Deliberate Discipleship: Forming Mind and Heart

Do you remember learning how to read? If you think back, you learned letters and then letter sounds. I can remember dancing with these inflatable letter people when I was in Kindergarten as the record player played songs with alliteration – Mr. T had tall teeth, terrifically tall, so tall it takes his toothbrush two-hundred twenty-two turns from the top of the tip to the tip of the top of each tooth, and that’s the tall truth. Good news, for those of you who just had a moment of nostalgia, the full record is on YouTube…you can brush up on your letter people! But once you learn the letters and their sounds, you don’t just sit down with a book and start reading, do you? Now, you probably have some sight words, I don’t remember having those. But now, students start memorizing those common words that are easier to just learn by look than by sounding out. “the, and, is, with…” Finally, you start putting those sounds together…one sound linking to the next sound…slowly at first…and faster and faster. Until you recognize the word – ah, now it has meaning. But in the beginning, it is so slow that the words don’t link together into sentences…they are just words. The…d-o-g…s-a-t…on…the…f-r-o-g. At first, it is so slow, we don’t even laugh at the ridiculous sentences we are reading, because we don’t link those words together in a meaningful way…we don’t draw a mental picture of what we are saying…we are working so hard just to get the sounds into words.

In our passage this morning, Paul is telling the church at Philippi that they have a journey to take. They have accepted Jesus as Lord. They are worshiping God. But, they aren’t living like Jesus. The journey of discipleship is a journey to having the mind of Christ, and it is a lot like learning to read. We begin with children with stories that are concrete – Adam and Eve in the Garden – Jonah and the Whale – The Boy Who Shared His Lunch. Then we add some moral lessons to the stories- Adam and Eve had a choice to make, and bad choices have consequences. Good choices are important. Jonah was told by God to do something he didn’t want to do. Bad things happened when he ran away and eventually he did what God wanted him to do. Obedience is important. A boy who had come to listen to Jesus had the only food in a huge crowd, but when he offered the little he had to Jesus, there was more than plenty for all. Sharing is important.

At this point, it is like we know how to read the words, one at a time, and we can form a mental image of the word. When I sound out d-o-g, I can connect those sounds in my mind to a four-legged animal that barks. When I sound out f-r-o-g, I can connect those sounds in my mind to a four-legged animal that hops. But, we aren’t yet seeing the full picture of the dog sitting on the frog. We see this story – Adam and Eve in the Garden – and we see the story of The Boy Who Shared His Lunch, but we don’t see how they relate. Which story is older? Who told it? What are the similarities and differences in the creation stories and in the feeding miracle stories? What might those similarities and differences tell us? Over time, as we practice reading, we begin to understand stories. The sentences turn into paragraphs and the paragraphs into chapters and the chapters into novels…and eventually all those words come together into one. Have you ever read a book that when you got to the end, you just couldn’t shake the story? It stayed with you, you continued to process it, to wonder about the characters, to wish you knew more? The Bible is like that. Over time, as we practice reading the stories, those stories meld together into one – the whole arc of the relationship between God and us – and they shape and form our heart and our minds.

And just like you can’t get to know a character in a novel until you read the novel, you can’t get to know God until you read the Bible. Deliberate disciples study. The best place to start is to start reading about Jesus, God-with-us. Jesus is our example. So, we study not only Jesus, but ourselves. We have four gospels, four stories about Jesus’ life: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and just like you or I would include or leave out, or even know, different stories about a friend or a family member if we were to tell their life story, each of the gospels about Jesus’ life is told a little differently from the others. Luke’s Gospel gives us the story of Jesus’ birth, “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed…” That’s not in the other Gospels. Luke also tells us about Mary and Martha, Zacchaeus, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, Jesus’ conversation with the criminals crucified with Jesus, the Emmaus Road encounter with the risen Christ, that we wouldn’t know if we only read the other Gospels. These stories reveal to us Christ’s mind and heart toward others and leave us wanting to know more, pondering how Jesus would respond to situations we face in our world; considering how we will respond, is our heart like Jesus’ heart? Our mind like the mind of Christ?

This morning, I invite and challenge you, if you aren’t already engaging Scripture, if you don’t already have a small group, to deliberately set out on the journey of discipleship with the Gospel of Luke. Luke is 24 chapters long, and there are 24 weeks left in this Christian year. The Christian year begins at Advent, this year it is November 28th. We will read a chapter each week and reflect on what it means for our lives. Our question each week as we read the chapter will be “What does this story tell me about the mind of Christ, and what would it mean for me to have that mind?”

Journeys are best taken in groups, so I encourage you to text or phone a friend or two and invite them to join you. You can set a time to call each week, or if it is someone you work with, maybe you have a Friday morning chat over coffee, or maybe your family will decide read the chapter together and discuss it. I will be posting my reflections on the Farmington Presbyterian Facebook page each week, and I hope you will engage there with your thoughts and share with your friends.

As Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and they received the commands for how to live, they were to be on their hearts. And to get them on their hearts, they were to talk about them when they sat at home and when they walked along the road, when they lay down and when they got up. They were to put them where they couldn’t miss them and would see them over and over: to tie them as symbols on their hands and their foreheads, and write them on the doorframes of their houses and on their gates. They were to put tassels on their clothes to see and hold and remember. In Christ, we receive those commands in the form of a person, Jesus. And we are to so embody his ways that they are our ways. We are to so know his mind that our mind is rewritten, so that our thoughts are his thoughts.

And we begin by knowing Jesus, by studying his actions and his life, and by studying our own hearts and minds, that they may be formed more and more into his likeness. A friend of mine shared with me her experience of reading with her daughter night after night at bedtime. Halting, word after word, until one night, the words fell into place. My friend exclaimed, “It was like a miracle!” May we study Jesus’ life, night after night, day after day, halting, action after action, until – like a miracle – our minds are Christ’s mind. Amen.