Divine Conspiracy // part the last // for the blog anyway

I don’t think I’ll be posting much on this book, which is interesting because of how much it’s reshaping my thought processes. But, this is just one of those that I live in so you’ll probably be seeing more posts, but you probably won’t know they are directly linked from the book.

As I was sitting here this morning, however, I was continuing to think on a phrase near the end of the book where Dallas Willard writes something to the effect of, “Non-discipleship is the [pink] elephant in the room. It is not the moral failures or greed or any number of other supposed sins that are visible. It is the lack of discipleship that is the root cause of all these problems, and we are unfortunately not dealing with the issue.” That was an extreme paraphrase and Willard says it more eloquenty and really with more forcefulness probably. This statement couldn’t be more accurate.

We feel the need often to treat the symptoms of a problem when what we really need is to treat the cause. Last week in Colorado, I had so much sinus congestion that at night I barely slept. I continued trying to treat the congestion when it was really the virus that I had that needed to be treated. When I began taking antibiotics, I felt better in a day. Our focus must shift from trying to tell people to quit looking at naked girls on TV, or quit sacrificing your integrity for another 10,000 a year, or quit killing your body by being ridiculously overweight, or quit murdering your neighbor/friends/co-workers/whatever by “just noticing” something or “just saying what you heard,” and we could all add a thousand more. These are symptoms of a problem, not the main problem. If we would focus our energy on discipleship, the antibiotic if you will, the problems would solve themselves because a disciple recognizes, “I must pick up my cross daily and follow Him. I must make Him primary in my life.”

What this does not mean is, “Church, you make me a disciple. Give me more. I want to consume what you have. I need you to feed me. Offer another program, offer something, this is your job.” No. Nothing could be further from the truth. It means, “God, You consume me. I will allow you to speak in me and feed me. I will obediently look to follow Your footsteps in order to grow. Sometimes it will involve a program at the church, but mostly it will involve me doing life with You and other Believers. It will involve me being real about my struggle to completely and daily die to myself and allow Christ to live in me.”

Jesus commanded us, you and me who are followers of Christ, to go and make disciples. Inherent in this idea of making disciples is that we be disciples. Therefore, inherent to the idea of discipleship is that disciples make disciples who make disciples. But we’ve got to buck up and move forward in this if we desire to see the sin abuse in our life fall away. We cannot treat the symptom and expect to kill the virus. Sure it, may go away for a time, but it will come back, even stronger.

Jesus said, “Come, follow me, watch what I do and do those things, be My disciple.”