I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately and the book that has had the most powerful impact on me outside of reading scripture is Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream by David Platt. I’ve also been doing a lot of journaling lately as I mentioned in a previous post, titled “Go In the Strength That You Have” which can be found here: http://wp.me/p11EFS-3b. Wayne Cordiero’s excellent journal tool, Life Journal, has been an invaluable structure to my daily times with the Lord.
So Platt writes in Chapter 5 of Radical that the central mission Christ gives to his church is to make disciples, and “Yet if you were to ask individual Christians what it means to make disciples, you would likely get jumbled thoughts, ambiguous answers, and probably even some blank stares.” Jesus gives us the plan in Matthew 28:19-20, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And sure I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” I’ve read that before as I am sure others have as well, but how?
Platt clarified it for me in this chapter. He breaks down Jesus’s command into the three parts and that’s what I have been thinking and journaling about in the context of being a blogger.
“First, according to Jesus, disciple making involves going. It involves intentionally taking the gospel to people where they live, work and play….A command for us to be gospel-living, gospel-speaking people at every moment and in every context where we find ourselves.” (pg 93) “In every context and at every moment” includes my online presence – my blog and my facebook profile.
Baptism is the second part of Jesus’s command and Platt paints two pictures of baptism. The first is that of the new life we have in Christ – that we have died to our sin and died to ourselves and that we have been raised to life with him. The second is that “Baptism pictures our identification with one another in the church… Disciple making involves inviting people into a larger community of faith where they will see the life of Christ in action and experience the love of Christ in person.”
And the third part of Jesus’s command is that we teach others. I like how Platt puts it on pg 98, “We need to be careful not to immediately jump in our minds to the classroom, lecture-style setting we often associate with teaching the Word. Classrooms and lectures have their place, but this is not the predominant kind of teaching we see in Jesus’s relationship with his disciples. On the contrary, the world was a perpetual classroom for Jesus and his disciples, providing opportunities for instruction at every moment.” On pg 99 he continues, “It’s not that sitting in lecture-style settings is not beneficial, but what if Christ has actually set us up to be the teachers?……What if we began to think, How can I listen to his Word so that I am equipped to teach this Word to others?”
For the last three days in my journal, the verses that I chose helped me to gel the purpose of my blog.
So, if you made it to the end of this post, here it is, the purpose of my blog. I will be musing on three things on a regular basis. My faith – You’ll see a lot of what I’m learning daily in my journal and how it applies to me. I’d love to hear how it applies to you too, so my blog posts will always have the daily reading assigned out of the Life Journal. They will follow Wayne Cordiero’s SOAP principle for journaling. You can read about the SOAP principle on the Life Journal website. Feel free to share what God has taught you in the comment section on this blog. We can all be learning from each other.
I’ll also be musing on my family and my life. As you know, our family has been profoundly impacted by adoption. So, you’ll see posts about my kids and about adoption and about our life as a family.
I pray that my blog will be to you the aroma of Christ, that it will reflect the Lord’s glory as I am transformed into his likeness by his Spirit, and that through it, others will see Jesus clearly and never distorted.
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