Discipleship is Relational (Part 2)

Discipleship is relational. It is personal. It is life-on-life. You cannot disciple in a biblical sense from a distance. It is up close and personal.

Discipleship is relational because love is relational. Love is not a concept to be understood but a relational commitment to be lived out.

Love takes time. Paul had, between his two past visits, spent upwards of two years with the Corinthians. Two years with the Apostle Paul and they were still this messed up! But Paul was not giving up. He was willing to put in the time. Jesus spent 3 years with the disciples teaching them in thought, word, and deed what loving one another looked like. Love takes time. It is not learned in a few weeks, or even a few months. It takes years to get good at it, and even then there is always room to grow.

Love takes personal investment. 2 Corinthians 12:15 (NIV), I will very gladly spend for you everything I have and expend myself as well. Is that not a strong statement of personal investment? As Paul was personally invested in the lives of the Corinthians, we need to be invested in the lives of one another if we are going to learn to love, let alone be able to teach others how to love. Love by its very nature is personal and costly.

Love not only requires our time, it not only requires personal investment into the lives of others, it means being vulnerable. You cannot love or model love and remain at arm’s length. That is the difference between being nice to others and loving others. The world says “be nice to one another,” Jesus says, Love one another, and further, as I have loved you, so you must love one another (John 13:34, NIV). You can be nice and not be open and vulnerable. But to love others you have to open up to them. And yes, that means there is the distinct possibility of getting hurt.

But it is perhaps especially in our hurts that love is so essential. Would you agree that some of the best fruits of love are compassion, mercy, grace, and forgiveness? Are these not at the heart of understanding the love of Christ? Yet these fruits, the ones we should covet most only come from working love into the dark soil of adversity. Compassion is only learned when we are caught up in the pain of another. Mercy is only learned when we relent and do not carry through with our anger or treating someone as they deserve. How can a person have an idea of the beauty and love of mercy if they never experience it from you or I? Likewise grace is a one-way love given to bless a person who did not earn it or expect it. How can you learn the love of giving forgiveness if you are never hurt? How can a person learn the preciousness of that gift if they never receive it and experience it themselves?

Indeed I submit that a person who does not experience compassion, mercy, grace, and forgiveness from fellow Christians will have a very hard time accepting that God has given those things to him or her at all, and will have a shallow and dull understanding of them; and so their love will be dull and shallow. Likewise, if we walk away from the work of cultivating the soil of suffering with the love of Christ we will never see much of a harvest of those fruits in our lives.

Discipleship is helping another person to love God and love others. If we don’t incarnate God’s love for us in love for others how will people learn what that means? How can we impart what we don’t practice?

Last week I was at a retreat in Wolfeboro, NH with seven other pastors. We went through a popular curriculum for men that was designed to help men identify and overcome the idols in their lives that kept them from loving God and loving others.

As we responded to the sessions and discussed the curriculum one of the things that came up was how these programs often do not have lasting effects. Most of these programs make the same recommendations if you want the best results. Don’t do it yourself, do it with a group. You need to be honest, open, and vulnerable. You need to be committed to it. All the things we have been talking about that discipleship requires because it is relational.

The problem is that most of the time the relationships only last the duration of the program. Once the program is over, for many the relationship ends there too. I’m not saying people don’t like each other, I’m saying that the honesty, openness, vulnerability, and commitment that is necessary for discipleship—helping one another learn to love God and love others who then able do the same—often does not continue once the program ends.

Love takes time, personal investment, and being vulnerable. Can I be honest with you? I have been learning that these are three things we are loathe to give. Our time is precious and we are very jealous of it. People like to keep their investments in themselves. And being vulnerable is just, well, anti-New England.

Paul said in Philippians 4:9 (NIV), Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. One of those “whatevers” is seeing that discipleship is not something that is done from a distance. It is a relationship in which we learn, practice, and teach love. It requires our time, our investment, and our openness. If we are going to obey the Great Commission we have to figure a way to let go of some of our New England sensibilities!

How do we do that? Well, let me share a three questions to ask to ascertain where we are at and then a set of three questions that can help us get started or keep going.

Am I compartmentalizing my discipleship relationships to programs? If most or all of your discipling relationships only happen in a small group or bible study or a Sunday school class, then you might need to ask yourself if you are using those settings as a buffer to keep you from getting too close to people…or to keep people from getting to close to you.

Is my motto, “all I need is my Bible and Jesus”? If it is, you might need to ask if you are using Bible study as a way to avoid people. If our Bible study does not lead us into relationships to learn, incarnate, and then impart God’s love to others, then we have gotten off track.

Am I more likely to invite a new person to come to my church before I would invite them to come to my home? By inviting a new person into our home we are letting that person know that we are interested in getting to know him or her. Just bringing them to church can be a way of staying at arm’s length…letting the church do the investing. In other words, are we looking to send people to church or are we looking to be the church to the people we meet?

Now, how can you start, or how can you get more intentional about being relational? Let me share with you some questions my mentor Tom Johnston shared with me that I have found very helpful. You can ask them of anybody, Christian or not.

Who is this person in Christ? Maybe they are in Christ now, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. Where are they in their walk with God?

What has Christ done and is currently doing in this person that I can partner with? This is a great question. It helps us to look for what we can work with, and frees us from thinking that we need to have all the answers to everything. What is Jesus doing that I can come and support? How am I gifted to help?

What does Christ want to do through this person? We are working for Christ and His kingdom so we need to have that kingdom focus. We get this answer by praying for the person and asking for Jesus to give us discernment as to how He wants us to walk with him or her.

If we prayerfully, honestly, humbly ask those questions of ourselves and the people in our lives I think you will find that God blesses you and uses you in very powerful ways.