What It Means to be a Disciple

[HKHaugan]

What It Means to be a Disciple

The sequence of events in John’s Gospel is significant. We begin with the beginning and it was the Word made flesh who was and is the Light of the world. He was full of grace and truth. Then John the Baptizer was sent to prepare for His coming by preaching repentance for sin and proclaiming His identity as the Lamb of God. The Jesus calls His first disciples. While John was the preparer it would be the disciples that became preachers and ministers of the living Word through the written Word. They would experience the living Word and then pass on His life of words and actions to become the accumulated written Word. As John said, “These things were written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that by believing you may have life in His name (Jn.20:31).” A disciple’s life is Jesus.

That life is spiritual life, Holy Spirit life, rebirthing everyone who accepts that Jesus is the risen Savior and Lord having come into their hearts by faith. That birth is a new birth, a spiritual birth that gives us a new identity, a new uniqueness, a new personality, a new purpose, a new mission, a new ministry and a new family. You use the old physical birth body to be a vehicle, the instrument, the carrier of the new. That’s discipleship.

Look at the spiritual transition. It is threefold. First, it is the facing of being a sinner and repenting, Second, it is accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord. Third, it is then becoming His disciple. The first reconciles you to the Father and you are restored to be His child. The second makes you a younger brother or sister of Jesus who gives you His Word to follow. The third is being guided by the Holy Spirit through the Word to grow spiritually processing your choices and decisions in every next moment each of which are new. That’s growing as a disciple.

Paul tells us that everyone is a new creation in Christ, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here (2Cor.5:17)!” This has an awesome meaning for each one of us. It is this: every moment we live is a new moment and each of us being new is always and everywhere and at all times facing a new moment. It is the newness in us that can only respond in that moment because we are the new ones on the spot and every next moment is new to us personally. No one, absolutely no one, has the same moment as anyone else even if we are in the same place experiencing a common event. Each will respond personally which will be different. We will respond to that moment because no one but us lives in our body, in the time, in the place and with the people around us. That makes our personal existence the most important experience in every moment we find ourselves, a disciple’s existence.

Is it any wonder then that The Father would send His Son to be a personal sacrifice for each one of us to recover us to Him? His responses to His moments were how God in the flesh reacts to that moment. It will never be the same again. He and He alone could do what He did, think, believe, trust and faithfully face that moment. What makes Him a Savior is that He shows us what perfect belief, trust and faith looks like and how He has freed us to respond uniquely in our every next moment. With Him at our side we can be free in Him at those moments to be who we are in Him. That is why He gave us the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of freedom, the power of spiritual freedom to be the image of God who has become a child of God, His disciple.