Starting next week the focus of ChrisMorton.info will be two things: Growth and Mission.  Here’s what that means:

Growth

Jesus left his disciples with one main instruction: Go and teach people to do what I said to do.

Doing what Jesus says will require full-life discipline.  It doesn’t just include a better understanding of scripture and learning spiritual discipline, but bringing your entire life into focus.  Since this will include everything from spiritual disciplines to lifehacks, we’ll categorize these entries under Growth.

via Radio Free Babylon

Some past entries on this topic include:

• 31 Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Before I Was 31
• The Number One Thing You Can Do Today to Achieve Your Goals
• Why You Need a Reading Plan (and how to develop one)

Mission

Lesslie Newbigin’s said in Open Secret that “We are forced to do something that the Western churches have never had to do since the days of their own birth-to discover the form and substance of a missionary church…”

via Brian Marvel

These posts will focus on what it means for churches and individuals to join in God’s mission.

Some past entries include:

• 3 Reasons No One Can Hear You
• 6 Charges From the Guy Who Coined the Term “Missional”
  
• 10 Misconceptions About Missional

I’ll continue to post 4-6 times a week, including long form and short for writing, quotes and videos.  You’ll see a new “About” page and a separate “bio” page.  There will also be a new social media push and some exciting possibilities like guest posts and video posts.  I hope you’ll spread the word.

The post Growth & Mission: A Preview of This Blog appeared first on Chris Morton.

The Shame of Sin. We ask the question, “how can I disciple someone else when I’m such a mess?” But this isn’t as big of a problem as we think. As Tim Keller says “only a Christian knows how much they hate God.” The discipler should be candid about their sin, and in time, the way the they approach sin will become essential to the act of discipleship itself.

Lack of Self Knowledge. Discipleship opportunities are lost all of the time due to the assumptions that come with a lack of self knowledge. Positively, a person might have an amazing devotional life, but not realize they have something to share, because it comes naturally to them. Negatively, a person might have cultural or political assumptions, and say things that exclude people they might otherwise help. If a Christ-follower does the hard work of learning who they are, they’ll have few blockers in passing that on to others.

Structure. In Jesus’s culture you walked everywhere. If you wanted something, you built it. If you needed food you grew it. It was easy to follow people around and learn what they do. Relationships and skill acquisition today is fundamentally different. We have rubrics for everything. So what if we approached discipleship with some basic questions of structure: What does the disciple need to learn? Where will that take place? How will we know when we’ve succeeded?

What will it take to get over our fear of discipleship? We need to accept our sinfulness as the place where God shines through, do the hard work of learning our inner selves, and structure into our lives as individuals and as a church.

photo credit: Adam Foster | Codefor via photo pin cc

The post Why is it That We’re So Afraid of Discipleship? appeared first on Chris Morton.

If you could read only one book about Jesus, it should be The Divine Conspiracy. Dallas Willard masterfully explains the core topic of Jesus teachings, The Kingdom of God, and how we are to respond to them.

The book begins with a discussion of the very idea of a kingdom, how we each have our own, and what it means for God to have one.  At it’s most basic, the Kingdom of God is “the dome under which God is King.”  He then goes on to explain that if Jesus is God, he is also the smartest person that ever lived.  He also explains that Jesus teachings were meant to be taken as serious ethical directions for individuals and societies.  The majority of the book works through Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.

What makes Willard’s writing so meaningful is that he is a foremost a highly astute philosopher.  Yet despite his intellectual prowess, the majority of his teaching is based in the belief that we can, and should do what Jesus said. He shows how very simple, yet difficult, it is to live in the kingdom of God.

Divine Conspiracy is on my vert short list of almost yearly reads.  When I read it, I feel like I am finally seeing who Jesus is, and how his teachings were meant to change our lives and the world.

You can find The Divine Conspiracy here in paperback, digital, and audio.

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