Unintentional Discipleship

“You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men.” 2 Corinthians 3:2

After church there is a pot luck. Someone is asked to pray over the meal. Everyone gets quiet. She stands and prays. Unintentional discipleship.

Your Fourth Day group meets at Denny’s. Someone has just ordered a Grand Slam and gets a text asking him to come and respond to a pastoral emergency. He dismisses himself and leaves without a thought. Unintentional discipleship.

One in church a man stands and nervously shares a “word” he feels God is giving him for the congregation. It is powerful.  Afterwards he mentions he has never done this sort of thing before and sits down, a bit embarrassed. Unintentional discipleship.

A teacher in the teacher’s lounge is frustrated at a broken copier. She lays her hands on it and asks Jesus to make it work. It works. Her colleagues stare in disbelief. Unintentional discipleship.


Discipleship can be intentional (through academic curriculums, Scripture memorization, topical studies, etc.) or unintentional (through the doing of life and responding to it’s daily demands with grace and spiritual fortitude). Either way, whether in the classroom or on the street, discipleship happens. It is both taught and caught. Truth is: People watch us. They copy us. They may even wind up doing the same things as us.

When I was a youth leader in Denver I led a worship set and it was really nice. Kid’s were genuinely brought into the presence of the Lord. When I was packing up my guitar a teen came up and told me he had been watching me lead music for years and wanted to be just like me. He even asked me to pray for him to be just like me.

Unintentional discipleship. You see, people are watching, learning, and actually believing that the way we pray, respond to pastoral needs, share what we think the Lord is saying, or lay hands on machines is the way they need to be doing those same things. It’s both a sobering responsibility and, at the same time, a magnificent opportunity. Just think. People look to us so they know how to share the how life in the Kingdom works with others.

TakeAway: Think of the people God has surrounded you with. How has He intentionally and unintentionally work His Gospel into their lives’ through you? Take time this month to ask God to fill you with his Spirit that you may be living witnesses to the Loving God, intentionally and unintentionally, in everything you do.

Repentance Made Easy

Again I ask, “Why does a person repent after committing a sin?”

Answers vary. But I maintain that if you are repenting so that you can get back to being good then you are repenting for the wrong reasons and will soon enough find yourself smack-dab back in the same situation that warranted your original confession in the first place.

And that has it’s downside. Because if we repent time and time again, and time and time again fall into the same despicable behavior, it wont be long until we see it as an endless loop, a casual cycle of give and take, without any real expectation that we could ever be delivered from the sin that so easily besets.

So, why does a person repent? Because we were bad? To do better? To realign ourselves with the moral code?

Even though we live in the New Covenant of Grace I am increasingly convinced that most of the church operates in what I call a burning bush mentality. You remember the burning bush. It was the vessel wherein Moses received his call to ministry and the place where he received the law. God’s desire was that he would have a people who would worship him, have relationship with him; a people he could call his own and there would be a real sense of intimacy between he and his people.

The gist intimacy was living within the law. If they obeyed Torah they enjoyed the blessing of God’s presence. If they didn’t, God withdrew from them until they were realigned with the precepts of the law. In this sense, intimacy with the Lord had to do with how the people obeyed or disobeyed the law. In short, it had to do with behaving, a code of conduct; or, to be precise: works.

Few people enjoyed intimacy with God back then. Moses did. He spoke with God as a friend. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the OT prophets enjoyed rich fellowship in the Spirit with him as well. By and large it went like this: if you were living according to the Law you were experiencing God’s favor. If you weren’t, you weren’t.

I remember standing under a waterfall once. It came right down from heaven and splashed me on the top of my head. If I was to move outside of the stream it went dry. That’s the way it was back then. Step out of the stream and you run dry. The stream, in that case, was the Law.

But all that didn’t work. We have learned since then that the Law kills. Like a cancer, it gets under our skin and can kill us. Jesus flipped it all around and, in essence, said, “I still want to be your God, you still have a tendency to sin. You’ve probably learned that it’s impossible to keep the Law, so believe in me, the Fulfillment of the Law, and all the privileges set aside for those who would keep the Law, will be yours through faith.”

He’s saying we can’t do it. He can. Believe in him and you will receive what you don’t deserve. So now it’s a whole different deal. Back then it was all about keeping the moral code. Today it’s all about Grace. Grace infuses the personality of God into our hearts. In Grace we have become true children of God, intimate with our Father, as we place our faith in Jesus Christ.

Grace is the new burning bush. We no longer take our righteousness from tablets of stone, but through the Holy Spirit as written by the same finger who wrote the commandments, only this time they are written in our hearts.

So what is the place of the Law in this new day and age? The Law is no longer essential for salvation but has become a natural by-product of the person who walks in the love that has been poured out upon us through the Holy Spirit. Let me be clear here - as it plays into something I’ll state below. A person cannot be saved by keeping the Law. The embers of the burning bush have faded away and now a new Way has been revealed. It is only by grace that we are saved. The Law, if taken too devotionally, will wind up killing us.

The Law hems us in, it reveals the parameters of righteous behavior - very much like speed limit signs provide safe parameters on the road. It is still a good thing. But is still cannot save. We are privy to the intimacy of God through grace and nothing else. We may feel better if we’ve been good. We may pat ourselves on the back and say “good job” when overcoming a temptation with the Love of God. All fine and well. But keeping the Law has little to do with getting saved.

Back then, when a person sinned, it was evident. Their behavior gave them away. Today it’s not so clear. Why? Because sin becomes more than the breaching of a moral code. It is getting out of sync with the intimacy of God. It is the moving away from the sweetness of fellowship found exclusively within the marital-like relationship between Parent and child.

When I sin I grieve the loss of intimacy and relationship with my Father, not the fact of what thing I did or didn’t do. That’s how a person can sin and not do (or do) a thing. I don’t have to commit adultery to sin. The mere thought of adultery is enough to strain my intimacy with God. It’s that sensitive.

Jesus makes reference to this when he shares with the religious leaders that, though the outside of the cup is clean, the inside of the cup is filled with dregs. What he meant by that was that they were doing all the right things - keeping the Law - but they were far from intimacy with God.

Now we all sin. We all move away from the sweet spot in Christ Jesus, regardless of what we do, or don’t, do. When we move away from that place, that place of abiding in the Spirit, we have sinned. When we sin, how do we get back into the sweet spot? How do we realign ourselves with the intimacy of God?

We call this repentance. When a person repents he or she decides in the mind to realign oneself with the grace falling from above. It’s a simple process, really. It is a reevaluation of the breach, a recognition of the fruit of the breach, and a repositioning of oneself back in the sweet spot of the Waterfall, if you will. It demands humility and honesty. In the best case scenario, a person repents and draws back to God because of the loss of intimacy and friendship he or she once had but has no more. “I remember my Father’s house,” we say. “I am longing for the delicacies from the table, the sweetness of being back home, and just to be hugged in the arms of my Father. I am so thirsty for that which I have lost.”

Again I pose the question: When you repent, what is at the heart of your desire to repent? Is it to be back in good standing with God? Is it so that you won’t flub it up again? Is it so that, by getting back into proper behavior, you can once again live within the favor of the Divine?

Careful here. For it is a very subtle difference. It is tempting to repent back to the principals given us in the burning bush, tempting to repent to get it right. Right? I repent to do better. I repent because I fell short. For sure we all repent because we got something wrong. But that something wrong is far deeper that merely the doing or not dong of a thing. That something wrong is the drifting away from intimacy in Christ. The doing or not doing of the thing is simply the fruit of intimacy lost. The loss of moral compass from True North is the first breach, the real sin here. The stuff that we fall into as a result of that is secondary.

The problem with most repentance today is that it appeals to the stuff that we should have done or should not have done and not to the reestablishment of intimacy with Jesus. We already know that we can be doing all things right and be standing outside the Waterfall. The Pharisees did all things proper, yet their hearts were far from God.  Even though he was standing right in front of them they recognized him not. For their fleshly passion of the written word blinded them from seeing the Living Light of the world.

O, but to repent back to intimacy! What a blessed gift that is! To be reunited with my Creator as Adam was before Eden’s Fall. That is the goal of true repentance. When that is achieved the Law becomes the wake of my boat, the ripples expanding out from the pebble’s splash, and the joy that comes from God’s abundant life. It’s not that the Law is bad. But Sinai’s tree is smoldering. It has been replaced with the New Wood of Grace which, when fully embraced, contains the very DNA of the original bush.

Intimacy? Found in Jesus Christ and his gift for us. Moral code - works and behavior? The fruit of that relationship.

Sin? Moving away from the sweet spot of living in the Spirit. The breaking of the Law, works of unrighteousness and works of the flesh are a horrific by-product of the one who has lost intimacy with their God.

Repentance? Choosing to realign oneself with the outflow of God’s love found in the Grace of Jesus Christ. It is not an appeal to a higher Law, or even asking God for the power to keep you from doing the stupid thing again - for those prayers will go unanswered and be un-empowered anyway if not first posed within the Spirit of God. Ideal repentance makes its appeal to the love of God, not the Law of God; the wood of the Cross, not the wood of the bush. It makes its appeal to Mount Calvary, not Mount Sinai. To Grace, and not works.

The true repenter understands that only when he or she is in right standing with God - standing within the love of God as poured out in the Holy Spirit - that the code of behavior will be attained, and that with such a glorious radiance and natural innocence that those who know not the sweetness of God will be drawn to it, through the fragrance of the redeemed, through Grace.

How To Share Christ Without Being A Nerd

Jesus spent his time telling how wonderful his Father was. What did he say? He told people his Father loved them, his Father had plans for them, and that the oppressiveness of sin, shame, regret, and other human baggage could all be lifted and forgiven as they rearranged their lives  under his headship.  In short his mission was all about telling others about his Father.

2000 years later? Nothing has changed. He is just as passionate about telling others about his Father as he was back then. He is still infusing purpose and eternal destiny in human hearts, still rescuing others from the wiles of the devil , and still wooing people into God’s love through his goodness – only difference  is that he is using you and me to carry it forth.

Sharing God’s love is what we do best. It is our DNA. It is our heritage. It should come natural. Why have we made something so easy and natural into something so difficult and complex? We are Christ’s body, are we not? We have the mind, heartbeat, and soul of Jesus, do we not? As Christ's body, the continuation of his love is poured out from heaven through us.

That is the foundation for sharing his love. Once that is established, the rest is glorious gravy. Our problem is that the church is often viewed as a hustle-bustle of energy-sapping activity. Her shepherds look stressed, her sheep are consumed with conferences, teaching series’, and spiritual exhaustion. Much of what we call discipleship has little to do with doing life and more to do with the checking of a “to-do” list, complete with theology, scripture memorization, and other essential academia. If we are not careful we may think we need to be educated learned men in order to gain respect from those who need Jesus the most.

Have you heard the phrase, “We are human beings, not human doings”?  So true. The best things flow from being, not doing. Being is flow. It simply is. It is in that “is-ness” that Christ’s Spirit is caught by others. We spend so much time doing that we have forgotten the best things flow from being. Endless activities, though potentially good, present an anemic church to the world - one consumed with stress, more meetings, more consumerism, and production, and more expectations (only this time it’s all done in the Name of the Lord).

Mary had a little Lamb
Her sleep was, O, so sweet
Then Mary became born again
And died for lack of sleep.

Welcome to your Sabbath rest! Why would anyone want to join that?

Being in authentic witness is easy. It is not so much about what we do as much as who we are. We do have a mission. The world is dependent upon us to be lights in her darkness.
It is our ongoing dependence on God that is the key to authentic, non-nerdy, evangelism.

Here are some reminders on witnessing to bring into the marketplace in the morning:


1. Christ in us speaks louder than we do. There is no sure-fire method/formulae of sharing the 5 spiritual laws, no cleverly orchestrated Cecil B. DeMille conversion epic, no anointed whacks on the back of the head with a ten-pound KJB, or no 4D multi-media production that will reach a thirsty soul for Christ. Rather, it is the fragrance of Christ in us (2 Corinthians 2:14) that become the hinges of the doors of their salvation. That’s something that just can’t be worked up. Jesus loves to be seen by others through us. While our tracts are important they wont be effective unless united with that certain “Something” within us. God’s love transcends far deeper than anything we could ever say.

2. God’s mysterious ways provide guilt-free witnessing. Perhaps you and been particularly burdened to share the Lord with someone, but didn’t. Or, on the other hand, perhaps you have witnessed to someone for hours, only to look back to realize you misquoted verses, ran down rabbit trails, or even compromised you own moral character. Guess what. It’s all right if we don’t do it right.  They wont go to hell.  God loves them too much and would never be so foolish as to place their entire eternal destination solely in hands of a single, trembling saint.

If we’ve “blown our witness” – God has already known that and has arranged someone else to share that same Gospel with them. This doesn’t advocate sloppy evangelism - not at all. Yet, God’s grace covers the times when we’ve fallen short of the mark. Let us be about the business of skillfully preparing for the for the privilege of sharing Christ with the person ahead, and not condemn ourselves for not bringing them to salvation, or (upon hindsight) realizing what we said may have been misinterpreted for something else. God know. He’s bigger than all that.

3. Jesus didn’t witness to everyone and neither need we. Good news: the salvation of every person you see on the sidewalk is not up to you! In Jesus’ day everyone needed to hear Good News. But not everyone heard it from Jesus. Jesus was very decisive with whom he talked with. He did not heal everybody. No doubt he passed many people on the streets every day without talking to them, even though he knew they needed him.

Jesus witnessed only to whom the Father was showed him. That was his success, if you will. When he got in the public arena, he was acutely aware of those to whom he was to share, or not share, with. If his Father willed it, it happened. If not, he kept on walking. Somewhere down the line they would hear the Gospel. But it would be in God’s time, from someone else.

Each of us is wired to reach a specific target market for God. You are specifically created – temperament, personality, humor, etc. – to reach a specialized slice of the non-Christian demographic. Because of that, not everyone will hear about God from you. But some will. They are your open doors. When you run across the person you naturally click with, go for it; naturally and humbly, taking advantage of the divine encounter. Use your vocabulary, your salvific experience, the verses you know and how God uses them in your life. Don’t witness like someone you are not.

4. Different Seeds for Different Soils.  When it comes to where people are in the Lord - or in the process of conversion - people are all over the map. Some only need a light-hearted reminder they are not alone in the universe. Others need a clear understanding on a spiritual precept – like “unconditional love,” for example. Some need water, others need miracle grow. Some need to be heard. What worked well with the last person may not fly with the future person. Our words need to be “on time” with where the person is at the time of our interaction. In short, our words need to be prophetic.

In college I was led to speak to a woman after class one evening. It was difficult for me because of what the Lord had asked me to share. I told her that I was a Christian and the Lord wanted her to know that her aborted child forgave her.  She was visibly struck. She placed her books down and was overcome by God. After a moment she looked up and said that another person came out of the blues the week previous and said the same thing to her. I smiled, said, “Perhaps the Lord is trying to tell you something”, and walked away.

Witnessing is much broader than sharing the message of salvation. It is a prophetic labeling, or defining, what God is doing around those he has us around. That woman may have been a believer or not. Little matter. God met her where she was in her journey to heaven.

5. Love rules. Our greatest witness is seen in how we love others. We may have great boldness, great prophetic insight, superior gifts of teaching, tongues, and  hospitality but, as Larry Norman sang, “Without love you ain’t nothing without love. Without love you ain’t nothing without love.”

Love is the true litmus test of our credibility before the world will be revealed in the way we live out Christ in the context of Christian community.  Do we love one another – I mean really love each other, sacrificially? I believe this is where evangelization really begins.

May God provide us with growth and opportunities to share his love in Jesus Christ. May he form us into authentic people. May we love others as he loved others, and as he loves us.