I
believe we beat around the bush too much in this church. Very rarely do we
really cut to the heart of the gospel. Too often we get lost in the thick of
thin things while the things that are truly important escape our grasps. We
spend our time trying to understand the leaves and branches before we really
understand the trunk. And if we don’t understand the trunk, then our
understanding of the branches and leaves will become distorted and incomplete.
I don’t know where the need to do this came from or why we do it, but we should
spend more time talking about the trunk of the tree; Christ and our relationship
with him.
So
instead of talking about all the differing things that make up a Disciple in
this church like honesty, good works and so on, I want to talk about where the
path of Discipleship starts. Like a race, it doesn’t matter how good you run if
you don’t start on the starting line. If you start anywhere else, you’ll be
disqualified. Similarly, if you want to be a disciple you have to know where to
start. Otherwise you could be busying yourself with things that are good but are
of no worth because you didn’t start on the starting line. But maybe instead of
starting lines, we should be talking about costs.
In
the New Testament Jesus said specifically what the cost of being a disciple
was; ‘he that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple’. When
we read this we want to hear that Jesus was saying to forget the things of the
world because I have something of much more worth, and certainly that was a
fraction of his intentions, but what those words really say is that Jesus doesn’t
want our things, he wants our person. If Jesus wants things he has no problem getting them
but it is people he wants. The cost of discipleship is everything the person is; their sins, their righteousness,
their personality, their everything.
C.S Lewis said
that when giving yourself to Christ, Christ says to us ‘Make no mistake, if you
let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in my hands, that
is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will,
and if you choose, you can push me away. But if you do not push me away
understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may
cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost
you after death, whatever it costs me, I will never rest, nor let you rest,
until you are literally perfect….I will not do anything less.’
This can sound pretty intimidating. Especially when you
remember that Jesus was represented by a Lion in CS Lewis’s fiction books. One
of my favorite descriptions of Aslan is that He is not a tame lion, but he is
good. Indicating that there is no telling what he’ll do, but you know that it’s
for good. I like to think of the decision to be a disciple as the action of
buckling myself into a roller coaster without knowing in advance all that it’ll
be. I just know that the roller coaster will ultimately lead to everything I
want and that I’ll survive. The act of buckling myself in says to Christ, ‘I
trust you and will be yours no matter where this takes me’. That is the mark of
a True Disciple; having fully entrusted yourself to Christ and His plans for
you.
This
turns out an interesting situation; there is really no way to tell on the
outside if anyone has made the decision to be a disciple. There are, for
example, people who show their best faces all the time, are righteous and keep
the commandments hoping to ‘distract’ God and others with their good works, but
never truly fully commit themselves to Him. This type of person can never make
it to the Celestial Kingdom. They are an empty shell. On the flip side, there
are people who struggle through and through with the traps of mortality. From
the outside, they don’t really seem to be ‘in the race’ per se, but on the
inside they’ve committed themselves to Christ and are truly trying to be a good
person. I believe there to be no room in heaven for empty shells. Heaven is
only for people who have truly committed to Christ at heart and strive to be
what He is, despite failure.
Too
often we want to believe that Jesus wants our righteousness before anything
else. Now, don’t get me wrong, he does want us to be good, but it is not the
most important thing to Him if He doesn’t already have us. After all, people are more important than things, and that
means we are more important than our actions. This He made unbelievably clear
through the Atonement which throws accountability out the window for our
actions if we repent. Sitting at the heart of the Doctrine of the Atonement is
the truth that God doesn’t care much about where we’ve been or what we’ve done,
but that He cares about our hearts and where they’re pointing. This truth is
obvious when we sin, but not so obvious when we’re righteous.
In Mere Christianity, C.S Lewis gives the
example of a fictional man and woman; Unbelieving Dick Firkin and Christian
Miss Bates. Dick Firkin has a good temperament whereas Miss Bates can be mean
and crotchety. If the purpose of life was to produce ‘nice people’ then God’s
work would be done with Dick Firkin, He made him nice. But both are in need of just
as much ‘saving’ as the other.
‘You cannot expect God to look
at Dick’s placid temper and friendly disposition exactly as we do. They result
from natural causes which God Himself creates. Being merely temperamental, they
will all disappear if Dick’s digestion alters. The niceness, in fact, is God’s
gift to Dick, not Dick’s gift to God. In the same way, God has allowed natural
causes, working in a world spoiled by centuries of sin, to produce in Miss
Bates the narrow mind and jangled nerves which account for most of her nastiness.
He intends, in His own good time, to set that part of her right. But that is
not, for God, the critical part of the business. It presents no difficulties.
It is not what He is anxious about. What He is watching and waiting and working
for is something that is not easy even for God, because, from the nature of the
case, even he cannot produce it by a mere act of power. He is waiting and
watching for it both in Miss Bates and in Dick Firkin. It is something they can
freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to
Him and thus fulfill the only purpose for which they were created?’
Now,
let’s suppose that we have given ourselves to Christ and are on the path of
discipleship. What now? If we assume that we do all the things that one is
supposed to do on the path of righteousness, not perfectly of course, but we
keep our commitment; what becomes of us? Here again is another dangerous belief
we can fall into; when one has given themselves to Christ, personality and all,
what do we get in return? Well the Personality of Christ of course, but we have
to be careful and truly understand what that means. I’ll tell you what it doesn’t
mean; it doesn’t mean that we all have to orbit around some set stereotypical
personality that our Mormon culture has set. The secret that we don’t see is
that when we give God something in His right hand, He gives it right back to us
with His left, only He has made it better. By giving ourselves to Christ we
truly discover our real selves. Every individual who comes to Christ develops
more and more into their real selves with infinite variety. The taste of salt
is overpowering by itself but when added to food, it doesn’t (if done correctly)
overtake the flavors that exist, but enhances and reveals them. God is waiting
to give us our real selves if we will only give Him what we now call ourselves.
To become a True Disciple of
Christ we must first choose to be
that disciple and accept all that goes with it. That is the only cost God has
ever set on being one of His Disciples and is the only thing He’ll accept from
us. Good works and righteousness are
found further down the path of discipleship as Christ begins the perfection
process on us, but we must remember that they are not the cost; we are. And if
you find yourself to be more like Miss Bates, when the efforts of living a
Christian life haven’t yet produced the kind of righteousness you’d hoped, to
quote Lewis one last time ‘Keep on. He knows what a wretched machine you are
trying to drive. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but
perhaps far sooner than that) He will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a
new one. And then you may astonish us all-not least yourself…‘
