Walking as a Christ follower means that we should expect God to order our lives in the way that will bring the most glory to God.  If we will begin to see our lives as extensions of the Lord's love for the world we will be better able to follow His promptings and realize that we exist for Him.

When we think about walking closer to Jesus and being His disciple we can all too often allow things other than God's Word to dictate what that looks like.  I am becoming more and more aware of the affect my own flesh and the culture where we live, has on my willingness to follow the Lord in a deeper way.  My own nature at times rebels against the Lord's desire for me to live, act, breath and think in a way that reveals who I belong to.  Our culture is in constant attack mode or so it seems, warring against the truth and saying as the serpent did in the Garden of Eden, "has God really said?" Just stop for a moment right now and see for yourself.  See what things in you have been allowed to erode, because either our flesh didn't want to or our culture said that it was no important. Jesus said that man would not live on bread along but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  In order to live my life in a way that truly pleases Jesus you and I must be hearers and doers of God's Word.

 Recently I have been reading the book called Choose the Life by Bill Hull.  It is really making me look much deeper as to what discipleship was meant to be, and what instead we have allowed it to become.  When I came to Jesus, although I had a good church and many believers around me no one really took the time and effort to walk me through a discipleship process.  The church that I attended just figured that if we had the right programs and good teachings at our services that everything else would work out, and to a point that is and was true. That seems to be the prevailing philosophy of most churches and most Christians here in the United States. We simply expect people to "get it", yet we are not very clear on what "it" is.   Believe me when I say that I am grateful to God for all of the blessings that He has given and for the faithful people who have spoken into my life.  There is no doubt that God's grace has been apparent in my own spiritual formation. Yet when I see how Jesus taught His disciples and how in turn the followers of Jesus discipled others, it makes me pause and ask the question, what would have been different had someone taken the time and energy to walk me through the steps of true discipleship? (More on my answer to that question later) It is an important question to ask and to answer, but not only for our lives in the past but for our future with the Lord.  It would be very interesting to see how many followers of Jesus, even those reading this blog can genuinely say that as a new believer they can remember a certain person who taught them and walked with them along the way.   If you are having a hard time finding one, you are not alone, but that must change. In order for our lives to have lasting impact and our church to have eternal affect we must begin to do the things that Jesus told us to do.   The great news is that we can start fresh and look at our own lives and see how and if we are being dicipled and how and if we are discipling others. Take a moment on this first day of the new week, to ask God to open your heart to the potential of a deeper life with Him and the hope of touching others with the love of Jesus and discipling them not into  a religious existence but to something more real than we have known, the deeper life, the life of a disciple of Jesus.