Discipleship is: a Way of Life

Over the last few weeks the focus of my posts have been on looking at what a Christian disciple is. Specifically, we have been looking at three core essentials of the Christian life: loving God, loving others, and making disciples. A disciple of Jesus is someone who loves God with all their heart, soul, and mind; someone who loves their neighbor as themselves, and who is discipling others so they can love God and love others who will go and disciple others.

At this point I am moving the focus from what a disciple is, questions like, how do we do discipleship? When do we do it? Who are we supposed to disciple? Over the next few weeks we are going to be looking at how we are to do it.

The first thing we need to understand about it is that biblical discipleship is much bigger an idea than we think. That it is best understood as a way of life and not as a program to attend or a set curriculum to be taught.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9 is one of the clearest explanations of this fact.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Meaning that there are no other Gods to pay attention to. Since there is only one God, he gets all our attention. Other translations say the
LORD alone. Meaning the Egyptians whom I rescued you from and people in the land you are about to possess all believe in many different gods, but you are not to listen to them. You are to listen to Me alone! I don’t think these need be mutually exclusive.

The very first thing that God says after this claim for complete authority is, Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Life is to be completely lived out of love for God. God is claiming that our hearts should be His alone, that our souls are His alone, and that we should love Him with all of our strength.

Strength can be taken in two ways. It is often understood more literally referring to personal will, meaning we should love the Lord with all our effort, with all our might, with all vehemence. Our will should be mightily spent on loving Him so that we do so with all of our being.

Strength can also be understood figuratively, meaning to love God in one’s power and possessions. Hence the CJB translates it love God with all your heart, all your being and all your resources. Again, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive. Can we love God with all our heart, soul, and strength without that effecting how we see and use our money, means, possessions, and worldly influence? The meaning is we are to love God with our whole life and everything in it.

Verses 4-5 teach that life is to be lived in love and devotion to God.

Verses 6-9 lay out how that is to be done.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. What commands? All the commands given in the book of Deuteronomy and by extension the whole Mosaic Law—Genesis-Deuteronomy. Jesus, summed up the Law of Moses into two verses: verse 5 of our text, Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, and Leviticus 19:18, Love your neighbor as yourself. To be sure there are other commands to know, but they all lead back to loving God and loving others.

What does it mean to have these commands on our hearts? It means that we are devoted to living them out. What do we mean when we say “You are on my heart” or “you have stolen my heart” or “that work is on my heart?” We mean that what is on our heart is deeply important to us. What we love, what we delight in, what we value is what is in our heart. If we love God with all our heart then His commands will be on our hearts; if His commands are on our hearts then we will delight in doing them because they are important to us. Love leads to obedience. Jesus reiterated this in John 14:15 (NIV), If you love me, keep my commands.

Faith, love, and obedience go hand in hand. Do we not naturally want to please who we love? Do we not naturally want the approval of who we love? What would you conclude if I said “I love my wife but I have no real interest in listening to her, pleasing her, or seeking her approval in what I do.” Would you think that I really love my wife? No, you would think I was nuts! If God’s commands are in our heart we will do them, we will want to do them. Since His commands in sum are to love Him and love others, our life should joyfully reflect that.

Loving God and loving others is not only something they were to be learning to do themselves, it is something they were to be teaching others. Impress them on your children. Notice where this impartation starts from: not the tabernacle, the home. The tabernacle is not mentioned. The priesthood is not mentioned. Now, I am not saying they don’t get mentioned further in the book. I am not saying they are not important. I am not saying they had no place in the teaching of children or adults for that matter. They did. But they were not primary. They were secondary. The primary teachers for children were their parents. That is where making disciples starts. Discipleship is something that begins and flows out of the home.

Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. When it comes to making disciples, there is no set group of people, or set place, or time for this. Rather it is with whoever you are with, from when you get up to when you lay down and everywhere in between. It happens at home as well as on the road. It is always to be done.

Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. What is the point of this? It was a visible reminder that everyone and all of life was God’s. There was no one who was not responsible for knowing, living, and teaching His commands, and there was no place exempt from doing so. Everywhere you looked, you would see God’s commands. They were a constant reminder of what you were to be wearing on the inside. They are kept inside in the heart, and were to be seen outside on their person. It was a visible reminder to be living in loving obedience to God and loving their neighbor as themselves (incarnation), and were opportunities for discussion and teaching about God (impartation).

Loving God with all your heart, soul, and strength meant:

1. Keeping His commands in your heart (that’s illumination) so that they can be lived out from the heart (that’s incarnation).
2. Teaching God’s commands and how to live them to others (that’s impartation), starting in the home with their own families and then to others as they went through their day.
3. Treating all of life as sacred. Yes, God set aside certain places to be especially holy like the tabernacle in Moses’ day and the Temple in Jesus’ day. But all of life was sacred. No part or person or place was excluded from His commands.