Life on Life at City Church: Deep and Wholehearted

Prayer is to life with God what oxygen is to our physical existence. At its heart, prayer is growing in friendship with the God who first loved us. Prayer is the most important activity of our lives, but most of us feel like we’re horribly bad at it. To help us, Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer – so simple a small child can memorize it, but so profound that it can sustain and nourish a lifetime of prayer.

When it comes to how people change, if you could only choose one way to help people at all levels of spiritual maturity grow in their relationship with God, the choice is clear: encourage and equip people in how to read the Bible, how to meditate on God’s word. There is no way to grow in the knowledge of God, deepen your faith, grow in your love for God and increase your hope without engaging daily with the Bible. How can reading the Bible move from “need to” to “get to,” from a duty to a delight?

Spiritual formation is wholly dependent upon God’s power in us to change us and yet it requires our active, deliberate participation. We are not trying to be like Jesus; we are training to be like Jesus. If we want to become healthy, wise, mature, loving people who always know how to respond in the right way, with the right spirit, at the right time, that requires a whole new lifestyle, learning from Jesus how to walk in his way, what Jesus calls his “yoke” (Matt. 11:28-30). Remember Lessons 12 and 13: we are not laboring to make ourselves more fit to be loved – we are already loved. We are instead training so that we might experience the love of God more and more as we go about our days. 

The gospel is not just how we begin the Christian life. The gospel is also how we grow in the Christian life. It’s not just the ABCs of the Christian life, what we learn in the beginning before moving on to the advanced stuff. The gospel is the A-Z of the Christian life, what we always must come back to in order to grow. You never get beyond the cross – only deeper into it. No matter how much we’ve grown or how far we have progressed, we never get beyond our need to get our hearts happy in the gospel each new day. God’s mercies are new every morning and our hearts need to be refreshed every morning because the gospel leaks out of us. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” It can be frustrating – This again! But it’s a sign of maturing faith to realize, as one of the old fathers put it, “always we begin again.” Always going back to our secure acceptance achieved once and for all by Jesus – that is the advanced stuff.

Growth in Christ, growing in grace, growing in holiness – these are all different ways of saying the same thing. The New Testament writers expect that we will grow (Eph. 4:15, 2 Pet. 3:18), but we may be surprised to find that change is slow, gradual, painful and non-linear. There is no shortcut or mystery or hack. No matter how much we progress in the Christian life, we never get beyond the need to go deeper and deeper into God’s unfathomable goodness and unfailing love. Confidence in God’s goodness and His steadfast love are the foundation of the Christian life.     

In our discipleship vision, the center of the target we are aiming for is deep wholehearted discipleship – men and women who love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength. We aim to become mature and maturing disciples of Jesus who want to see every part of our lives conformed to Christ’s life.  

Life on Life Leader Training from Sunday January 23, 2022.
Overview of Topics

A.   Remembering the Vision of Life-on-Life (LOL) Groups: What’s the Goal?
B.    Learning from One Another: Some Shared Best Practices
C.    The Bigger Picture: Where LOL Groups Fit in our Larger Discipleship Vision
D.   Looking Back at Unit 1: Gospel Foundatios
E.    Looking Ahead at Unit 2: Gospel Formation
F.    A Few Helpful Conditions for Growing in Christ 

In the 21st century West, we are such a highly individualistic culture that it’s almost impossible to grasp how communal and community based was the New Testament world. Today, we think of identity as largely an individual construct, something we choose or make for ourselves. Radical individualism, the individual’s right to choose for himself or herself what’s most important, is so much a part of the air we breathe that the Bible’s emphasis on community and new family (cf. Mark 3.31-35, Luke 14.26) can strike our ears as archaic, foreign, impossible.

 And yet the Christian life was never meant to be lived alone. Even God, as the Trinity, is a community of persons in relationship, a community of friendship. And as we are created in His image, so we too were created to be in loving, self-giving community. 

The Bible makes the astounding claim that we ourselves are now temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3.16). We are God’s dwelling place on earth (Eph. 2.22). The Spirit is how we experience God’s presence and power in our lives today and if we don’t have the Spirit then we don’t belong to Christ (Rom. 8.9). And yet, for far too many of us, the Spirit remains an anonymous, faceless aspect of the Divine Being, if not forgotten, at least unknown and unappreciated.  And yet, the Holy Spirit is the real agent of change in our lives. 

In the Bible there is one word that captures what it means to have the spirit of your mind transformed, the eyes of your heart renewed. It was one of the first words Jesus used in his first sermon (Mark 1:15) and one of the last words he told his disciples to proclaim (Luke 24:47). The prophets used it (Isa. 30:15); the apostles used it (Acts 2:38, 17:30). When Martin Luther started the Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, he put this first: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ…willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”

Repentance is a comprehensive process. It’s not episodic: stop doing that. Nor is it only what someone does at the beginning of choosing to follow Jesus. It’s a life orientation of learning to go with the grain of reality, with the flow of God’s will, aligning with our Creator’s intention. Repentance is not a heavy burden imposed on us; it’s an invitation to become more human, to be more free, to have the image of God gradually restored in us. It feels like hard work (Luke 9:62), but it leads to rest for our souls (Isa. 30:15, Matt. 11:29). Repentance is an invitation to live into the way God sees things, which means to live into the way things really are. Repentance is Jesus’ invitation to stop running, turn back, and live in the Father’s embrace.