Course: Spiritual Life of the Leader

Lecture 26: Through Movement for Clergy and Laity (Part 2)

Tozer says we don’t have the right of choosing Jesus as Savior and postponing our obedience. Dispositions are something that’s part of your daily life. Christian disciplines help us to love God and love our neighbor. Encourage people to seek God’s direction for where he wants them to serve. The biblical model is that mature Christians will live as disciplined followers. Make it a goal for pure love to fill your heart and govern your words and actions.

I. Biblical and Theological Rounding

A.W. Tozer says that a notable heresy has come into being throughout evangelical Christian circles; the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need him as Savior and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to him as Lord as long as we want. No, we don’t have the right to postpone our obedience. This is where Dallas Willard comes back to mind; he makes his famous quote regarding such reasoning. He says that it is not reasonable to be a vampire Christian, one in effect says, ‘I would like a little of your blood please, but I don’t care to be your student or have your character. In fact, please excuse me while I get on with my life and I will see you in heaven.’ We can completely agree with Dallas Willard, that in no measure can this be an approach that Jesus finds acceptable. The spiritual life of the leader presses; it isn’t a shallow thing; it is not a you and Jesus thing. It is a deepening of your understanding of God’s work in God’s church. It is a deepening of your application of the Gospel to those you are called to serve. The call to the church in this day and in this age is to recover the full array of the revealed truth of Christ. That is why we must have biblical and theological training? How is it that you can even go to seminary and come out not being biblical and theologically trained to the extent that leads you? It just cannot be. And to integrate that truth to our lives as disciples and into the lives of others, the life of Christ then begins to emerge in individual lives. In these family groups, the life of Christ and the mind of Christ begin to emerge and then people begin to be obedient to the Gospel and as a result, joy happens and the mission of God unfolds and the world is transformed.

II. Formation of Life-Giving Dispositions

In the fourth atmosphere or environment that needs to unfold, this is in the formation of life-giving dispositions. I use dispositions here instead of disciplines; something that is dispositional when it is a part of my daily life. We are justified by faith in Christ as a sheer gift of grace. Nobody earns this. There is absolutely no action on our part that enables us to earn the free gift of Christ. Yes, we are called to repent and to have faith in Christ; these are conditions where neither one and earn anything. We are also born a new and our nature is transformed by the same gift of God’s grace coming into our lives. We cannot work our way into God’s favor. Full salvation is unearned and unmerited, yet we are called to cooperate with this grace. Dallas Willard again says as we move from one degree of glory to another (2nd Corinthians 3:18), grace is opposed to earning not effort. We are called to cooperate with what God is trying to be about in our lives. We are not to be quiet; the church has condemned quietism as not being the way of Christ. Quietism says that you step back and do nothing, you just wait.

There are Christian disciplines that we are called to take up if we are going to live in obedience to our Lord. We have to imprint the fact that this is going to be an environment where being with a small group and being a disciple of Christ, then I am going to get over on this side in terms of being mature disciples who are living in the pattern of our Lord. Did our Lord go up into the mountains to pray to his Father? Did he pray in the synagogue and did he pray the psalms? Did he know the Word and explicate the Word? Yes, these things were patterns of Jesus. In all of these things, we are taking on the mind and lifestyle of Christ. He lived in community and close fellowship with others. Sometimes they called him a drunkard because of this. We are taking on the nature of Christ in living in fellowship with people that he loved and took delight in as we should do also. This is a gift to us; we are talking about life giving dispositions and so we are committed to community and devotional living where everyone understands their lives as being completely committed to God in every aspect of their lives. We are on the same page of Scripture every day and praying for one another every day. We are going to worship together and serving together. We are strengthening all of the relationships that we have been talking about. The Christian life will not neglect home and family. The Christian life doesn’t neglect those we work with and serve with. How are we loving others with the love of Christ? The whole context of the spiritual life is so important; we meet together regularly and give an account of our lives with the Lord. We are praying for opportunities to share the love of God with others. This is when the kingdom becomes a life for us. Then even throughout the formation of disposition, a mature disciple will find where they are called to serve. And we want to let that service be determined by God, not by filling needs in your local church because you will box God in if you do this.

If you will disciple a person, then eventually the impact of that will be global, not just local. God has a different calling on everyone’s lives. The question here is how each person in this group is being called to serve the king and work in partnership with his kingdom? As spiritual leaders, we should always be really careful to not make our kingdom the kingdom. We want to be careful to know and say that we are not building our own kingdom. There is no room in regards to competition in God’s kingdom. In 1 Corinthians 12:27, every member in their place of service is equal before Jesus. We are all the same and in regarding to the afore mentioned temple nurturing; this is life giving. We are called to nutritional sanity where we exercise self-control as it says in 1 Corinthians 9:25. Any natural appetite that the Lord has created us with, this can become self-centered and thus become sinful. We are not to get drunk with wine but be filled with the spirit. There is a warning of living in excessiveness in 1 Peter 4:4 where our god is our stomach in regards to eating too much. Read the Word and let it speak to us for the whole person gets redeemed. We are discipling the whole of our lives, not a part of our lives. So, we have mature Christians who are living as disciplined followers.

III. Sin Nature into the Light

Now, the fifth type of culture that we want to see growing and striving is an environment that we as leaders set. To be repetitive, you have to demonstrate and live the life that you are telling others about. You have to incarnate and embody what you are preaching. We are going to create an environment that will allow the sin nature to be brought to the light. So the sin nature is going to come into the light that is Christ. If someone will actually make the commitment and covenant with you to be in the Word of God every day and to be in prayer and give an accounting of themselves back to you in whether they are actually doing this and what the Holy Spirit is saying to them, God will be able to then do amazing things in your life. But you will also see that people will not enter into some of these disciplines; they just cannot find time to pray or to be in the Word. And you are going to lovingly speak to them and be talking about it. How can we lovingly commit ourselves to one another with having any kind of negative biasness toward anyone? What will come out of this will be openness and desire for people to pray, but above all, we cannot dam others for how they are. But, instead, you cerebrate any success a person has over sins or habits or honesty with God. The road blocks to loving God with all that we are and loving others; those difficulties which people go through are going to come out, not in terms of condemnation but in terms of giving the Lord full control of my life. We love John 3:16 and also 3:17, for sure Jesus did not come into the World to condemn the world, instead he came into the world to make possible a restored relationship with the Father which happens through justification. The atonement accomplishes that.

He came here to allow us to have intimacy with himself and with the Father to get this sin nature to die in our lives. It has to go to the cross with Christ. He came to transform our very characters; to take on our sinful nature. It was nailed to the cross and redeemed and healed and in the resurrection with that kind of power, I too can have those sins taken care of in my life. Wesley said that pure love (loving God for who God is) is filling the heart and governing all the words and our actions. That is the definition of maturity.

IV. The Goal is Spiritual Maturity and Full Participation in God’s Mission

Maturity in Christ and participation in the mission of God guides the whole process. We have a goal; it is maturity in Christ which is going to guide the process and then a full participation which is saying yes in God’s mission. I am going to grow up in Christ and allow him to grow me up so that I can fully participate in my part of salvation history. I am going to be found in Christ so that I can be sent forth into his kingdom. This is going to guide this process so that the sin nature will be crucified. For some us, it takes a while, but then this full maturity says that I am going to reflect the beauty of who Christ is in my own life. Normally, we want to get straight in terms of who the beautiful people of are for our culture has it all wrong. The beautiful is in those people who have walked a long time with the Lord and who has allowed his beauty to enwrap them and have allowed his goodness to infuse them. Now I am an ambassador of Christ. I understand my life; I totally understand my life as one of being a full time missioner. I am sent on a mission in his kingdom. I am praying that kingdom on a daily basis to come Lord Jesus. The goal of maturity in the Christian life and the participation in the mission of God directs everything that we do. We do this to see kingdom people to come forth at the end. We don’t do this in order to try and fulfill what we think ought to be done. We do this in order to take on our Lord’s leading to see the twelve that he discipled; to see the apostles grow up and go out.

So the purpose of the discipleship process, therefore, is to allow the Holy Spirit the opportunity to grow disciples of Jesus. This simply can’t be a program to enrich a person or a service opportunity disconnected from the purposes of the Gospel. Discipleship formation is successful when it is fruitful and when it is faithful to both the means and the ends of following Jesus. The goal before us is to grow children, youth, women, and men into people who are actually living in submission to God the Father while actively following God the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit. Maturity in Christ is where we are headed. Wesley, again, said that we need this kind of maturity and when holiness starts to happen there will be a deep fulfillment and joy and rejoicing in ministry. Genuine Christians are happy in God and rejoicing evermore; they have the witness of the Spirit of God in their hearts saying that they are a child of God. That is called assurance of faith; they give thanks in everything always lifting up their hearts to God. Such the love for God result in their hearts being full of love to all mankind, he says. We don’t have to get into a ghetto mentality or in a sectarian mentality or the party spirit where one party is totally evil. We are called to love all people with the love of Christ. Furthermore, the love of God purifies us from evil passions and from bad tempers resulting in mercy, kindness and humbleness of mind, meekness and long suffering. So the desire is not to our own will but the will of him who sent us.

V. Desired outcomes of the Class

I pray that we have had a good class and that the seeds that were shown will bring forth fruitfulness that you really haven’t dreamed of. It is simply to allow the Lord to work in your life as a spiritual leader. This is where we want to get our lives to where we are highly committed to the Lord and living in family covenant and theologically grounded in our own lives. We are doing these dispositions in our lives; we have got the life giving discipline unfolding, not in legalism, but in joy with life flowing into us so that the water level of our own soul are not being drained all of the time. We are allowing Jesus to nail this to where we got to be nailed. Blessed is the person of God who has someone who loves them enough to speak into their lives where they need to be spoken into. Blessed is the woman of God that is loved enough where she will allow someone to speak to her where she needs life. These are good things, not bad things. We want this in our lives not just so that the light of Christ can put to the death the sin nature. As a leader, you are walking in this marvelous place that our Lord wants us to walk so that you as a leader are exhibiting some of the fruit of the Sermon on the Mound. It is where you are leading yourself from a place of maturity and you just go through all of the ways of living in the Sermon on the Mound and then you come to Matthew 5:43. You have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you might be children of your Father in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, but you if love those who love you, what reward do you have; don’t even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more do you do with others. Do not even the gentiles do the same? He then sums up the word to where we want to be, to have the same type of perfect love at work in our lives that the heavenly Father has continually working throughout the world. Be perfect; come to the end of what you are created to be.

Theologians love this great word Telos; it is the end product. You can reach this Telos just by looking at the nature around you, the beautiful trees where you see stability and long term fruitfulness. You see shade and a home for many creatures, for it has grown to what God wanted it to be. God wants you to be at this place of maturity and what better place to bring you to that place of maturity than where he has placed you in the local church. This is the estuary; this is the atmosphere and environment that God is going to grow me up? Absolutely! Blessed be the name of the Lord who loves you enough as a leader to take you through all sorts of crises! Why? To get you here so that you also will rise up and bless and praise our Lord and then together in the kingdom, we will rejoice for evermore. Amen.

VI. Questions and Answers

When you are talking about the sin nature, I was thinking about all the stories we hear about powerful biblical expository preachers; the whole time they are preaching their hearts are wicked and so you can think that you are mature while your sin nature is still in full control. What I was thinking about as you were laying these things out; it is really the balance of all of these things that we can use as red flags. We can think that our sin nature isn’t in control, but if we are not living in a covenantal structure in our family. To use your own words, if we are getting from someone else what we are getting from our spouse then that becomes a check and balance, doesn’t it? We can convince ourselves that any of these are true but other ones aren’t going to be true and they should become the indicators for the spiritual life of the leader, there is a problem. Is that fair to say?

Yes, that is true. Theologically, it raises a huge issue of what you do with the sin nature; do you repent over the sin nature? No, you repent over sinful actions and movement. The only thing that I know to do with the sin nature is to crucify it with Christ. I can’t do this and so I pray for the sheer gift of grace for the sin nature to be crucified with Christ. I think even if God answers that and does crucify the sin nature, it doesn’t mean that I cannot be tempted and most certainly I still need to keep growing in Christ. You don’t get to the point where you have arrived and I would never go around proclaiming that. I think theologically it is a valid prayer to ask for God to crucify the sin nature. I just have to stand with John Wesley saying that in the new birth, I am giving everything that is needed to be an over-comer in Christ. I do not have to commit sin; I do not have to be the rules and dominating; I don’t have to live under the guilt and tyranny of sin. Yet, that sin nature, many times, is not necessarily crucified at that point.

What about we do it this way? We go to Jesus where we deny ourselves and then daily take up our cross and follow him. So, the whole point of living as one who is crucified is a daily disposition, a daily way of living.

You fail at this if you go around saying that you don’t sin anymore.

I really appreciate what you said when you first began this section on the Holy Spirit to contextualize the things in the process because we can logically make up a lot of systems to require certain behaviors or certain actions. There are a lot of groups, clubs and societies that do this. We tend to do this because we want to feel comfortable and to have that feeling of acceptance for whatever reason. I think that not only is this important for this process but it is important personally that we understand that this is the nature of how God relates to us. It is a relationship with us where the Holy Spirit is informing us on a daily basis of what he wants us to know and how it wants us to apply that. We have the Word and there is a plain meaning to Scripture and yet we have things that were written by people two thousand years ago or more that we expect to be able to apply to our lives today. How do we do that? The only way we can do that is rely on the Spirit to apply the plain meaning of Scripture as we live that out every day. So, as we practice that in our lives, we need to practice it with the process to. And as we do that, we contextualize these things wanting to know the steps involved in it but that is not how God works. If we could do that we could depend on ourselves and our own logic to sort this all out. So, as we do the process, we need to depend on the Holy Spirit to contextualize us and that is going to be a moving target all the time. One month, as we have it ready to go, it might change three months later to where we emphasizing something different. As we do that, we need to depend on to act in a way that is consistent with the Spirit to inform us as we go.

Once again to say that it can’t be a program in a box. It is not a one size fits all things. The Holy Spirit loves all of us because we are all unique.

We see that as a disadvantage sometimes, because we want to control it, but the point is, that is so freeing and awesome that God is going to work with this as a living thing and he is going to be doing this with living people that we are relating with that which are also changing. All of this is a moving target and to think that we can understand everything about ourselves is pretty optimistic, but then to think that we can understand about what is going on with one or two or three or five hundred other people as they are going through their own stuff. We have to depend on something other than our own logic and understanding. It can only be the Holy Spirit in the lives of people.

From the stand point of being a lay person who has been a participant in some of these small discipleship groups, a lot of times you will see that it is part of our human nature. As you are sitting around discussing and looking at one another’s needs, someone will bring up a need and a natural tendency is for other people to give you a pat answer and say that I saw this on u-tube or the Internet and I think you need to do this and this and that and try to fix each other’s problems or this is what I did. I think that is a danger and so what we were instructed to do form the very beginning is don’t try and fix one another’s problems but just to support and encourage each other and say that the Holy Spirit is the one that needs to direct our lives and to speak truth into our lives first.

We need to have deep respect for the human person; we don’t try and shut them up through fixing them with quick easy answers. Basically we can ask how you need us to pray for you about this. Rather than fixing them, we want to know how to pray for them.