“Go and make disciples”, Jesus said. “Teach them everything I have taught you.” I think sometimes we get a little confused about this. Sometimes it appears that we are more interested in enforcing a law than to teach Father’s love. There is a pretty big difference between the two considering that love, not law, is what empowers us to obey Jesus. We teach simply to help people understand what the Spirit is doing in them with what the Father implanted in them the moment they said “I believe”.
I know we want to explain about repenting and throwing off sin and all the rest of it but sometimes we move past teaching into manipulation. It’s like we forget that the job of conviction belongs to the Spirit. Yes, in our enthusiasm we forget we are the witnesses of who Jesus is and we try to take on the role of the enforcers. But Jesus has no interest in forcing anybody into anything. He offers an invitation.
So, we are the witnesses and when someone expresses a desire for more of what we are demonstrating, then we disciple them by teaching them what Jesus has taught us. This means we better be constantly growing and learning ourselves. You know, you can disciple someone before they believe and hopefully as you demonstrate the Kingdom to them they will encounter the reality of Jesus and move from curiosity to belief. Of course we continue to walk with them, discipling them so they can understand the lifelong transformation that is happening to them. This is that mustard seed that is growing in them so a day will arrive when they will be able to offer fruit and shelter to others.
That’s the messy part, the journey toward maturity. This is where most of us mess up, where the Church fails and we move from life to law. It is so much easier and less messy to teach a list of rules then to allow for maturing in relationship. This journey is not a light switch. We don’t shed the old and put on the new overnight. We do it step by step, as the Spirit convicts and we respond. It is a whole lot of learning, growth and transformation. What we do not want it to be is conformity to a bunch of rules that will leave us with a lifetime of guilt and failure.
I have a friend who made an observation about his university experience. He told me that there are a lot of good teachers who are good at teaching the beginning stuff. There are also a lot of good teachers great at teaching the end stuff. But there are not a lot of teachers who are great at the in-between stuff.
In the Church we have a lot of people who are great at the beginning stuff and they are getting even better at it. Helping people discover Jesus is a very exciting thing. We also have a lot of people who are very good at teaching what a mature life in Christ looks like. A lot of the epistles have sections that give us lists of what this looks like. What we seem to be lacking are those with the patience and longevity to walk with a person from the after birth stage to the mature stage. In fact, a lot of churches don’t even make allowances for this very trying and messy stage.
The Body has not been good at building a thick skin for the many failures in the journey to maturity. Some Spiritual Parents are all too ready to kick that spiritual infant out of the house because he keeps making messes. But messes are what we are all about. The Strong are to bear with the Weak, because the Weak are on a journey to become one of the Strong. The Spirit is responsible for conviction and we are responsible for modeling relationship. We who journey with those on the road to maturity model what relationship looks like, both with our King but also with each other. This, after all, is Father’s purpose for the Body, that we would work out our salvation daily as we encourage and build up one another.
We need those who introduce people to Jesus, to see that come into this relationship through belief. We need those who can teach what maturity looks like, what we are moving towards and why. But we are also desperate for the spiritual mothers and fathers who will commit to years of patience and suffering to fulfill the role of those who teach through example the in-between stuff. We need to get better at this.
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