The Gospel and Discipleship

For many believers, discipleship is fundamentally about duty.  A disciple is one who dies for Jesus—they are sacrificially committed to him—even up to the point of death.  That’s certainly true, but if that truth is isolated from the gospel, it will suck the life out of you.

We are not servants who worship, but worshippers who serve

It’s crucial to our spiritual health that we view our Christian life first and foremost within the context of worship.   John Piper’s classic missions book, “Let the Nations be Glad” asserts that the purpose of missions is to create worshippers.  Mission exists where worship does not.  But this truth about the foundational nature of worship doesn’t just apply to mission, but to all aspects of the Christian life.  We must think about the Christian life this way—it is meant to be lived as a worshipful response—to the gospel--to all that Christ is for us and all he has done for us. 

The Bible is a book about Jesus Christ

We said in our last blog that the gospel is the power of all of our salvation, not just our conversion.  Part of the reason many of us in the church fail to make the gospel the central hub around which we build our lives is because we’ve been taught a wrong understanding of the Bible.  Today, most believers have been conditioned to think about the Bible primarily as a handbook for spiritual transformation.  It’s a manual for being like Jesus.  If we can just get enough of the Bible into us—in some mysterious way, we will be more and more like Jesus, so we must read a lot of it so we can be like Jesus.  For many believers—that is more or less the way they view the Scriptures.  In fact, that is horribly misguided.  We must see the Bible through this lens and that is--the Bible is a book about Jesus Christ.

Justification produces Sanctification in our lives...

Romans 1:16-17 is a precious truth for believers for several reasons, but I want you to notice something about it that perhaps you’ve missed before.  Paul writes, “¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”  Paul says that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”  Notice Paul does not say, “the gospel is the power of God for the CONVERSION of everyone who believes.”