Discipleship and Actions
11/20/2008 | Author: RCW
Some of you may have seen this coming.

I did a blog entry on Discipleship and Learning. I then published one on Discipleship and Feelings. Now of course, I am writing one on Discipleship and Actions. This is for some people the "holy trinity" of discipleship....God's word penetrating and transforming the human mind, human heart, and human hands or will. I am not sure that I want to limit discipleship to JUST those 3, but it makes a handy-dandy and memorable formula.

I think I am going to keep this entry as short as I can and simply state that discipleship MUST have a volitional component. In other words, if we begin to describe discipleship, there is always a definite piece of it that involves our own will.

Think of it...

  • We already spoke of the potential flaw in giving God our mind, but not our heart and emotions. (We run the risk of becoming dry and lifeless! Discipleship is more than JUST learning!)


  • We also spoke of the danger of giving God our heart without our mind.
    (We risk having zeal without knowledge, or passion without content, passionate devotion without a proper understanding!)


NOW what we are talking about involves the surrender or non-surrender of our ACTIONS or WILL.

  • What happens when God has our mind but not our will?
    (We are with those who call Him Lord, but will ultimately perish! We become the ones who hear and know the Word, but don't act on it...as bad as the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. Read Lk. 7:43-49!)


  • What good is it if God has our heart surrendered to Him, but not our behavior?
    (We run the risk of being hypocrites...forgetting that love is an action, not feelings!)


  • What good will it be to God if we ACT like Him, but don't surrender our mind to Him as well?
    (We are just do-gooders...having a type of godliness but not acknowledging its source.)


  • Or what good will it be to God if we give Him our actions, but not our heart?
    (Our service is passionless and will be nothing more than mere obligation...like the Israelites who confessed God and observed rituals, but whose hearts were far from Him!)

In the end, we could find scripture after scripture (many from the mouth of Jesus Himself) that condemns and rebukes these various conflicts of allegiance.
The bedrock bottom line reality is: Real discipleship involves submitting our head, heart, and hands (and whatever other parts of ourselves that we might speak of -- soul, spirit, body, speech, passions, relationships, priorities, calling, vocation, time, etc.) wholly and completely unto God.

Any non-surrendering on our part amounts to a violation of the first and greatest commandment: To love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, might, and strength.

-RCW
This entry was posted on 11/20/2008 and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

0 comments: