A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN
TIMELESS VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
Value 9- Week 2 Witness
Word: “Everyone who calls in the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how are they to call on one whom they have
not believed? And how are they to
believe in one whom they have never heard?
And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?” Romans 10:13-14
“What good
is it brothers and sisters if you say you have faith but do not have works? . .
. Show me your faith apart from your works and I by my works will show you my
faith.” James 2:14, 18
Reflection: Words and Deeds
Congruence is a critical virtue for our witness. One of the criticisms leveled at those of us
in the church by those outside of it is there is a lack of congruence in too
many of us. In other words, we say one
thing and do something else. What that
leads to is a lack of credibility and ultimately to a lack of trust. And without trust, I can influence no one. Why would I believe what you say if you aren’t
doing it yourself? Jesus asked the same
question of many would be followers in his own day, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say?” He also commented, “By their fruits you will know them.”
If we talk about grace, but act judgmentally, or talk about
forgiveness, but bear grudges will anyone believe what I say? Because we have experienced that in others, I think many of us are hesitant to talk
about our faith for fear that we aren’t living it well enough to have credibility
ourselves. As a result many of us who
follow Jesus have satisfied our guilt over not “witnessing” by simply saying, “I’ll
let my life do the talking.” Now don’t
get me wrong, I’d much rather people live the faith and not talk about it than
talk about it and not live it, but an effective witness has do to both. If we do good things and live in a certain
moral way but never tell anyone my motive and ability to do so is because
Christ lives in me, then I’m just a good person and people admire me. However, Jesus said, “let your light shine before others that they may see your good works
and give glory to your Father in Heaven.”
But, how can God get the glory if no one knows that my good works are
the result of what He has done in me and my desire to please him as a result? I love the story in Acts 4 about how Peter
and John, empowered by the Holy Spirit began to boldly speak about Jesus. Verse 13 says, “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized they
were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as
companions of Jesus.” What made
people pay attention to their words was their actions. The question for us as witnesses is, can
people hear us speak and see our transformed lives and recognize that we are
companions of Jesus? It will take both
our words and our actions and a consistency between the two to make us a
credible witness.
Practice: Take some time for self-examination this week and see what
changes I need to make in my life in order to give credibility to my witness.
At the same time, look for an opportunity to tell someone what motivates and
enables me to do what I do.
A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN
TIMELESS VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
“We declare
to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with
us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” I John 1:3
Reflection: Our Vows
A couple of years ago, those who are
responsible for such things decided that we needed a revision in the liturgy
for joining the church. For years the
question asked of candidates was, “As
members of this congregation, will you faithfully participate in its ministries
by your prayers, your presence, your gifts, and your service?” Now we have added a fifth responsibility
for church members, “your witness”. I’m not sure what that says about us that we
never felt the need to have witness as part of our commitment to being a member
of the church. Could it be that we were
so focused on making church members that are committed to the support of the
institution that we forgot that our primary mission was to reach out and make new
disciples of all nations? After all,
good church members should pray for each other, come together for worship and
fellowship, give of our money, time, and talent to support and serve the church. But in reality, all of those things are
inwardly focused as we work on our own relationship to God and minister to each
other. Could it have been that finally we
woke up and realized our church was in steady decline primarily because we had
become so inwardly focused that we had long forgotten that our primary mission
was to reach out to bring new people into a relationship with Christ? Maybe it is not a mystery why 40% of all
United Methodist Churches didn’t have one profession of faith last year. Maybe we had forgotten to teach people that
Jesus and the early church equated being a member of the “Body of Christ
(church) with being a disciple and being a disciple meant being a witness for Christ.
Many of us would define a disciple as one who follows Jesus and that is
true. Jesus however invited people to
follow him in order to make them into “fishers of people”, disciples who are
intentionally trying to bring other people to Jesus. What led to the explosion of growth in the
early church was when people had a life changing encounter with Jesus and an
infilling of his Spirit they could not help but go and tell and show others
what they had experienced. The writer of
I John said that we witness to what we’ve experienced in our own life so other
people can share the experience and become part of our “fellowship”. Think about how often we “witness” to our
experience at a new restaurant, golf course, ball game, or with a new technological gadget, television
show or movie so that people might share that experience with us. Is it that our relationship with Christ doesn’t
have that big of an impact on our own lives, or have we been so immersed in a
culture where faith is privatized that the sharing of it is thought to be an
unwelcome intrusion into the lives of others?
It is time to recapture the idea that to follow Jesus is to be
transformed into a witness for Him.
A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN TIMELESS
VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
“I am the
Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for
in these things I delight.” Jeremiah
9:24
One of the principle differences I see between the Old and New
Testaments is a shift in the primary ethic for life. In the Old Testament that ethic is justice,
based on a theology of a just God. The
basic question a person would ask before any action would be, “is it
just?” In the New Testament however, the
primary ethic for life is love, based on a theology of a loving God manifest in
Jesus. I John said, “God is love”, and
Jesus said the greatest commandment was “to love God and neighbor”. What is interesting is that Jesus said that
he didn’t come to abolish the law (a relationship with God based on justice),
but to fulfill it or to bring it to its full intention (a relationship with God
based on love). So in Jesus we find that
justice and love are inseparable, in fact they manifest in his life and
death. I John says we know what love is
by the fact that Jesus died for us, but we know that Jesus died for us to pay
the penalty for our sin (love and justice held together).
God never separates love and justice and he calls us to “hold fast” to
both, to “do justice and to love kindness”.
Our world has been and always will be (at least until the Kingdom comes
in fullness) full of unjust systems and people driven by greed, power, pride,
and self-centeredness. It is why Jesus
could safely say, “the poor you will always have with you”. Jesus came to break down strongholds of
oppression and exploitation; he fed the hungry, cast out demons, healed the
sick, broke down walls of division, and gave value and worth to all people
regardless of race, gender, economics, or religion. In other words, out of love he sought to
establish justice. For Jesus, to live
out the law of love was to do justice.
Love for him was an action and not limited to those who loved you (that
would be just), but even to love your enemies.
If you think about it, love without justice is not really love is
it? Is it loving as a parent to have no
accountability (justice) for our children?
Is it loving as a church to teach people that God loves them without
also teaching people that God holds us accountable for our actions? James would ask, “is it loving to see people
who are hungry and say God bless you, God loves you, but not feed them”? Is it loving for a nation to be unwilling to
enter a “just war” on behalf of people who are suffering genocide? For those of us who live under grace we do so
because Jesus lived under justice and as result we will forever have to hold
them together in our understanding of God and the living of our lives as His
children.
A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN
TIMELESS VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
As we’ve already looked at the last two weeks, the Old Testament is
grounded in a theology of God’s justice.
In fact, this is so basic to the nature of God it is revealed in the
creation and natural law. Isaac Newton’s
3rd law of motion says, “for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction.” You could call that
the law of consequences (justice). But,
we know this is also found in the New Testament. Paul called it the “law of sowing and
reaping”. It simply said that because
God is just, there are consequences to our actions, direct correlations between
what we do and what we experience as a result.
Remember Jesus saying things like, “you will be judged with the measure
that you judge others”? No story that
Jesus tells illustrates this more disturbingly than the “parable of sheep and
goats” (Matthew 25:31-46). In it Jesus
reminds us that because God is just we are held accountable for how we live our
lives, particularly as related to the practices of justice and mercy towards
the poor, hungry, the sick, and the imprisoned.
(remember Micah 6:8 “what does the
Lord require of you but to do justice and love kindness”) According to Jesus if we act with justice and
kindness by feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, clothing the naked,
visiting the prisoners we would be blessed by God with eternal reward, but if
we didn’t we would be held accountable.
The disturbing thing about the story is that those who were held accountable
and punished for not “doing justice and loving kindness” claimed that the only
reason they didn’t is they failed to see the injustice and brokenness (in
particular that they didn’t see Jesus suffering it). For those of us who live in the prosperity
and security of America (at least those of us who live middle to upper class
lives socially and economically) it is really easy to not see. It is easy to not see how many children are
hungry, how many people have no health care, how many students fail to
graduate, and how many people are going to prison because it’s not happening in
my neighborhood. As a church that has
become largely middle to upper class socially and economically we find it more
convenient to move our church when the neighborhood changes, to move our youth
minister when he/she reaches out to kids “not like ours”, to budget far more to
sustain ourselves than to our mission and outreach.
I love our theology of grace in the United Methodist Church, but I think
we need to be reminded there is a theology of justice. There is accountability for how we live
individually and corporately. We need to
remember we will reap what we sow and we will be judged as we judge.
A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN
TIMELESS VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
“Is not this
the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the
yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share bread with the hungry and bring
the homeless poor into your home;”
Isaiah 58:6-7
“What does
the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8
At the heart of every religion is worship. If God is God, He is worthy to be
worshiped. Nowhere is this truer than
with Israel. At the heart of their
corporate life as the people of God was a dedicated practice of worship. Through their system of sacrifice they
expressed thanksgiving, praise, and contrition and as a result experienced a
right relationship with God. In Israel,
worship went back to their understanding of not only an almighty God, but also
a just God. If God had blessed you, you
should bless God in return. If you did
wrong against God, payment must be made to put it right. All because they understood God as just.
Over time, one of Israel’s critical mistakes in their relationship with
God was the worship became a substitute for ethics. As long as you kept the feast and festivals,
carried out the right rituals, and offered the right sacrifices, it didn’t
really matter how you lived. In the
midst of their blindness to their own actions or idolatry, exploitation of the
poor, and other acts of injustice, the prophets began to preach a repeated
message; God is more concerned with justice than with worship. In fact, they taught that to live out justice
and kindness was in itself an act of worship that honored God more than ritual. When Israel cried out to God in complaint
that they were worshiping as prescribed, but not being blessed, God spoke
through Isaiah that the worship he desired was for them to live justly. Micah’s famous pronouncement to the people
was that the only thing God required to be in right relationship with Him was,
“to do justice and love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.”
This idea carried over into life of the early church. James wrote to the church, “religion that is
pure and undefiled before God is to care for orphans and widows in their distress
and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (James 1:27) John Wesley in beginning the Methodist
movement put a great emphasis on personal holiness and the practice of
spiritual disciplines towards that end, but always added that, “there is no holiness
but social holiness”. Hence the
Methodist movement was at the heart of justice issues among the poor and imprisoned
the sick and mistreated. While worship
is a critical part of what we do in the church, we cannot forget that what
honors God most is how we are “doing justice and loving kindness” in our
community.
A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN
TIMELESS VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
In James Michener’s book “The
Source”, a novel about the history of religion, a wife comments about her
husband, “If he had a different god, he’d be a different man.” The point is this, how we understand God (our
theology) affects how we live our lives (our actions). This is one of the reasons good theology is
so important. That means in order to
talk about justice as a discipline to practice, it is important to begin
looking at justice as attribute of God.
In the Old Testament, the nation of Israel’s single most defining virtue
of God was justice. And because they
understood God above all as just, the concept of justice affected their
understanding of life itself and how it worked, as well as becoming the
principle ethic from which they would live their lives. Their basic view of life under the providence
of a just God was, if you are good, good things happen to you, and if you are
bad, bad things happened to you (hence the great dilemma of Job, who saw
himself as good but had bad things happening and was confused by his
understanding of a just God). In their
view, because God was perfectly just He would never do anything wrong, and
because God is just He has a heart of compassion for those who suffer
injustice, as well as a heart of love for those who practice justice in their
own lives. This is communicated
throughout the Old Testament writings.
The Psalmist repeated talk about a God who loves justice and
righteousness and is just in all his ways. The Law itself was seen as an
extension of the nature of God and the primary ethic it demanded was to live justly. The story of the Exodus was the story of a
God who saw his people experience injustice and he delivered them from it, only
to see them failing to practice justice and consequently punished them through
the exile. The prophets repeatedly spoke
on God’s behalf a call to practice justice because they represented a just God.
Justice as the nature of God is not just limited to the Old
Testament. While Jesus came as the
primary revelation of God and moved us to an understanding of God as love, that
love was grounded in and manifested through justice. In Luke 4 when Jesus is beginning his
ministry, he chooses to read to the people a verse from Isaiah and say it would
be fulfilled in him, “The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the
poor. He has sent me to proclaim release
to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go
free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”(justice) He promised a divine reversal when the
“last would be first and the first would be last”. Jesus life and teaching reflected a God who
was just, who loved justice, and who expected people to practice justice. In the church, as followers of Jesus who appropriately
ground our understanding of God in His love, it is important that we do not
forget His justice and what that means for our lives and ministries as
reflections of Him.
Practice: Take time this week to think about ways I
have experienced God as just and look for ways that I may be failing to live
justly in my own life.
A DEVOTIONAL GUIDE FOR “THE TEN
TIMELESS VALUES FOR DISCIPLESHIP”
In medical and academic circles, a fellowship
is sometimes defined as “a period of training after residency”. In the church we could apply that same idea
to fellowship. Fellowship is a critical
spiritual discipline after deciding to follow Jesus. It is the place of ongoing learning, support,
and growth. What is embedded in that
model is an understanding that growth is an ongoing process and we are never
done (which is also consistent with our understanding of salvation and
sanctification). One of the things that
happened in many long established United Methodist churches is that we evolved
into a system designed to make “church members” and not disciples and as a
result there is little expectation and no accountability for members. That also means there is little disciple
making going on.
Traditional churches with a “professional minister model” do follow the
early church model in a focus on “apostolic teaching”, and certainly that is an
important part of discipleship. But,
what is missing was the centerpiece of early Methodism, the “class
meeting”. In our beginnings, people were
discipled in “peer learning groups” where lay leaders facilitated a process of
accountability for and expectation of each other to grow as followers of
Jesus. Discipleship requires
accountability and assumes it is not a solitary pursuit. Growth requires challenge, which means
someone to answer to, someone to be honest with, and someone who loves me
enough to speak the truth in love to me.
That doesn’t happen when our groups are more focused on socialization
and even education. When we socialize we
are taught to “play nice” and “if we can’t say something nice don’t say
anything at all.” (At least until we get off in the corner where we can talk
about other folks). When Sunday School
replaced the class meeting the focus became almost completely education and
social. What was lost was the key piece
of accountability for our discipleship.
Today some churches are rediscovering fellowship through the development
of small group ministries where people on a common journey learn from each
other, support each other, and hold each other accountable. The commitment to return to our roots (in the
early church and early Methodism) may well determine our future as a church.
