Discipling By Jesus

Are we lying to ourselves?
Will listening better to our Others help us find the truth?

* I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life
* Living Fearless - Jamie Winship

Coming up on Feb 14: VaLENTine Men's Study

How do we prove to the world that we don't need the same things they want?

Warning: spoiler alert for Crazy Rich Asians.

See also 12/2 Tri-Quatrain: Choose to Lose

What if the true opposition to the gospel is hidden inside our own implicit assumptions about reality?

1. Identifying and confronting our emotional distress is essential for identifying our lack of alignment with the Father’s will.
2. For you, I believe that taking up *your* cross would require you to actively pursue becoming aware of and confronting the roots of your emotional distress, because you have become addicted to a superficial yielding that does not result in emotional catharsis or true intimacy.

I need to go now and do the exact same thing with MY wife (confront the roots of MY emotional distress).

Four Stages of Engagement.

1. Try to fix your problem 
2. Step back and let you fix it yourself
3. Incarnate into the tension beneath the problem
4. Demonstrate Christ's new victory

Does Jesus -- unlike Pharisees and philosophers -- require His disciples to sacrifice our "digital abstraction of self" in order to confront the emotional distress that lurks beneath?

Your impression is essentially correct, though perhaps not _quite_ as bad as you probably think...  

During most of the gospels, the disciples wanted a king who would destroy their enemies rather than a savior who would destroy their sin.

My Christ-less failure mode is trying to destroy your sin instead of [before] confronting my own.

Luke 9:18-26

• 22 And he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”
• 23 Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.

Is a relationship with God about obeying His will or enjoying His presence?

Or something else entirely?

Should our highest value be allowing God to rewrite our values?

Can externalizing our eternal values enable us to maintain integrity while being fully emotional present for others?

What does it mean to love our community the way Christ does his friends?

• The Opposite Of Addiction Is Not Sobriety – It Is Human Connection

• Anthem: Follow The Way Of Christ (Becoming “Foot-Washers”)

• John 15:13: Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
•  Matthew 16:23: Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
• Matthew 5:11: Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

What is needed to keep growing us all closer to Jesus?

• Our strategy (ultimate goal) is to love (hesed) the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength (particularly via loving our families as our selves).
• Our tactics include various spiritual disciplines (tools and tasks).
• Operational Discipleship is ensuring we accomplish the right objectives (management), which is what aligns tasks (execution) with goals (leadership). 

The paradigmatic verse for this is Luke 9:23, where we escape the cultural identity of Christendom by:

1. Denying the current version of our Self (personal, relational, societal)
2. Taking up our cross daily (the very thing our homeostatic self doesn't want us to see, much less do)
3. Following Jesus (after the cross as our new self, not just before it as our old self)

References:

• Speck to Beam to Cross: Responsive Discipleship
• From Christendom to Christ: Religion vs Relationship
• My Thick Geas: Growing Closer to Christ / Through His Cross
• Discipling By Jesus

What does Christ think about good and evil?

Is anyone more evil than "you"?

https://biblehub.com/luke/11-13.htm