What's new?
Devotionals
Amateur Radio
Christmas
Come Ye Apart
Standard
Waiting
Parable: Society for the Picking of Apples
Milestones on the way to cross-cultural understanding
Want more out of life?
10/40 Window
Missionaries needed
Searching for God's will?
An African martyr's statement on commitment
Mission trip fund raising
10 ways to ruin mission trips
Youth in Mission
Nazarene Missions International resource pages
Linking to me
"Every pupil, when he has completed his training, will be like his teacher" -- Luke 6:40 (Today's English Version)
Week 5 (February)
I was eavesdropping on a conversation in a church parking lot. The service had been dismissed nearly half an hour before. Everyone had gone except a young architect who was still talking to the pastor.
"Well, Pastor, it sounds easy when you say it," this new Christian was saying, "but it's not so easy living it."
How true. It can be very easy to talk about living by the principles of the Kingdom. However, every pagan who has observed Christians closely knows that the way we live is not always what Jesus outlined in His Sermon on the Mount.
In the message given in Luke 6 (which Matthew also records), Jesus talks about the ideal Christian life; a life profoundly different in both motivation and lived-outness of the natural man's life.
Living by the Sermon on the Mount principles is not something that just happens. It's not always easy to love our enemies, to do good things to those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, to not judge nor condemn, and to forgive. Such a high degree of Christ-likeness can only grow out of a clean heart, a sanctified heart. And even then, we have to conscientiously discipline ourselves under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
During our furlough after our first term of missionary service in Italy, I noticed that discipleship had become a fashionable spiritual words for North Americans. At that point in time, it seemed like everybody was either taking a course in discipleship or else teaching one.
Actually, discipleship is a good way of summing up the lifestyle Jesus calls us to accept in His Sermon on the Mount. The fact that discipleship is now being highly emphasized doesn't mean, of course, that a way has been discovered to streamline the discipling process.
While pastoring in Uvalde, Tex, I would occasionally browse through the library of the junior college on the edge of town. One day I found German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book The Cost of Discipleship. In the opening pages Bonhoeffer writes against believing in a cheap grace. Grace is costly, he argues, and therefore, so is discipleship. What an effect that book had on me!
There's no cheap price tag on true discipleship. No discounts are offered. No short cuts have been discovered. Discipleship is much more than a course to be mastered and a grade to be earned. It's much more than a list of facts to be memorized; it's more than keeping a daily journal.
Certainly, we must study what it means to be a disciple. The content of the Sermon on the Mount must be mastered if we are to live it. Journals or notebooks and other tools can help us in developing our personal spiritual discipline.
But being a true disciple is a total life-style. Having learned something of what it means to be a disciple doesn't mean we have arrived. It means we can now begin. Living the Sermon on the Mount is something that must be redone fresh every day. There's nothing cheap about that kind of discipleship. It will cost you the rest of your life.These devotional thoughts by Howard Culbertson appeared in the February 3, 1980 edition of Standard
| ||||||||||||||
Howard Culbertson, Southern Nazarene University, 6729 NW 39th, Bethany, OK 73008 | Phone: 405-491-6693 - Fax: 405-491-6658
Copyright © 2000, 2001 - Last Updated: March 16, 2006 | URL: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/cheap.htm
You have permission to reprint what you just read. Use it in your ezine, at your web site or in your newsletter. Please include the following footer:
Article by Howard Culbertson. For more original content like this, visit: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert