Developing Disciples

Our love for God and others is not an initiating love, but a responsive love. We love because God first loved us. (1 John 4:19) By surrendering to God's love for us, our love for Him and others grows.

Let me explain what I mean by "surrendering." Our relationship with God is based on grace -- it is based on a love that is undeserved and unearned. The only proper response to this kind of love is our surrender to it. In order to surrender, we must admit that God's love for us is undeserved (i.e., we are sinners), and we must trust that God really does love us. When Jesus met a person, it was always on those same terms: "admit that you are lost and want me, and then we can have relationship." A surrendered heart repents of its sin, submits to its sin, and then trusts grace to satisfy its hunger for intimacy.

By surrendering to God's grace, our love for God and our dependence on Him increase. We have admitted our great need for Him and have received His forgiveness; as a result, we love Him. (Luke 7:47) God's terms for relationship with Him are always the same (Col. 2:6,7): we must turn from our tendency to be our own ruler and depend instead upon His authority and provision. God does not require perfection of the disciples that we endeavor to develop, but he does desire true hearts of faith and repentance. Faith and repentance are the very means of relating to God and growing in love.

That is what developing disciples is about. We are essentially developing hearts of surrender to God's initiation, passion, and movement toward us (both our sin and pain).

Opportunity for Repentance and Faith
If we want people to grow and develop hearts of surrender, then we must help them find an environment in which "surrender to grace" is understood, chosen, and modeled. We need to help people into a position in which they are more conscious of the choice they must make. We should give them an invitation to and taste of relationship from our own souls. We need to use our relationship with them as a place in which they are confronted with their great desire for intimacy and their sin of self-commitment. We do all that we can to build that context -- the rest is God's work.

The context is this....As hungry people in a fallen world, we have a tremendous problem -- we cannot fill the hunger of our soul. Try as we might, through moral or immoral means, we cannot find satisfaction or ignore our hunger. As believers, we must choose to either depend on ourselves to exact meaning from life, or to trust God's provision.

We must choose. In fact, we do every day. We choose when we lie in hopes of intimacy, when we verbally slash someone in hopes of impact, or when we boast about our "goodness" in hopes of respect. Intimacy, impact, and respect are all legitimate, God-given hungers. However, lies, slander, and bragging are remnants of a belief that we can not only control life, but that we have the right to control it, even if doing so violates the command to love.

All sin is this way. It may either be immoral in the way the belief is expressed (e.g., lying or immoral relationships), or it may be "moral" (e.g., the self-righteousness of the Pharisees). Either way, sin is the committed belief that we have both the ability and the right to control our world. In developing disciples, we must expose and undermine that stubborn, arrogant belief, and then offer the option of trusting God for the satisfaction of our hungers and the forgiveness of our depravity.

As developers of disciples, we need to help people into places where their sin is exposed (Prov. 19:25, Rom. 12:20,21, Rev. 3:19), their hunger for relationship is aroused (Luke 15:17, John 14:4-15), and they hear the Gospel (Rom. 10:17, Gal. 3:2). We need to help people see their problem and its solution. Then, we need to pray that they will surrender to God on His terms of repentance and faith. God, and the new heart of integrity that He has given us, does all the rest.