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I think before I started going to the Village, the word “disciple” to me was just a random term used to describe Jesus’ followers, interchangeable with apostle and not holding any deeper meaning for me. Regarding my salvation, I held the view that might perhaps be best encapsulated by the term “fire insurance,” not because I’d been raised to believe that (I wasn’t) but because the gospel hadn’t really fallen in my heart yet. I didn’t articulate my belief that way, but I certainly lived like it. As a result, I don’t really know how to categorize the first two and a half decades of my life in terms of being a believer, except to say that God created circumstances that let me walk into situations that would have destroyed me had His grace not been over me, so that three years ago in November I could sit in a service at the Village and have the Spirit move powerfully in me to make the Gospel a real thing, a life-changing word of life, and make Jesus a real person, rather than a moral club or a political movement.
Through the course of diving into sermons and into the Word, I felt called to seek out discipleship, to be led by more mature believers into a greater and more fulfilling level of belief that could be sustained through all of life’s turmoil. I spent these first few years living and working from paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay bills and seeking to build a career as a musician that was fulfilling and able to sustain me. As I dug in, the shallowness of this as my end-all, be-all in life became all too clear. Matthew 28:19-20 makes it clear that being and making disciples is our call and certainly I desired to live in obedience, but it was a call to joy that pulled me deeper in.
At the same time I was convicted of the sin in my lusting heart and my addiction to pornography, and I knew that I had to attack this in order to move forward. I first entered into discipleship relationships in recovery when it began Tuesday nights at the Denton campus, and got to interact with other men struggling, and those who had moved to a deeper relationship, a level beyond “I’m not gonna do this because it’s bad” to “I don’t do this because I love God, and this behavior is antithetical to that.” I was witness to a new kind of man, and as I dug into the Word and into old sermon podcasts I had that man defined more deeply for me.
Matt has hit on this subject of eldership and what it requires to be a leader many times, usually in the context of laying out church policy in the context of its roots in Scripture. But I saw something deeper in those sermons, particularly one from a few years ago called “What are Elders?” that I first listened to while driving around one night delivering pizza. In the biblical description of an elder, I saw the man I wanted to be. 1 Timothy 3:1-7 says:
“The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.”
Through all of this, the Spirit planted in me a desire to know God, to love Him and to follow His ways. I’ve always been a loner, of the “I can do it myself” mindset, and I knew that I had to break out of that lest it kill my desires.
My next opportunity to enter into a discipling relationship came with homegroup. My group was and continues to be primarily young single men in the college to post-college years, but over the years we have had the opportunity to have older married men be involved with the group, men like Jim Burke and Bob Akers, who took the time to pour into us and guide us into greater maturity as men and as believers.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to enter into a small group with just three other men, to do a study together following the spring men’s study and dive in deeper. There is a certain struggle that goes along with building these relationships, especially a struggle to prioritize and pour in energy—to regard this as something that is not simply helpful to me, but rather, crucial to my life and necessary. The short break our group has had to take over the last month made that all the more clear to me, and I am looking forward to resuming our meetings and our study of God’s Word and his immense blessings on all of us through each other.
All of this together has helped me to grow in truth, keeping me steady even as I struggle with sin’s effect on my life and strive to push it out. Growing in Christ with other men through the last two years’ period of transition from struggling with money through hourly jobs to steady work kept me on a steady course to seeing God not as either Santa Claus for giving me a better job and salary or as arbitrary punisher for hard times, but rather as my loving Heavenly Father that desires for me to know Him and fully enjoy Him by glorifying Him forever. I took those words on years ago as an intellectually true thing, but through the influence of the men around me, it has grown deeper into a statement of my embattled heart and my deepest desire that I strive to cultivate.
Further, I have felt led to dig further into the realm of discipling other men as a result of this. I’ve seen that there is an incredible amount of work to be done in sharing the Gospel, in loving on the people around me and in growing the body of Christ, and the idea of being able to do that work inspires a great deal of joy in me. I don’t yet know exactly how this will look in my life, but I know it will involve sacrificing my time and energy for the glory of God, and I pray daily for a heart more and more in love with God and driven to pursue him in this. He’s blessed me with so many men who model this life and I pray that I may be like that.
I was reminded very recently of the urgency of this work when I learned just a few days ago that a friend of mine had passed away at the age of 39, just ten years older than me. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and while I don’t know the state of his heart I do know that he struggled with addiction to alcohol among other things. It brought to mind all the people around me that I have known and yet have not shared the Gospel with, and the grief that comes to mind when I think of them lost. I stand before you a man saved by grace through faith gifted by God, strengthened and grown by the Spirit through the Word of God and through the body of Christ that surrounds me, and I desire to live ever-deeper in this truth and joy.
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