It really doesn’t matter how long we have been following Jesus Christ, even if it is decades, we will always be moving and building our own level of discipleship.  Put another way, following Jesus is a lifelong quest.  That quest does have a point of beginning, even though it has no end, at least not on this side of Heaven; we’ll see what comes after that in due course.

During this journey, we need to be growing in discipleship.  More often, I like to say that we must be growing in our relationship with Jesus Christ, because for all intents and purposes, and certainly for the purposes of this blog, they mean the same thing.  That is so very easy to say, and when we reach a certain point of understand, it seems so very obvious, but for the person in the early stages of their relationship with Jesus, it may seem mysterious.  This might also be the case for the Christian of many years who was never introduced to this concept. With this in mind, I thought that I would continue from last week’s post about being a disciple (You can read it here if you missed it) by spending just a few minutes on the concept of our personal discipleship.

This brief conversation is based upon the idea that a disciple is someone who knows what the Master knows, and who does what the Master does.  If Jesus is the Master, and we are supposed to know what He knows, then we have some things to learn before we can really be expected to do what He does… right?

How well do we know the Bible?

Right at this point, we run into trouble, because there are many who know much of the Bible, but who do not know Jesus Christ at all.  We need to recognize that being His disciple must begin with knowing Him! Over the past few days, I have decided to take an inventory of my own personal journey in discipleship and I am posting my findings and experiences in a series of posts called “The Journey” which I would invite you to take a look at.  The first one posted yesterday called, “The Journey: Personal Prayer” and if you would like to begin finding out more about this aspect of being a disciple, I hope you will feel free to follow it along its path.  Here in the disciple series, we’ll soon be looking more at the “doing” aspect of discipleship.

Before I end this post, I’d like to leave one little bit of information about building our relationships with Jesus; the getting to know what He knows aspect.  Over the centuries, scholars, theologians and teachers have come up with the notion that there are things that we can do to build knowledge, understanding and relationship with the Lord.  They usually break these activities, called spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices,  into two categories: Classic practices and creative practices.  Classic practices are things like prayer, Bible reading, devotions, worship and Bible instruction.  Creative practices are much less formal and include things like writing, art, sculpture, gardening and so forth.  If you think about it, any of these things can bring a person closer to God, even though they may not bring someone else closer.  you might have noticed that they could be considered creative expressions of spirituality..  “The Journey” will deal with some of those as well as the Classics.  From this point on, this “Disciple” series will deal with doing what the Master does. As a final thought, I hope you will always keep in mind that our discipleship grows when we move out of the place where we are comfortable.