Label these as 9 on a seperate sheet. Do you find yourself leaning more toward the side of openness or toward the side of discernment? What can you do to sustain a balance in this area? • What is your own assessment of SCB strengths and weaknesses? • What role has your combination of experience and expectations had in your understanding of Spirit-filled spirituality? • How would you assess yourself in the five requisites of admitting your weakness, surrendering your will, confessing your disobedience, sanctifying your desires, and trusting in God’s promise to fill you?
Admitting our weakness. When we call on God out of a spirit of humility, contrition, and brokenness, we are acknowledging our desperate need for him. God’s power is perfected in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). Surrendering our will. If a farmer is to cultivate a field, that field must be plowed and harrowed before it can receive the seed that matures and bears fruit. This is a painful and upsetting process, but God uses times of crisis to bring us to the point of surrendering our will to his. When we become weary of our own resources and efforts, our growing sense of frustrated inadequacy drives us to God. As we realize our powerlessness, our increasing dependence makes the Spirit of God more real to us. Instead of working for God, we learn to invite him to work in and through us. Confessing our disobedience. Purity leads to power. We grieve and quench the Spirit when we tolerate unconfessed sins, questionable behavior, impure thoughts, lack of integrity, dishonesty, selfishness, immorality, and other forms of disobedience. Scripture calls us to present ourselves to God as those alive from the dead and our members as instruments of righteousness to God (Romans 6:13). Instead of focusing on having the Holy Spirit, we should be more concerned with the Holy Spirit having us. “The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us” (1 John 3:24). Sanctifying our desires. Those who consciously long for the cleansing, empowering, and quickening of the Spirit will cry out to God in holy desire. This is the theme of Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s spiritual classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence; a pure and contrite heart and a fundamental abandonment to God’s loving purposes bring us the treasures of his grace. Prayer and communion with Christ lead to spiritual power. Trusting in God’s promise to fill us. Scripture commands us to be filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18) and exhorts us to walk by the Spirit (Galatians 5:16, 25), to be led by the Spirit (Romans 8:14–16; Galatians 5:18), to live by the Spirit (Romans 8:11–13; Galatians 5:25), and to set our minds on the Spirit (Romans 8:5–9). Thus we can be assured that God’s desire is for his children to be Spirit-filled.
Please put these on seperate sheet Label these as 11. When we trust in and appropriate his promise to fill us, we can be confident that this is a request our Father will be pleased to grant.
In your pilgrimage, in what ways has nurturing others assisted you in your spiritual formation? • How do evangelism and discipleship relate to love and purpose? • Recalling the metaphor of a flock of sheep, where would you place yourself as a follower of the Shepherd? • Which of the eleven discipleship principles spoke most directly to you?
10. Spiritual Friendship Is a Component of Discipleship Just as Paul and Silas imparted their own lives to the people they served in Thessalonica (Acts 17:1–9; 1 Thessalonians 2:7–12), we must make ourselves personally available and transparent to the people we disciple. Spiritual friendship is founded on a mutuality that exists for the purpose of helping each other grow in grace and character. (This is not the same as spiritual direction or mentoring; we will look at these in the section on corporate spirituality.) While our Lord commands us to love all, we can befriend only a few. This dimension of holy friendship makes discipleship a two-way street where the discipler and the disciple both give and receive. Spiritual friendship moves beyond the level of personal gratification to the cultivation of Christlike virtue (2 Peter 1:5–9) and requires a deliberate intention to be open to one another and to God’s formative purposes. Praying for one another and with one another is an essential part of this mutual relationship. 11. Effective Discipleship Requires More Than One Method When it comes to spiritual nurturing, one size does not fit all. There is a tendency in discipleship ministries to turn models and methods into masters. The assumption is that if a method works well for some, it must be appropriate for all. As a result, people whose temperaments do not resonate with the proffered method may conclude that there is something deficient in their spiritual commitment. This misguided tendency toward homogeneity can reduce discipleship to a cloning process: “When you’ve completed our program, you’ll look like this.” When the rich diversity of personal temperaments and cultural factors is not taken into account (see appendix A, “The Need for Diversity”), discipleship becomes program-driven rather than person-specific. A teaching or training method that inspires one person may be unrealistic and inappropriate for another. Disciplers who fail to grasp this can create expectations that inevitably lead some people to a sense of inadequacy and frustration. A variety of tools are needed, and this is why there is a multiplicity of discipleship ministries and approaches. Some are more programmatic, and others are more relational; some stress the cognitive, and others stress the affective or the volitional. Just as God created the cosmos as a unity out of profound diversity, so the body of Christ is a unity in diversity. QUESTIONS FOR PERSONAL APPLICATION
