What's A Disciple's Journey All About?
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Would you like the one true God of the Holy Bible to real to you? Do you hunger for a deeper relationship with Him? Would you like Jesus to transform your life? If so, A Disciple's Journey: 26 Devotional Studies to Draw You Closer to Jesus was written for you!
A Disciple’s Journey provides inspiring devotionals, probing questions, and Scripture studies to motivate and encourage a partnership between you and the Holy Spirit. In this partnership, you will undergo a godly transformation through developing character traits encouraged by the Lord. Through the twenty-six devotional studies of A Disciple’s Journey, you can discover how to implement permanent changes throughout your life and even form twenty-six godly traits within a year, allowing twenty-one days to establish each new habit discussed within.
Discover how God intends to satisfy your deepest desires. Learn about the prerequisites for entering a new life with the living God and how to walk by faith. There are so many wonderful topics to learn more about such as God’s provisions and how to use them, God’s purpose in trials, and His ultimate goal of preparing us to become one with Him and reign with Christ as His Bride. Through A Disciple’s Journey, discover how truly great a partnership with the Holy Spirit can be.
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Dedication
"Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:16-20 (NIV)
This book is dedicated to all those who have gone before me and helped me on my journey. It is also dedicated to those who will follow and spread the Word to others as they continue on their own journey as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. My prayer and hope are that God will use this book in some small way to help us fulfill His Great Commission.
“Becoming more like Jesus through Praying, Studying, Meditating, and Doing”
“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Matthew 7:13-14
Introduction
For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.
And His commandments are not burdensome. 1 John 5:3
This book is about the journey of a disciple of Jesus Christ. It is about my journey and may also be about yours if you seek to follow Jesus after receiving Him as Savior. Although our paths won’t be identical, there will be similarities. This book came into being because I sensed the Lord wanted me to share some things I have learned along the way and continue to relearn because they may help you on your journey. We all have the same destination: to become more like Jesus and to be drawn closer to His heart. If you want to find out more about how I began my journey or how you can begin yours, I invite you to read How I Became a Christian in the appendix.
Before we begin our journey, we must realize no matter how well-intentioned, our own efforts cannot bridge the gap that separates us from God. God draws us to Himself and offers the gift of faith in Christ as we trust in Him and His finished work on the cross. Then He gives us a new life that pleases Him: We share in the resurrection life of Jesus Christ and leave our old life behind. As we enter into this new life, we learn to walk by faith depending on God to lead and empower us. When we walk in union with Christ, trusting Him, obeying God is not difficult. Our challenge is to get to the point where we completely trust Him in all that we do.
To the natural mind, the true Christian life makes no sense. It is not burdensome (1 John 5:3) but without God, it is impossible (John 3:5-6). Because Jesus paid it all, it cost us nothing (John 3:16). But following Jesus will require us to lay down the life we once had and surrender control of our life to Him (Luke 14:25-33). When we give our life to Jesus, He gives us so much more than what we left behind (Matthew 19:27-29).
The problem is we do not want to let go of what we have to possess what we do not see and cannot control. It is like trying to take a bone out of the mouth of a hungry bulldog. You do it at your own risk! The best way is to offer him a nice juicy steak. Then he will gladly let go of that old bone. Our natural mind does not see that nice juicy steak of a new life in Christ. We must perceive it by faith. The natural man wants to hold on to that old life, like the bulldog with only a bone. The Christian life makes no sense to the natural man.
Because of the nature of life and its trials, and the testing of our faith with its setbacks, there is no easy road to Christian maturity. It doesn’t just happen. Salvation is a gift but becoming a disciple requires surrendering to Jesus. The process of surrendering does not happen all at once but is usually done in small incremental steps as we learn to trust Jesus incrementally. He promises to give us grace as we need it so we can pass through the trials successfully. Without having a faith-vision, we are like that old bulldog and just want to hang on to what we have. Growing as a Christian goes hand-in-hand with renewing our minds, a process necessary for maturity.
A disciple must be willing to deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Jesus (Matthew 16:24). Those who respond to the call will find He is more than they had ever dreamed. Those who persevere in following Jesus and overcome through God’s grace will find the reward is well worth the cost. I hope you are among them. If so, A Disciple’s Journey was designed with you in mind to help you along the way. You can return to it any time you want to be refreshed in its concepts or motivated to develop additional godly habits.
Welcome to Volume I of A Disciple’s Journey: 26 Devotional Studies to Draw You Closer to Jesus. We are each on our own journey with God. There are signposts along the way to help guide us and let us know we are on the right path to Christian maturity. We will be deepening our personal walk with the Lord and interacting with other Christians as we take up the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). This book provides help to understand and overcome the challenges we will all face. It will not replace one-on-one or small group discipleship and assumes a basic knowledge of the Bible. Volume I focuses more on your personal walk with the Lord and can be done individually or in a group setting. Volume II will focus more on one-on-one and small group discipleship.
This book does not provide a course in systematic theology or a complete foundation for the Christian. However, it does address foundational areas for discipleship in an interactive way. A Disciple’s Journey was designed to help you partner with the Lord to build and strengthen character qualities that move you closer to Him. I hope you find the devotional studies both inspiring and enlightening. They have come through a life of many ups and downs from someone first introduced to the Lord almost fifty years ago.
There are different ways of approaching these devotional studies. Some may benefit by first reading the devotionals to get an overview and then returning to do the studies at a pace and order of their own choosing. Those who benefit the most will have read the devotionals, answered the questions, and formed new habits. Ideally, they will have formed twenty-six new habits to celebrate as they progress along the road to Christian maturity. Others will be successful in forming a few new habits that draw them closer to Jesus. If you continue on the journey, you have not failed regardless of your level of success. Then we can celebrate our success together!
Experts say it takes twenty-one days to establish a habit. A Disciple’s Journey was designed with this in mind. Each volume contains twenty-six devotionals with the corresponding Pray, Study, Meditate, and Do sections and is designed to be completed in a year. Doing the devotional studies without developing new character habits can be done in much less time and should be beneficial but would defeat their primary purpose.
Each study is designed to take two weeks and may require an average of half an hour or more per day to complete with excellence. The first week can be used for reading the devotional; interacting with the Lord through prayer and meditation; answering the questions where Scripture references are provided; identifying the change to make into a new habit, and continuing to form the habit identified in the previous devotional. During the second week, you should focus on developing the new habit while establishing the previous one. You will also delve deeper into the subject of the devotional through answering questions that require researching the Scriptures on your own.
Doing the research questions should increase your understanding and deepen your foundation. As you see the importance of these character qualities, it should strengthen your resolve for developing them. Seeking the Lord to identify and establish desirable character qualities while partnering with Him is essential. Remember, depending on the Lord’s strength and following His leading is the key to discipleship.
There are 323 exercises, some with multiple questions. Answers will be personalized and some may require several paragraphs. Recording your answers and tracking your progress in making the desired character changes will ensure you get the most benefit from these studies. See How to Track Your Progress in the next section for a suggestion. I also recommend recording your answers electronically or in a notebook since sufficient space is not provided here. You can explore the recommended resources that interest you at any time.
Each godly character trait you turn into a habit brings you one step closer to total intimacy with Jesus.
A Sample from A Disciple's Journey:
Are You Ready for the Journey?
May you persevere on your journey as a disciple of Jesus Christ.
My hope is that A Disciple’s Journey will help you along the way.
Chapters 1-3
Grace has commonly been defined as unmerited favor or through the acrostic, God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. I like to think of grace as Christ-merited favor. Christ-merited favor is what Jesus Christ deserves. It is given to us as a gift through faith in Him. Faith in this context can be defined as confidence in God, His character, His Word, and His promises. It is more than mere head knowledge and lodges in the heart, producing action based on that confidence. Such faith is a gift of God and not something produced by man’s efforts or desires. Grace is what God has made available to us in Christ and faith appropriates it for our use.
To succeed in the Christian life requires a deep understanding and application of grace and a persevering faith that grows deeper through the trials of life. Trials are designed by God to test our faith and help us mature. God will enable His saints to persevere through trials without abandoning their faith (see 2 Timothy 1:12). Your faith and perseverance will be tested as you work your way through these devotional studies both by the studies themselves and by the events that transpire in your life. God has given you the overcoming life of Jesus Christ. If you keep your eyes, mind, and heart focused on Him, you will endure to the end and bring Him great joy.
These devotional studies provide insight into different aspects of the Christian life. By partnering with God through studying His Word and yielding to His Spirit, you will become more like Christ. Expect some resistance and some pain along the way. Old habits are hard to break and the enemy will resist you in establishing godly habits. God will help you break bad habits and replace them with good ones. After taking twenty-one days to form a good habit, it will take some effort to maintain it. You will need discipline and diligence to succeed but God is your Helper and Christ in you is the One who overcomes.
Enjoy the journey!
“Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.” (Proverbs 16:3; ESV)
Chapter 1 What Does God Really Want?
After removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him: “I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.” Acts 13:22 (NIV)
We all want something out of life but we do not always know what we really want. Our priorities and desires can change as well as our awareness of them. Do you know what your “top ten” desires are? How about your top three or your number one desire? The answers to these questions may not be obvious. You may want to take some time to reflect and write down what you discover about your own heart and what your chief desires are. Similarly, we may think we know what God wants but it may not be what He really wants.
God created us and promises to give us the desires of our hearts if we delight in Him (Psalm 37:4). The Creator of our hearts also has a heart. Have you ever wondered what the chief or greatest desire of God’s heart is? That’s what this devotional study is about: what God really wants as His number one desire.
Arguably the best-known verse in the Bible is John 3:16. It may also be the most loved verse. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” The Holy Bible reveals the greatest desire of God’s heart is for us to be reconciled to Him. He is a good God and He loves us. He called Jesus His “beloved Son” yet He gave Him up for us. He wants us to be reconciled to Him and share everlasting life with Him.
But what is everlasting life? Does it simply mean to live forever? Does it mean to live forever with God or does it mean something else? Jesus answers this question in John 17:3: “Now this is eternal life: they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.” Eternal life means to know the only true God and Jesus Christ.
We can know what God and others have revealed about themselves. But knowing someone can mean many different things. It certainly means more than knowing about them. We can know about others through what we read or hear about them. We can assess what they have done and draw our own conclusions. But we don’t have direct access to their hearts. God revealed the greatest desire of His heart through sending His Son to die on the cross for us so that we might know Him (John 3:16). God then gives us access to His heart through His Word and by His Spirit that we might know Him intimately (1 Corinthians 2:1-16).
Jesus continues in John 17:25-26, “O righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me. And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” Jesus also said, “protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so they may be one as we are one” (John 17:11b; NIV). John 17 gives us the answer to what God really wants through Jesus’s great priestly intercessory prayer. God’s greatest desire is for us to know Him and become one with Him.
God created us for Him but He didn’t create us to be robots. He gave each of us a will, a mind, and a heart. He wants us to enter into a voluntary oneness with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He will not force it upon us but will work in our hearts so we desire it. He wants the greatest desire of our hearts to match His - to choose Him and to become one with Him. When He has our hearts, our deepest fulfillment will be realized and we will be at rest in Him. But what hinders this from happening?
First, let us consider what cannot separate us from God’s love. Romans 8:35-39 provides a short list: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written:
‘For Your sake we are killed all day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’
“Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
There is one and only one thing that keeps us from knowing God and from entering into union with Him. It is our sin. As Isaiah 59: 1-3 says, “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; nor His ear heavy, that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so He will not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue has muttered perversity.” Jesus removed that barrier through His death on the cross. He reconciles us to God when we receive Him. But if we walk in darkness our sin blocks our fellowship with God (1 John 1:6-7) even though we may still have a relationship with Him. When we love God, we willingly follow Him. He will not dominate us and compel us to obey Him through fear, intimidation, guilt, or duty.
Sin is more than doing what is morally wrong or failing to do what is morally right. The essence of sin is having a will set at odds with God and His will. We usually want to manage and control our own lives. We do not like others to tell us what to do or to dictate how we are to live. We resist submitting to someone who wants to dominate us. But God’s will is for us to know and become one with Him which requires us to submit to Him. To do this we must first know true freedom and fulfillment come only to those who are willing to submit to Him and to be freed from the tyranny of “self.” But we seem to think we can do a better job than God because we want to run our own lives. God will allow or engineer circumstances in our lives to break us of our self-centered will so that we are willing to follow Him.
Even when we know we need help in managing our lives, we are reluctant to trust someone else. Too often we have been let down. Too often we have been hurt because we have trusted someone else and they have let us down. With good reason, we are not ready to entrust someone else with our lives. But can we trust God and His wisdom? Can we relinquish all control over our lives to God and trust Him to lead us into what is best? Are we willing to trust Him and allow Him to choose for us?
How can we trust God if we do not know Him? And how can we know Him if we do not trust Him? This is another form of the old dilemma: “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” As we perceive God’s love (Romans 5:8; 1 John 4:19), we learn to trust and love Him. Our love for God compels us to obey Him (2 Corinthians 5:14). As we trust and obey God, He continues to reveal Himself and His love. Love, trust, and obedience are linked together with knowing God.
God knows our dilemma and He is willing to meet us where we are. When we come to Him, we are like a newborn baby. He knows we have to learn how to sit before we can stand and stand before we can walk. He also knows the progression of taking baby steps comes before walking with confidence and that walking comes before running. He also knows how to build endurance in us so we can run in a marathon race. Life is like a marathon and God wants us to be free to run with Him. To get there, we need to take things incrementally, starting at where we are now.
As we gradually discover that God is different from others and is trustworthy, we will grow in our willingness and ability to trust Him. Our love for God and trust in Him will grow together. These qualities are displayed to the degree that we learn to obey Him. Our love and trust will grow step-by-step as one act of obedience follows another.
Eventually, we can learn how to habitually obey God and that’s a very good thing! We are truly free when we go with God, obeying Him through easy and difficult situations. He is a patient Father and a good Father. He will continue to work with us to help us get to where He knows we need to go.
God wants us to love Him with all that we are and to trust Him fully. He wants us to become one with Him as Jesus prayed in John 17. He calls us into a holy oneness with the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God really wants us to enjoy this kind of intimacy with Him. As Jesus said, eternal life is for us to know God and Jesus Christ Whom He has sent (John 17:3).
Chapter 1 - What Does God Really Want? Pray, Study, Meditate, and Do
Key Scripture: "After removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him: “I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.” Acts 13:22 (NIV)
Ask God to help you as you work through this devotional study. Feel free to add to or change your answers any time. You are encouraged to write all your answers.
During this week take some time to search your heart before God and discover your greatest desires.
Can you identify your top ten desires? Write as many of them down as you can.
Can you identify your top three desires? If so, write them down.
Can you identify your greatest desire? If so, write it down.
Consider these Bible passages. What do they tell you about some of the desires of God’s heart? Psalm 37:4, Ezekiel 18:32, Hebrews 11:6, Matthew 22: 36-40. Identify and write down God’s desires as expressed in each passage.
Use an Internet search engine or a concordance if necessary and find some other Bible passages speak of desires in the heart of God. Write down the references and identify what desires of God’s heart they identify.
Try to find Bible passages to identify ten of the top desires of God’s heart. Write the references down and what desires they point to.
How do your top desires compare with God’s top desires for you?
Ask God to purify your heart to align your will and desires more closely with His. Look for Him to show you what you can do to cooperate with Him as He purifies your heart.
Ask God to show you a few things you can do to help move your heart toward His heart for you. Write these things down.
Choose one of the things God has shown you and work on making it into a habit and incorporating it into your life. Input it into your mobile device or write it on a 3” by 5” index card and carry it with you. Review it several times a day. See how you do and chart your progress.
Recommended resources and/or projects for those who want to go deeper: Shattered Dreams God’s Unexpected Path to Joy by Dr. Larry Crabb
