Engaged in the writing of my next book, I am often asked what it is I am writing about. For ease of reference, here is an introduction, for those who may be interested. I anticipate this labour of love to be completed around the end of 2020.
Introduction
This work sets out to explore the shape of what it means to develop a pattern of of Christian discipleship, within and among us as people, a witness to the world of God’s gracious love and purposes. It is designed for those who, like me, get confused at times, or just distracted. I seek to express something that is simple and memorable, through three focus points. These three focus points I have run with, in my heart, for some time now. I find them helpful to hold onto, in what I am thinking, doing and trying to achieve. I pray that you might do too.
In embarking on this project, I am still intentionally journeying as a disciple of Jesus Christ, forty years from commencing full-time, stipendiary Christian ministry. This has allowed me the opportunity to reflect at length on the nature of Christian ministry. I realise that there is so much that I still do not know, so much that I do not fully understand. I am very conscious that I have not yet grown into what I will one day become; yet this is clear to me and has consistently been my anchor: Jesus Christ is a living person who can be personally met with by each of us, drawing us to Himself and, in so doing, bring us into the presence of our unseen, Heavenly Father. This is a truth and an experience that continues to fill me with gratitude and joy, again and again; and I recognise that it happens because of the special way that Jesus Christ pours out the Holy Spirit – who is the creative power at work in sustaining and filling the whole Cosmos - into my life in a way can be so utterly exhilarating. Our three focus points serve as my memory aide, helping and challenging me, as I look to respond to and engage with this experienced reality of God. They help bring me back to the call of God to pursue Christian discipleship, wherein God embraces us with such compassion, faithfulness, patience and purposefulness.
In what follows we will explore, through the three focus points, implications as to how God has called and commissioned us, as disciples of Jesus Christ, continually reshaping our understanding, relationships and actions. These focus points are summed up in three words: recall, renounce and refuel.
‘Recall’ carries a sense of urgency in focusing on the substance of the message that Jesus and His Apostles declared to people. It involves exploring how Jesus Christ is pivotal, in understanding both the identity that God calls each of us into and, therefore, grasping how and why God deals with all of humanity. We find this message concentrated in the words, the works and the ways of Jesus Christ. We find the message expressed and Jesus Christ testified to throughout the sixty six books that make up the Bible. It involves looking, then remembering. Again and again. Turning our attention to and digesting what we see and are confronted with. It comes from a Biblical Greek word, anamnesis. This is our first focus point.
‘Renounce’ is the specific way in which we are invited to respond to this message. It comes from a Biblical Greek word, kenosis. It is, for us as people living in an increasingly self-affirming culture, a word that communicates something that is very counter-intuitive. Renouncing does not come easily to us at all; yet it is essential. This action, of decentralising from and surrendering self, is our second focus point.
‘Refuel’ is our third focus point. It looks to the active power of the Holy Spirit, in the special way that is manifestly enabled and energised in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It comes from another, Biblical Greek word, anastasis. It flows from the revelation that each of us can have an authentic, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, who entered this world to be like us, as a human being, in every way that God designed us to be. This enabling should be transformative, for it is because of his resurrection that we can experience the same power at work in our humanity that was at work in Jesus. ‘Refuel’ points us towards a future with God wherein the Holy Spirit, by whose powerful activity God has fashioned and sustains the entire Cosmos, would enter into us in a special way, changing and reshaping us.
Our ‘three R’s’, shaping our identity. Lives taken hold of by God, transformed and conformed to the likeness of Jesus Christ. Discovering a new identity for ourselves. A.K.A. Christian. This is what we now set out to explore. We will look at the significance of these focus points, in ways that touch every part of our life and witness. We begin by exploring a fuller sense of each of these three words: recall, renounce and refuel.
1. Recall / Ananmnesis
Recall can be tedious. We are bombarded with new, fresh information every day, more than any other generation that has lived before us. Ready access to information technology means that we can experience and investigate so many new ideas and opinions. There’s something exciting in that.
There is also something dangerous in it. We can easily become disorientated and lose a sense of direction. We need to hold to a focus on Who we are, Where we are going, What is is that we are seeking to achieve and How it is that we are looking to achieve it. Our journey of discipleship requires recall, recollection, remembering. It means that we must take our bearings from what is known to us, from the past as well as the present, in order to plot a course into the future.
Where we want to centre on Jesus Christ, it is important to recall by making use of the record and testimony that is there for us, in the Bible. Here we read of Jesus, as Christians have recognised and come to know Him, from the time of the first disciples right up to the present. The Bible has proven to be the most influential book – or rather, collection of books - in the history of the world. In reading of God in the Bible, we realise how important recall is. In Luke 24, when Jesus meets with two distressed disciples on the road to Emmaus after His crucifixion, we see that they were disorientated. The words of some women disciples, who had reported that Jesus was alive, had seemed like nonsense to the other disciples. Yet what Jesus did, in walking along with these two disciples, was to open an understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures to them – what we call the Old Testament – so that they could see how the whole of the Bible, from its beginning, plots a course through human history to the coming of Jesus Christ. In this process through time, the Bible records events that demonstrate what God is really like. In other words, Jesus took the two disciples on a journey of recalling what God had done in the past, through to seeing how He had planned for all that had happened in the present. Through recall, He gave them renewed hope and faith. Jesus showed them how God had planned and prepared for His coming into the world. It was through being helped to recall what God had done in the past and how the plans, purposes and promises of God expressed in the Old Testament come to find fulfilment in what occurred in Jesus Christ’s life, ministry, death and resurrection, that the disciples were able to grasp the relationship that we are now able to enter into with God. They were reorientated to recall who they were, where they were going, what it was they were to achieve and how they might achieve it.
A vital key in this process of recall comes through looking at the life of Jesus Christ, as we find it narrated in the New Testament, recorded and written down by the first disciples and their followers. Here, we get help in tracing how what is recorded in the Old Testament reveals a trajectory that carries through to Jesus Christ. It follows that meaningful engagement with both the New and the Old Testaments will bring us to a deeper appreciation of who Jesus Christ is, where he would lead us and how he would continue to accomplish God’s purposes in and through our lives. Critically, the New Testament gives us a personal profile of Jesus Christ. It tells us about his life. It records for us his deeds and teachings. It shows us the impact and effect he had on the first disciples: the same sort of impact and effect that he has had on countless men, women and children for over two thousand years.
We also need to recall how Jesus Christ has affected the lives of people who have been His disciples over the intervening centuries; and recount how he affects the lives of people who travel with us, as His disciples today. Each of us has a story to tell. In telling that story, we can be amazed and encouraged to discover how the experience of Christians today readily matches with the experience of successive generations of Christians, right back to the first disciples.
2. Renounce / Kenosis
In looking into aspects of what it means to ‘recall’, we will also explore the response that God looks for in us. Integral to the way that we are called to respond to Jesus Christ and the message that He brings is the practice of renunciation. We need to renounce self, in order to embrace Jesus Christ. This call to renounce should not, however, be mistaken as a call into personal negation. Rather, we will see that it is only through renouncing self that we can truly come to enter life in its fullness, in coming to participate in the life, ministry and victory of Jesus Christ. We will see how this perspective is supported both from the teaching of Jesus, as we find it in the four Gospels of the New Testament; and also from the writings of the Apostles, as found in the letters and accounts that make up the remaining books of the New Testament. We will explore the importance of learning to renounce all that we would long and aspire to be of ourselves, independent or separated from the express will of God, in order to become effective disciples of Jesus Christ. We will explore the ways that, through acts of renunciation, we are better prepared to participate in the life God has for us, appreciate the hope that is offered to us and come into a fuller experience of faith and the sustaining power of divine love.
Renouncing prepares us for a fuller life and keener effectiveness. Renouncing is harder for those who have much, or who carry a heavy burden of seeking to prove themselves. It is less complicated for those who have come to possess little or nothing, either in possessions or in personal ego. Renunciation is the response demanded by the message that Jesus Christ brings, the message of an immanent coming of the just and righteous rule of God over all people and places, of a transformed Cosmos. As we recall the Biblical witness, the practice of investing ourselves in God and His purposes requires that we renounce patterns, preferences and prejudices in life that are contrary to God’s will and Jesus’ way. This will be, for most of us, a long and often painful path, a journey that will last a lifetime. Yet it is in renouncing that we are liberated into a brighter hope, a deeper faith and a richer love.
For the thief on the Cross, next to Jesus at the time of his crucifixion, it was a journey that was reached in a moment. He had heard of Jesus. He knew something of Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God. He had also heard that Jesus had done no wrong. He knew fear of God in His heart. So when we read, in Luke 23, of his words to Jesus, “remember me when you come into your kingdom”, we see this man’s faith expressed by a renunciation of all he was and had done. He wanted to belong to Jesus.
Repentance and faith are words that are used to describe parts of this process. Key to an understanding of them both is this second focus point, ‘renounce’.
3. Refuel / anastasis
The reality of Jesus Christ’s resurrection punctuates all that the Gospel communicates. It gives sense to the Cross of Calvary and the death that Jesus willingly endured, expressing God’s mercy and effecting salvation for us. It also brings focus to our total dependency on the presence and power of the Holy Spirit entering into us with fresh intensity, enabling us to enact our Heavenly Father’s will and to walk along a path of authentic, Christian discipleship.
There is a natural propensity, in us all, to either try and run on an empty tank or to veer off the road and into a ditch. Only the empowering presence of God the Holy Spirit can enable us to live a life that expresses the reality of Jesus Christ in us. An empowering presence, focussed and intensified through Jesus Christ’s own humanity, his humanity a prism that concentrates the activity of the Holy Spirit into our humanity in a piercing, powerful way. The Holy Spirit is also the Creator Spirit, sustaining and empowering all of life in the Cosmos. He is, however, specially focussed through Jesus Christ, bringing to birth and growth the new life that issues from the power of Jesus Christ’s bodily resurrection. It is through this life, ministry and victory of Jesus Christ that the Kingdom of God finds expression, in bearing the first fruits of a renewed Creation, through a renewing of our humanity. The possibility of our living as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ is released and enabled when we are refuelled by the Holy Spirit.
This third focus point helps us to make sense of the invitation to renounce, building on the invitation to recall. The process fits us to know the presence and power of God in a fresh, fuller way. It is the key to our being enabled to pursue the goals, engage in the practices and be formed with the virtues that characterise lives of fruitful discipleship in following Jesus Christ. This is our goal, our aim in embarking on this project. Let us go on, in the chapters that follow, to explore the application of these focus points together.
