Hey y'all! Last Sunday I was invited by some friends to join them for a service at Grace-Midtown church in Atlanta. I went once before, a couple of summers ago, but now they're in a new and bigger building. I love visiting other churches and experiencing their worship and sermons. I'm also very picky about sermons. I've grown up at Perimeter with incredible in-depth sermons studying the Word so I've been spoiled. Something I usually use to decide whether I like the sermon or not is if it's Gospel centered. If the pastor is opening his Bible and pointing us to the Word, it usually means that the sermon is going in a good direction. This service was great though! I loved every part of it.
The worship was very different than Perimeter. A lot of the songs that they played were very repetitive which allowed for us to really think about what we were singing and focus on worshiping instead of on the screens and reading the words. (It was so good that I ended up buying two of their CDs! They're on iTunes if you want to check them out. They're called Rising and Sounds Like Sunset.)
The sermon was also great. They're doing a series right now about what it means to be a disciple. The week I went, they were focusing on being a disciple by being a discipler and using Colossians 3. The pastor, Chris Moerman, started with a quote from The Great Omission by Dallas Willard. "Jesus told us, as Disciples, to make disciples. Not converts to Christianity, nor to some particular faith and practice." He also talked about the death that we all die to ourselves so that we can live for Christ. I've heard this many times before, but he reminded us that we can't resurrect ourselves. We have to simply die and trust that the Lord will resurrect us and make us new.
Paul also talks in Colossians about how he imitates Jesus, and we are supposed to imitate Paul. This points to passing that on through discipleship. He also lists 5 P words. (Pastors love alliteration.)
1. Presence - With a discipler, it's a spiritual impartation of wisdom instead of knowledge. We need someone who's real with us and knows our "junk". Jesus doesn't just say "listen to me", He says "follow me". In the great commission, it says "AS you go, make disciples." You're already going somewhere or going after something, so rub shoulders with the people on the same path as you.
2. Purpose - All of us are invited into the mission and called into it.
3. Power - The role of the disciples was never to just follow Jesus and applaud. It was to watch and imitate.
4. Process - God in His infinite wisdom and grace gives us time to grow in character and capacity instead of giving us everything at once. For example, the prodigal son was crushed by an inheritance that he wasn't ready to carry.
5. Pursuit - God loves all of His children but there's a special closeness in relationship for those that pursue Him. God hides things for us, not from us. He wants us to search them out.
And one last quote: "To whom did we allow sufficient access to our lives that they were able to 'imitate our lives as we imitated Christ?'" -Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture
I hope this was as encouraging to you as it was to me!
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