Disciple: Day 3

Our boys are always extremely busy, their individual interests are different, but both of them require lack of sleep. Their early mornings for their extracurriculars often alternate from each other, but someone in our house is always having to get up by 5 to be on time. Jonathan has said a multitude of times in the first 6 weeks of school, that being good takes time, but being great takes sacrifice. 

In Luke 9:23, Jesus gave a pretty good summary statement about the meaning of discipleship. 

"Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me .”

He noted that being His disciple meant dying to our desires and sacrificing everything to follow Him. In other words, He is the focus of discipleship in the Bible—and in our lives and doing it correctly requires sacrifice. This means turning away from self-reliance, personal ambition, and sin. Instead of letting worldly success or failures define your worth, you define your identity through Christ. 

This means setting up spiritual disciplines in our lives. Daily bible study, sitting with Christ daily, prayers, and redefining our lives by Kingdom mindedness. My success doesn’t come from work, my marriage, or even how successful my children are, my true success. The only one that actually matters, is how well I followed Christ, daily taking up my cross in every day tasks.

Moving forward sometimes requires restoring spiritual discipline.

Father, you alone know what each of us individually need to restore in our lives, and you alone are able to restore these disciplines. We ask that you open our eyes, and help us to create these disciplines, setting our eyes back on you, so that we can complete the task of going out to create more disciples.