Refocus

Mindy and I are doing fantastic. Yesterday, I finished a job as a grip on a short film in Hollywood. Basically, because I don’t know anything about gripping, I got paid to just guard a big truck full of expensive lighting equipment since we were filming in a pretty rough part of town. The nice thing about “guarding” the truck is that I got a chance to sit there with some other guys for hours at a time. Not much to do except talk about life. By the end of Monday, one of the younger guys wanted to get together with Mindy and me since he and his girlfriend don't know many couples out here. Excellent discipleship opportunity.

Which brings up a great question. What is true discipleship? Lately, we’ve been challenging ourselves to define much of our Christian lingo. Even words like “gospel” and “salvation” are completely loaded terms that many of us don’t understand, let alone can aritculate if put on the spot.




So one of our primary goals as we move forward together as a group is to assault our lingo. I wouldn’t call it a deconstruction of our language. I’d say our goal is to simply refocus some pictures that have become blurry. To push through the cliches in the Church and get to the heart of the spiritual life.

We’ve been listening to a series of sermons that Howard Hendricks did on the dynamics of discipleship. I HIGHLY recommend that you listen to them yourself. You can download them for free here. But in them, Hendricks says, “Discipleship is the spiritual life. And the spiritual life is the life of Christ, reproduced in the believer, through the Holy Spirit. Therefore, master the Master's life.”

I couldn’t agree with Hendricks more.

Here’s the logic we’re following as we begin a pretty intensive study of the Life of Christ over the next several weeks. The backbone of the Church is the Life of the Disciple. The foundation of the Life of the Disciple is the Life of Christ. Therefore, we need to master the Life of Christ. Before you can truly understand Acts, you first have to understand Luke. Before you can truly understand the Church, you have to understand the foundations for the Church. So we are going to look at the Life of Christ and talk in detail about why Christ had to come in light of God's greater program, what model He provided for us in His life, what He accomplished for us in His death, and what are the implications of His resurrection.
We want to live the spiritual life. We want to take discipleship seriously. We want to see people not only put their faith in Christ for the first time, but to live the abundant spiritual life that’s available to all of us who have entered into the Kingdom through our faith in Him. It's not just about eternity in Heaven in the future, but it's also about life in the Kingdom of God now.

In West LA it is critical that we are able to articulate our faith with our words and our lives. If we can't, we run the risk of being swallowed by the thousands of other messages all competing for people’s allegiance out here.

If you get a chance to listen to those Hendricks sermons, I'd love for you to share your comments on them.

Please keep praying for us!