New Life UMC

Eric Blachford and Kevin Clark share information of The Net Church.

•Forming Others – That brings us to our final topic. How can we lead others to Christian Perfection? You may think it is impossible, but I believe there are activities we can engage in that will help form each other to that point. So I want to introduce you to the idea of Spiritual Direction and Formations.

•Following – that brings us to our process of discipleship. Hopefully we understand a little bit of how God is forming us; but we also have a role in the process. We enter the fellowship, confess our faith, and then become followers. It was easy (kind of) for the first disciples. Jesus said, “follow me” and they got up and followed him. Now they had to literally leave behind their old lives to take on new life; and in the end most of them were executed for their faith, but all the following took was standing up and walking. The question is how do we follow Christ?

•Moving Towards Faith – last week I said the Gospel is not intuitive. You will never come to have faith that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead in isolation. So the first step is listening. Remember the early church learned from the Apostles. If you are looking for faith you have to immerse yourself in the gospel. You need to read your bible, listen to our teachings and other’s teachings. You have to learn and listen together. But listening isn’t enough. Eventually you have to trust.

•Fellowship to Faith – fellowship is the first step. If you want to make disciples you have to invite them into the fellowship of the church. This is not the end of the journey however. Many people remain in the fellowship their entire lives. And we can fall into the trap of inviting people into the fellowship and never seeing them take the next step: faith. But as much as we may want to rush to the next step we have to engage people where they are. The first step of making a disciple is inviting them into the fellowship of the church and the fellowship of our lives.

•Thinking Long – One dimension of thinking long is thinking different and prayer is the key to both. Prayer doesn’t just change circumstances. More importantly, it changes us. It doesn’t just alter external realities. It alters internal realities so that we see with spiritual eyes. It gives us peripheral vision. It corrects our nearsightedness. It enables us to see beyond our circumstances, beyond ourselves, beyond time. It’s not enough to dream big and pray hard. You also have to think long. If you don’t, you’ll experience high degrees of discouragement. Why? Because we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year. Of course, we also tend to underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade. The bigger the vision, the harder you’ll have to pray and the longer you’ll have to think. But if you keep circling, it’ll come to pass in God’s time.