Personal Discipleship

posted by Navigators on November 1st, 2017 in Discipleship | Spiritual Transformation

Dear Friend,

We live in a time when it is easier than ever to access good content. You can download podcasts or listen to great preachers from our era and previous eras. You can subscribe to great courses and walk through various subjects. YouTube may be a wasteland of cat videos and movie clips, but it’s also a place where you can find lecture after lecture from some of the most eminent scholars in the world. Without ever leaving your living room, you can read all the books you want from the ancient church fathers. You can find Puritan literature for free online. Dozens of books from last century’s writers, like G. K. Chesterton, are available on Kindle for less than a couple of dollars. It’s never been easier to get great content.

While good content helps in our discipleship, we need more than good content to disciple us! We need godly Christians, ordinary people, real-life flesh-and-blood, Spirit-filled Christians around us to help us become more like Jesus.

Disciple-making is accomplished by modellers, not just messengers. We develop not merely through intellectual transfer, but also through witnessing the lives and choices of other disciples we encounter on our way. The people who make the biggest difference in our lives are those who not only give us knowledge but who know us well enough to speak truth into the specifics of our lives, to give counsel from their experience and biblical insight. Small groups are important places where this can happen, but we need more than meeting up for an hour and half once a week. We need to be connected to one another, walking with one another through the ups and downs of our everyday lives, encouraging and exhorting one another to be more like Jesus in the whole of our life. Having fun together, praying for one another and bearing one another’s burdens. This is one-to-one discipleship. It’s a hallmark of the Navs, and it can change the world one ordinary life at a time.

Together let us go wherever He leads and do whatever He asks. Lead On!

Grant Dibden