Jesus is the narrow gate through which we enter God’s Kingdom and are enabled to become His eikons again.

No other person in human history has comprehensively demonstrated the ability to partner with God to conquer sickness, personal immorality, systemic evil, political exploitation, religious manipulation, and even death. Jesus is the master of human spirituality. All other teachers fall short.

This is because among all human spiritual teachers, only Jesus Christ demonstrated that he was actually the physical incarnation of God – the divine person graciously sacrificing self in order to repair the breech caused by man.

Therefore, Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) in God’s plan of human redemption. He is God’s good work to restore us as eikons. Therefore, our mission is simply to follow Jesus and to make followers of Jesus (Matt 28:18-20). In this way, discipleship cannot be seen as merely one facet of our work. Rather, it is the end goal in everything we do. Teaching people how to know and follow Jesus Christ is the only task that will bring about God’s vision of a redeemed world, and it is our only long-term hope of righting the injustices of humanity.

Yet, too often discipleship is presented as an optional commitment. This is a distorted view of the gospel (John 14:15). The transformed life lived obediently to Christ is a measure of the salvation Jesus promises, as his striking acts of power demonstrated (Matt 4:23). Therefore, living in the present Kingdom of God and experiencing the powerful rule of God is the only way to experience the salvation of God.

The Method of the Gospel: Godward Praxis

Not only did Jesus tell us to make disciples, but he told us how to make disciples. In the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20), Jesus lays out a method of spiritual formation that is from the inside-out:

• “Make disciples” - Enlist people as students of Jesus, engaging their mind and their will (or their “hearts”) in the intentional experience of learning from him.
• “Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” - This doesn’t just refer to dunking people underwater. It literally means to immerse (”baptize”) them into the presence and reality of the triune God. Put another way, we must immerse people in the kind of life that is full of the work of the living God. That is exactly what Christ did with his disciples.
• “Teach them to obey everything I have commanded” - Specifically, teach them the faithful outward acts of a genuine inward faith, like those found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7). This means to praise them when they succeed, correct them when they’re wrong, and encourage them when they’re tired.

This simple progression reveals a method of discipleship that engages people from the inside-out, starting with the condition of the heart, moving toward a community life of prayer, worship and service, and finally culminating in outward acts of righteousness that are conspicuously good in a world that is often evil.

The same inside-out progression is conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus begins with matters of the heart – anger, lust, greed – and progresses along an increasingly outward trajectory – until he has dealt with every vital realm of human life and behavior. According to Dallas Willard, this order is critical:

“The will must be moved by insight into truth and reality. Such insight will evoke emotion appropriate to a new set of the will. That is the order of real inward change.” (Willard 2002:248).

If the heart is changed first, the body will follow. I refer to this as having a “Godward” heart, a phrase reminiscent of the middle age monk Brother Lawrence who described his simple habit of “turning his heart toward God” in order to practice God’s presence in every duty of life. Sometimes we refer to this as the “inner life,” but I prefer the “Godward heart” because it establishes an outward trajectory – away from self, toward God, toward mission – rather than a inward attention. Either way, both phrases are meant to reinforce the heart as the starting point of transformation.

However, while the heart may go first it often goes tentatively in order to test what is only believed partially. “O Taste and see that the Lord is good,” (Psalm 34:8) the psalmist encourages us, knowing that tasting (or testing) is required to produce strong belief. When Jesus sent out the disciples to heal and cast out demons (Luke 10) we know they believed, otherwise they would not have gone. However, we also know they didn’t fully believe, otherwise they would not have been so surprised that “even the demons submit to us in your name!” (Luke 10:17). Putting their faith into action – and discovering that it was true – increased and strengthened their faith.

This kind of belief-action-reflection-reinforced-belief cycle is called praxis, a greek word meaning “action with reflection.” Adult education expert Jane Vella writes,

“There is little doubt among educators that doing is the way adults learn anything: concepts, skills, or attitudes. Praxis is doing with built-in reflection. It is a beautiful dance of inductive and deductive forms of learning” (Vella 2002:14, emphasis added).

Yet in church we often attempt to instill information – or “beliefs” – without giving hands-on opportunities to test (or taste!) the claims of Christ and reflect on what we experienced. If we are to effectively make disciples we must rediscover the hands-on, inside-out teaching method best modeled by Jesus himself.

The Means of the Gospel: The Gift Community

The realization that Jesus “baptism” was actually an explicit instruction about how to make disciples should lead us to an inevitable conclusion: Human transformation cannot occur in isolation. We must be immersed in a life permeated with God’s work, and because God most often does his work through and among people, the only way to be “baptized” in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to live in and among a community of other Jesus-followers.

We first see this truth most strikingly in Jesus’ own ministry, where students were folded into the life of a larger community that was actively seeking transformation of themselves and the world around them. Paul also exhorts us to radically commit ourselves to the “body” of Christ (Rom 12; 1 Cor 1; Eph 4), his vivid metaphor for the community of believers.

These passages reveal that there must be a high level of commitment within the community precisely because the students need each other in order to become mature (Eph 4:14-16). In fact, there is a particular way the community of faith achieves maturity and it guarantees that we cannot be isolated, autonomous believers: God has given gifts to every person in the community that create interdependence – because everyone needs every gift, yet no one person possesses them all.

Everyone has a need, and everyone has something to give, and it is the free exchange of gifts of love that produce change and growth. We desperately need each other, and only by freely giving and receiving do we encounter the grace and love of God.

This relational dynamic of grace presents us with a bit of a dilemma, because modern American church life often bears little resemblance to this kind of pervasive gift-economy. Indeed, Eddie Gibbs points out that a Biblical community should embody values that are quite opposite the modern market-economy approach to relationships, saying,

“A further aspect of the exchange basis of marketing [that negatively impacts the church] is its reciprocal basis. [Kenneson and Street] write, “the reciprocity embodied in self-interested exchange is not the same as the reciprocity embodied in gift-giving…Gift giving establishes and sustains relationships by acknowledging indebtedness…but this is precisely the kind of indebtedness that self-interested market exchanges seek to avoid.” In the marketing scenario, once you have paid the price and received the goods, you are free to walk away…In contrast, the gospel is not a product to be marketed, but a life-long relationship to be established and developed” (Gibbs:2000:51).

In other words, generous gift-giving tends to create relational attachments of loyalty, while market exchanges tend to create detached autonomy.

This is a powerful critique of the market-driven church culture because  according to Paul the dominant social feature of the people of God is gift-giving. Compare this with many modern churches which – precisely because of the way they attract people through goods and services – more closely resemble a market economy, which  actually frees people from commitments.

The people of God, by contrast, are to exist within a new gift-based way of living and interacting with each other, which generates radical relational commitments – which in turn become fertile ground for human transformation. Without gift-giving as a means of meeting one another’s needs there is no transformation into the image of God. There is simply no way to be the people of God without living concretely among the people of God and participating in that life of communal gift-giving.