses. Hypotheses are the devil’s playground. Always deal with what is, with reality, the way things really are right where you are in the context of faith.

Back to heartstyle.

There’s a whole lot involved in heartstyle. Guilt, sin, repentance, forgiveness, choice, decision and emotionality are all heart experiences. The big issue for the heart and the best way to describe the movement of the heart toward God is trust. What we believe with the mind works its way into the heart through trust. We may believe in Jesus but the question is do we trust Him whom we believe?

It is the heart where a disciple takes belief and makes three choices:

First, we pray, we talk; we converse with the Father through the Son in the power of the Spirit. How do we do that? It’s from Scripture we fill the mind with the knowledge of God.

Second, we ponder what we have read. We process our conscious life; our memory and our self-concept, letting the Spirit of God energize Scripture’s words in us.

Third, we place our selves next to Jesus by picturing Him through His teachings and actions walking with us, probing and encouraging us and placing His arm on our shoulders as we go from place to place and person to person.