We talked about the plan, and then we talked about the cost. Now I want to talk about the realities of discipleship in today’s world. It’s What You’ve Been Searching For, I’m Joel Fieri. Stay tuned.

In thinking about how to land the plane on this series of discipleship if you were with us last week, you know that we talked about the cost of discipleship, and I went back to Mere Christianity and C.S. Lewis, which is where I’m going today again. Still got the copy of the old copy. I wanted to talk about how what he says, how he concludes his thoughts on what it means to follow Christ in a basic sense, in a Mere Christianity sense, with what Jesus told His disciples when He sent them out into the world, what should be our attitude towards the world, especially in today’s world, which is lining up some pretty scary and intentional things against Christianity.

So as for Mere Christianity, for Lewis, at the end of the book in the last chapter, he wraps up, like we were talking last week, compares the growth in discipleship, the growth of a Christian to be more like Christ to evolution. It’s different from the world and the scientific expectation or understanding of evolution. Our evolution has a goal. It has a target that we can see. It’s not a random happening. Not only that, He’s the one causing the evolution, so it’s different from the world’s understanding. This is what he said, and this is what had jumped out at me when I was reading this and finishing the book.

“Compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of lightning for 2000 years is almost nothing in the history of the universe. Never forget that we are still the early Christians. The present, wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy. We are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that before. Again and again, it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without or corruptions from within, by the rise of Islam, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of the great anti-Christian revolutionary movements.”

“But every time the world has been disappointed. The first disappointment was the crucifixion. The man came to life again. In a sense, and I quite realize how frightfully unfair it must seem to them, that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing He started. And each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us.”

Okay. So that’s Lewis’ conclusion on how what we expect or what Jesus expects of us, how we grow, how we evolve is different from what the world understands. And the key is here. It’s different from what the world understands or even accepts.

While I was reading this, as I told you before, there was kind of a coincidence of happenings when I was reading my devotions a couple of weeks ago that put this into focus for me. I was reading through Matthew, and I came to Matthew 10, where Jesus has concluded the sermon on the Mount, talking about the kingdom of heaven and all the different ways that we should treat each other and seek God and what the kingdom of heaven is like. He then sends His disciples out to be His representatives. The first time He sends them out, he gives them power to heal the sick, cast out demons, all these things.

But He tells them something when He sends them out that I think is key. It jumped out at me, and I want to share it with you. I’m reading from Matthew 10, starting in Verse 16. He says, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves, therefore, be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.