Discipleship Outcome #1: Intimacy With God
Mission and Vision
Discipleship Outcome #1: The Pursuit of God
From Vintage Faith Church’s Vision Statement:
Loving God with all of our hearts, minds, and souls. By pursuing intimacy with God through the individual spiritual disciplines and faithful corporate worship. Matthew 22:37, 1 Corinthians 14:26-40, Hebrews 10:25, Romans 12:1-2, Ephesians 4:13-16, Acts 2:42-47, 2 Corinthians 9:6-15, Psalm 111:12, Psalm 119, Matthew 28:16-20
For the Christian, God is and must be our greatest treasure. For where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. Salvation is and was not free, it came and comes at the highest possible cost. We were bought by the precious blood of Christ, the only Son of God. The only right response to receiving this gift of grace is pursuing God as our greatest treasure. After eleven chapters of the most beautiful and deepest possible gospel presentation, the Apostle Paul says “I appeal to you therefore” Essentially.. Because of all this grace and truth!
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” Romans 12:1-2
God is Holy. He is infinitely wise, powerful, perfectly loving, and abounding in mercy. You have rebelled against him. In fact you are unholy, unwise, unloving, and unmerciful. But.. In spite of this, in His great mercy and kindness He has ransomed you, He has pulled you from the miry pit, saved you from the agony of hell, delivered you from sin’s dominion over your will, pardoned you from your grievous sins against Him, given you new life, placed His Spirit within you guaranteeing the inheritance of the eternal life to come, and made you alive to Him. All of this not because of anything you have done, but simply because of His grace.
How does one respond to this?
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Matthew 22:37
The only proper response to God’s love is to give all of ourselves to Him. To seek him with all of our heart, soul, and mind. This is not an attempt to earn favor with God, but rather, it is the proper response to His favor. Often, I hear well-meaning Christians in jest take shots at other believers when the spiritual disciplines are discussed. Things such as seeking God through regular disciplined Bible reading, developing set prayer times, and taking serious regular fellowship with and in the body of Christ. That is legalism they decry! Well, if you are doing it to earn God’s favor, and if you are doing it to boast, yes, it certainly can be legalistic. But, let us continue to look at it from the perspective the Bible gives us.
You were dead in your sins. You were without hope and without God in the world. You were walking in darkness. A darkness so great that you may have thought the darkness within you was light. You were following the prince of the power of the air. Destined for God’s wrath. And, in His kindness and mercy, He called you out of that wretched darkness into His marvelous light. And the cost of calling you was the death of the Son of God. He took your sin. You took his righteousness.
Isn’t the only right response to this truth to seek God with everything you have?
This starts with renewing our minds. We need to let God’s Word wash over us like water shaping stone in a riverbed. Over weeks, months, years, and decades the stones are shaped by the water. This is similar to our pursuit of God. The changes are imperceptible immediately, but over time we begin to see God for who he is, and we begin to see our own growth in Christ, more of our sin is put to death, and Christ’s righteousness within us increases. We become more and more like Christ. This takes time and will never be fully completed on this side of glory. However, on this side of heaven, we are shaped day in and day out by the regular prescribed rhythms of grace that God has given His people. Time in the Word, time meditating on His Word, cultivating a life of prayer, and having a faithful presence in corporate worship with God’s people.. Rinse and repeat..
There is a quote from one of the worship books that Steve and I have read together that I love. “We must strive to have thinking hearts and feeling minds” – There is no separation between heart and mind. If theology is dry and dusty and you can’t see it as something that has anything to do with God and worship, you are looking at it wrong. Studying God is meant to be a delight, and an act of worship. Renewing our minds informs our worship.
If you want heartfelt, sincere, powerful worship, you must.. And I don’t say this lightly. You must study and delight in the God of the Bible. Of course.. there are exceptions. Children, and those whose minds are not functioning well. But, most of us are not exceptions.
Right worship affects our wills and our emotions and it all begins in the mind.
We will be hearing more about these discipleship outcomes as the weeks and months progress. But check yourself on this first one. How are you doing with it? How is your bible intake? What is your prayer life like? Do you have regular times to hear and speak to God? Do you see faithful attendance in the corporate worship service as a vital ingredient in your growing and maturing as a disciple? What can you put into place as a discipline to lean into your pursuit of God?
Grace is against earning, but grace is certainly not against discipline. Anything good in life requires effort. A flourishing and fruitful faith is no exception.
Let us be a people in the world but not of it. A people who know God intimately. Who seek him because He first loved us. Living temples of the living God. A royal priesthood who know God and explain and show God to a lost world.
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
1 Peter 2:9-10
In Christ
Pastor Anthony Valentine
