Incarnation and Discipleship

 

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“All my knotted-up life I've longed for the sanity and simplicity of knowing who's good and who's bad. I've wanted to know this about myself as much as anyone. I needed God to clean up the mess, divide the room, sort the mail so all of us can just get on with it and be who we are. Go where we're bent.” - Beth Moore, All My Knotted-Up Life

Oh how I can relate to what Beth Moore wrote in her autobiography.

I wanted my faith journey, my discipleship, to be neat and tidy. I wanted to just seamlessly become the person I feel like I am in my quiet time. Growing up in the church, discipleship was often presented as such. I don't want to minimize the importance of challenging people to move from childhood to a mature faith, to become disciplemakers and beyond. That is certainly biblical, as long as we remember we are always both being discipled and making disciples, that we are all people in process who learn from each other as we follow the Lord. 

But I have learned that in my life, discipleship rarely has functioned so neatly. I've struggled with this, not sure what to "do" with a faith experience that didn't exactly fit the mold. I grew up in church. I wandered. I wrestled with God while He pursued me daily. I discovered His Word and began to allow my life to be molded by it. I stumbled. I struggled. I grew. I served. I blew it. I was hurt deeply. I wrestled while He pursued me into something deeper. I spent plenty of nights feeling like I was hanging onto the side of a mountain. But one day I looked around, and there were still people left willing to catch me.

I began to get it. Slowly, I began to learn, through people showing up for me and by being planted in a church that values being a people in process, that my discipleship would not be the predictable linear progression I had wanted. It would be hard and messy. It would look a lot like dependence, like being deeply known, like learning to sometimes lean on people younger than me, like realizing that the newest believer can still speak into my life. It would look like putting myself in a learning posture, learning to receive, learning to drop ideas of "shoulds". 

Along the way, I learned that discipleship - both my own and that of those others who allow me in - looks messy. It's an upward climb, but not a smooth one. The process is not predictable. My Sovereign God directs what the path ahead looks like, and calls me and others to walk together toward Him. Along the way, I'm learning that its messiness looks a lot like the Incarnation. 

Every year for decades now, I have prayed and asked God to help me learn something new about the very familiar Christmas story each year. For someone who was practically born in church (my Mom went into labor on a Sunday evening but insisted on going to church before going to the hospital), I initially found this a challenge. But God has been faithful, and every year something jumps out to me that makes the Greatest Story Ever Told even greater still.

The incarnation was messy in ways that seem unnecessary. Yes, Scripture tells us that Messiah had to be human in order to die and conquer death (Hebrews 2:14) - but did He HAVE to be born the way He was? Did He HAVE to be born to a young woman who would be shamed and disgraced? Did the angel HAVE to disappear before everyone else in Mary's life heard the Good News? Did the family HAVE to be so poor that they could only afford the barest minimum sacrifice after His birth? Did He HAVE to become a refugee, going to the very country that had come to symbolize sin and captivity for His people?

The answer, of course, is yes. Not because God in His sovereignty could not have chosen to divinely save the world from a distance. The answer is yes because God in His character could not stay distant. He tells us that He is the God who is There. He is revealed in the Bread of the Presence. He is Immanuel, God with us. 

And that means He is with us in our messy discipleship - and He calls us to be with others in theirs. Not because we have "arrived at the top" and solely live to bring others up, but because we are together climbing the upward climb, pressing forward in our growth, something lifting and sometimes being lifted, sometimes sprawled on the ground, sometimes barely hanging on, sometimes celebrating. Discipleship is not a pleasant hike with a gentle climb. It's an all-out rock climb up a steep mountain, sometimes with ice and mud thrown in for good measure. We will not do it perfectly, and we simply cannot do it alone.  Like our God who came to earth in such a messy way, we come alongside each other. 

As you reflect this Christmas on the Incarnation, look around and see the people God has called to walk alongside you through the messiness of life. Ask Him to help you live incarnationally toward them in true ministry and discipleship, not detached service. And even more, ask Him to give you the grace to be vulnerable and allow them to walk incarnationally with you. Catch each other when things get slippery, and learn more about the heart of our Savior reflected in the name Immanuel, God with us.

Silence, Solitude, and Sin

 Immediately a rooster crowed a second time, and Peter remembered when Jesus had spoken the word to him, “Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.” When he thought about it, he began to weep. (Mark 14:72, HCSB)

Most of us who have been in church any length of time know the story of Peter’s denials. Brash and bold, sure he would follow Jesus to the death, ready to fight in the Garden of Gethsemene, hours later Peter finds himself weeping inconsolably - some translations say he “threw himself down” in deep dismay and grief. What happened in between Sure Peter and Devastated Peter? Three denials of His Savior, to be sure. But this verse suggests something more. 

Why did Peter not weep after denial #1 or #2? To make it more personal, why do we - why do I - sometimes repeat sin patterns and not weep over my sin soon enough? We know from Luke 22:61 that Jesus “looked at Peter” after the third denial. This gives us a hint that Peter’s understanding of his sin was connected to that poignant moment - a look he never forgot. I would like to suggest that verse 72 contains another hint. Peter “thought about it”, as several translations put it. The idea is not that he just had a quick memory of Jesus’ prophecy of the denial. No, the sense is that he finally stopped talking (ahem) and faced exactly what he had done. 

And it wasn’t pretty. 

Commentators generally agree that Peter was Mark’s primary source material for his gospel. Reading this passage again during Holy Week, I was struck with the idea of an older, humbler, wiser Peter talking to Mark and still feeling grieved. I imagined him saying, “Every time I think about it, I still weep.” That’s what repentance does - it makes us so aware of our sin, and Christ’s tender look that we long to keep our eyes on that look of love and our backs to our sin. The forgiveness is deep and real. But when we remember the sin, the remorse is also deep and real. He throws our sin into the sea, but we remember - we always remember. 

Among the forgotten spiritual disciplines in our day are two that I think are key to truly grasping the depth of sin’s presence in our lives: silence and solitude. We must have times when we are quiet before the Lord, to hear His whispers of conviction before He is forced to make them shouts. And, we must have time alone with Him, where we can focus on the look of love and forgiveness that is always offered on his face. Just as a marriage cannot thrive without times the couple can be alone and look each other in the eye, so our relationship with the Lord requires intentional intimacy. The disciplines of silence and solitude set us apart with Him so we can hear from Him. 

Ultimately, Peter didn't let this moment of betrayal define him. After plenty of wrestling, he received the Lord's sweet forgiveness and stepped into the calling God had for him, using his unique gifts and personality, led by the Spirit this time. Our moments of sin don't define us either. We move forward into the life God gives us, the purpose He fulfills in us, the plans He makes for us. But like Peter, we may still find times that when we think about it, we weep. And that's ok. Let those moments keep turning us toward His look of love.