Status Updates From Habits of Grace: Enjoying J...

In fact, it is likely the days when you feel strongest personally, and most spiritually accomplished, that you’re most prone to walk in your own strength, rather than by the strength that God supplies (1 Pet. 4:11).

You could read all the passages, give time to extensive journaling in meditation and prayer, work at length on memorizing Scripture, and easily move right into a day of walking in your own strength and not dying to selfish interests to anticipate and act to meet the needs of others.

Bible meditation is not about checking boxes, but communion with the risen Christ in and through his word. Walking in his grace today is not dependent on you going through your full devotional routine, or any routine for that matter. It is the regular pattern of communion with Christ that is vital, not extended time on one particular day.

Someone needs to stop me from starting new books

Making disciples is a great means of God’s ongoing grace in the life of the one doing the discipling.

This means good disciplemaking is always a two-way street. The “disciple” and the “discipler” are most fundamentally disciples of Jesus. And so, as Stephen Smallman says, “Our involvement in making disciples will be one of the most significant things we can do for our own growth as disciples.” It’s like any subject; we get it better ourselves when we teach it to others.

The discipler’s own enjoyment of the means of grace (word, prayer, and fellowship) serves to fuel him spiritually for pouring out into others. However, disciplemaking is the very stuff of Christian fellowship, and every believer, indwelt by God’s Spirit, can be a channel of God’s grace to anyone else.

Disciplemaking is the process in which a maturing believer invests himself, for a particular period of time, in one or just a few younger believers, in order to help their growth in the faith—including helping them also to invest in others who will invest in others.

We will only go so deep with Jesus until we start yearning to reach out. When our life in him is healthy and vibrant, we not only ache to keep sinking our roots down deep in him, but we also want to stretch out our branches and extend his goodness to others. But not only does going deep with Jesus soon lead us to reach out to others, but also reaching out leads us deeper with him.

‘If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one,’ says D. A. Carson, ‘it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.’ But however difficult it may be, if we really believe that we all are sinners and that unchecked sin leads to pain and misery and eternal destruction, love will constrain us to give the gift of loving reproof.

One of the most loving things we can do for each other in the church is tell each other when we’re wrong. Call it correction, reproof, or rebuke … but don’t miss what makes it distinctively Christian, and a gift to our souls: It is a great act of love. The kind of rebuke that the Scriptures commend is the kind intended to stop us from continuing on a destructive path.

The key principles of the means of grace are Jesus’s voice (word), his ear (prayer), and his body (church). The various disciplines and practices, then—our habits of grace—are ways of hearing him (his word), and responding (in prayer) to him, in the context of his people (the church).