Day 1, Session 1

Okay Aaron, I will take a stab at starting this “3-day” conversation. Your question of how do we love others is not a simple one. After all, Jesus said all the law and his commands can be summed up in two: love God and love others. So, how DO we do this? Let me see if I can articulate some of what I understand now. Bear with me as I feel like I am only about 22 months into the metaphorical 3 years of training as a disciple of Jesus. I got a late start, even though I have been an active, evangelical believer for 28 years. I apparently got stuck on the Christian highway for many years and missed the narrow path. Anyways, I am off the highway now and have started down the path. I may be wrong in some of my thinking. If I am, then I am. If I knew where I was wrong, I would stop it.

Let’s follow Jesus’ lead here. You remember what his primary message was: I have some good news! The kingdom of God is now available to you. Reconsider how you have been thinking and living and really believe it (not to be confused with just profession). Jesus preached this throughout his ministry and spent three years describing what living life in the kingdom of heaven (or kingdom of God, same thing) was like. This is key. It is not about what happens after we die. That will take care of itself. It is about learning to live our lives now under his rule, where we are actively participating in what he is doing now. Kingdom living is to love God and others. So the question is how do we live life in the kingdom now?

This primary message of Jesus somehow escaped me through much of my Christian life. I could blame that fact on the church and its failure to teach it, but I gave up blaming others 9 days ago. Though you won’t often hear much about kingdom living and how to live that way, there are those that are talking and writing about it, you just have to find it. I guess that is why the road is narrow.

A good place to start to try and understand about kingdom living is to read the gospels. It is not easy to read and understand a 2000 year old document. You can consider reading the gospels in The Message, which is a common language paraphrase. No better way to learn than to learn from Jesus’ clear examples and teachings. Next place you can turn is to God for grace. The Holy Spirit lives in you so ask him to help guide you to the right places, people, practices, and resouces to teach you. Next, you can seek after those things and learn to sense when they are “speakin’ the truth.”

I see this as a good process: take the word into us (head), let it interact with the Holy Spirit and grace (heart stuff), and then put out some intentional, well-directed effort (doing).

One other assumption is needed at this point. We must assume progress. That is, we need to believe that what Jesus taught us to do can really be done. When he talked about not being angry, contemptuous, or lustful (sermon on the mount stuff), he really meant that we could accomplish it. What we are talking about here is transformation. If we take discipleship seriously, we actually can learn to obey all that he commanded. Many Christians do not have this assumption. They think that we are “not perfect, just forgiven.” This is what Dallas Willard calls the gospel of sin management. We assume that Jesus did not really mean for us to actually do all that he commanded. The important thing is to believe so we can go to heaven. Yes, we try to do the right thing, but we are sinners and we fail so we ask for forgiveness. We need to get off that highway and get on the path of discipleship. Non-discipleship is not an option if we want to live in the kingdom.

Enough for this post. Does any of this make any sense? This should not be new as we have been talking about a lot of this in this blog and at youth. What questions or comments do you have?

Next up: Components of the self. Transformation involves the whole self, so we will need to define some of the components.