Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did > Status Update

JMC: "“Go and make apprentices of all kinds of people.” So read Jesus’ closing words to his apprentices."

Me: See earlier note on Matthew 28. Whether we interpret ethne as nations or ethnicities, Jesus is talking about political groups as political groups here. "Go disciple the nations" (with the nation/families of Gen 10 in the background) is a better understanding than the individualistic one JMC offers here.

JMC: "In Acts 1, the historian Luke wrote, “In my former book [The Gospel of Luke],…I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach.” Note the verb: began. The implication is, this book is about what Jesus’ disciples continue to do and to teach. And that’s exactly how Acts reads, as a continuation of Jesus’ work. All the things you read about Jesus doing in Luke—healing the sick, casting out demons, preaching the gospel—you read about his apprentices doing in Acts."

Me: Yes! Let me both nuance and beat a dying horse some more in the process.

Acts is the story of what Jesus Himself continued to do, but this time through His corporate Body, the Church. When the disciples act, Christ Acts, when they speak, He speaks. When Jesus struck Saul blind on the road to Damascus, who did Christ accuse him of persecuting? "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" (Conversely, when you give a cup of cold water to a Christian, visit a Christian in jail, clothe a Christian, welcome a Christian in, etc., who are you doing these things to? Christ - Matthew 25:40.)

Today as then, Christ continues to bring His dominion, His Kingdom, on earth through His Church, until that day when all the ethne as ethne will pay explicit homage to Him as King of kings and Lord of lords. The Church wins. The gospel of His kingdom goes forth and conquers. Every nation will be a Christian nation as they are baptized into the Triune Name and taught to obey all that He has commanded.

JMC: "Or to be more precise, the kinds of things Jesus would do if he were us? Willard defined a disciple as someone whose ultimate goal is to live their life the way Jesus would live if he were me."

Me: Agreed. "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me" (Gal 2:20). As a member of His Body, joined to Him by the Spirit, what you do in faith and obedience, He does.

JMC: "In Jesus’ incarnation we also see what a real, true human being is like. We see what God had in mind from the beginning—what human beings have the potential to become if reunited with God."

Me: Agreed again. Jesus is the true Image, the perfect likeness, in His humanity (considered in itself) as well as in His Deity. He is the telos of what Adam was created to be, but fell short of.

JMC: "Three basic rhythms of Jesus ministry:
1. Making space for the gospel (hospitality)
2. Preaching the gospel
3. Demonstrating the gospel"#1 "You see, for Rabbi Jesus, meals were not a “boundary marker” but a sign of God’s great welcome into the kingdom; not a way to keep people out, but to invite people in."

Me: As It still is today. Every single week, Jesus Himself invites us to His Table to share this deep, meal-time communion with Him once more.

This is an excellent, excellent section on the power of gracious hospitality in our culture of individualistic isolated unrootedness. Many (the majority of?) people are hungry to the point of near-death starvation, and it's not for food. This section alone might raise this book a star in my overall estimation of it.

JMC: "A few days ago my teenage son came home distraught. “What happened?” I asked. Deep sigh. He had just been walking downtown with a friend and came across a group of Christians preaching “the gospel” on the street corner. It was textbook: They all had signs on poles—a bizarre mix of “Jesus loves you” and dire warnings about the fires of hell. Naturally, there was a bullhorn, and tracts were passed out. The friend he was walking with isn’t a follower of Jesus, and Jude felt the group’s “evangelism” would do nothing but push his friend away from God, not draw him in. Like Jude, many of us cringe just hearing stories like this. These old methods feel tone-deaf and out of touch at best, if not manipulative and cruel. They rarely result in people discovering life through apprenticeship to Jesus."

Me: But they do indeed result in people coming to the faith (I know a few).

These proselytizing groups are being both faithful and loving. They are giving up a lot to spend time trying to turn people back from the path to Hell. JMC may not particularly like their methods (I must admit that I probably wouldn't use them myself), but the accusations of being "tone-deaf and out of touch... if not manipulative and cruel" are way off base. These brothers and sisters in Christ are often simply willing to publicly say what the Bible says is true.

Furthermore, if we are going to "be like Jesus," then it behoove us to speak like Him, and He spoke of the reality of Hell more than all the other references in Scripture combined.

JMC: "That is a jarring inconsistency, but it’s not surprising given our times. We live in a pluralistic, postmodern culture where any form of Christian “proselytizing” is offensive to our modern sensibilities. We’re socially conditioned from a young age to keep our mouths shut about Jesus; “faith is a private, not public, matter,” we’re told. “Who are you to tell me what is true?” is the sentiment. Because any form of truth claims, no matter how graciously presented, pass implicit judgment on other truth claims. And what is secular culture but a dizzying bazaar of competing truth claims?"

Me: Here again I find myself swinging wildly back to something I could not possibly say "Amen!" loud enough to. JMC is right over the target here.

JMC: "The question is not, Are you preaching the gospel? It’s, What gospel are you preaching?

The gospel of third-wave anti-racism? Or LGBTQI+ pride? Or democratic socialism? Or American nationalism? Or free-market capitalism? Or cold-water therapy or intermittent fasting or the keto diet or mindfulness or new wave psychedelics?

All of these are “gospels”—they are messages about where our hopes lie, where human history is going, what the dangers are, where salvation is to be found, where we can find community, and how to live a good life and become a good person."

Me: This is a paragraph that I myself would and probably have written before somewhere. Everyone has a gospel, born from the story they think they are in, a path they believe will save them, and they convey that belief to others by their words, actions, and life choices. What you believe gives you life you cannot possibly help but share.

JMC: "Mark summarizes the gospel as “The kingdom of God has come near.” Paul’s one-line summary is “Jesus is Lord” (another way of saying the same thing).

The gospel is that Jesus is the ultimate power in the universe and that life with him is now available to all. Through his birth, life, teachings, miracles, death, resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Spirit, Jesus has saved, is saving, and will save all creation. And through apprenticeship to Jesus, we can enter into this kingdom and into the inner life of God himself. We can receive and give and share in Love Loving. We can be a part of a community that Jesus is, ever so slowly, forming into a radiant new society of peace and justice that one day will co-govern all creation with the Creator, in an eternity of ever-unfolding creativity and growth and joy. And anyone can be a part of this story."

Me: I would have disagreed with this a few years ago as I had a more narrow view of the Gospel at the time, but I have come to believe that JMC is entirely correct here. I might put different emphases in places, but the same structure is there.

JMC: 5 Best Practices for Preaching the Gospel:
1.) Offer hospitality
2.) Find where God is already working and join Him
3.) Bear witness
4.) Do the stuff (manifest extraordinary gifts of the Spirit)
5.) Live a beautiful life

Me: I praised point 1 above. Point 2 is great for personalities that lack the initiative to start new things. Point 3 is inevitable to the process. We must actually open our mouths and speak of the hope we have in Christ.

As for Point 4: Though I believe the sign gifts as spiritual gifts (consciously activated Spirit-appointed abilities intended to build up the Body of Christ) served their purpose in "the Last Days" and now ceased, I do in no way limit the ability of God to extraordinarily manifest His power today in these and other ways. Thus, I'm not adverse to the idea of "do the stuff" in general, though as it is sporadic from our own vantage point, it wouldn't show up in my own "Best Practices for Preaching the Gospel" list.

JMC: "A better way to read the dramatic stories of Jesus is as signs of the inbreaking kingdom of God. Jesus healing the sick, delivering the demonized, feeding the hungry, standing up to injustice—this is all what Isaiah and the prophets said would happen when the kingdom finally arrived."

Me: Agreed. No notes.

JMC: Jesus's Four Signs
1.) Healing
2.) Deliverance
3.) Prophecy
4.) Justice (making wrong things right)

"The apostle Paul called this “prophecy,” and he seemed to assume (and I’m thinking of 1 Corinthians 12–14 here) that the same Spirit that was on Moses and Jesus and all the prophets is now on us, and that, in a similar, though less potent way, we can speak a word to others from God. This rarely means we hear an audible voice from the sky; normally it’s simply a feeling or a thought that comes to mind—a word, phrase, scripture, or picture…We then get to humbly offer that word or impression to others, in love."

"Just the other day, I was in the throes of a major decision, praying to God for clear direction. As I was praying, I got a message from a friend on the other side of the world with a “word” he felt was of the Spirit for me. It was uncanny. The language and the imagery he used were all straight out of my prayer time, and he had no clue I was even making a decision."

Me: My position on this has softened somewhat over the years, as my view of a mechanical universe has been slowly replaced by that of a spiritually porous cosmos, but I still have two important qualifications: First, we are not to sit around waiting for a "sign" or a "prophetic word" before we choose to act. Second, these notions are never authoritative. If JMC would have listened to his friend, recognized the supernatural nature of the conversatiom, and then chosen to do the exact opposite anyway, he would by no means be in sin, disobedient, unwise, or walking outside of God's plan/will for his life by doing so.


JMC: "Christ has no body on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassionately on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours!

But in Paul’s theology, we are the body—not you, not me… Us, together."

Me: I have written as much many times throughout these notes. I wish this corporate Body idea would be integrated quite a lot more into JMC's "Be with Jesus" section. Yes we flow outward into the world as the Body, but we can also only truly experience our belonging and undergo our becoming with and as the Body.

JMC: "The way we turn our work from “marking time” into “ministry” isn’t by becoming a pastor or starting a nonprofit; it’s by doing whatever we do the way we imagine Jesus would do it if he were us—with skill, diligence, integrity, humility, the kingdom’s ethics, and so on. It’s also by doing our work very well."

Me: Very much agreed. I recommend Doug Wilson's book, "Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work and Wealth" to put some meat on the bones of this excellent teaching.

JMC: "Be with Jesus and Become like him can skew a little more inward, but Do as he did is unmistakably outward. And there is a tension, for sure, between “the contemplative life,” as earlier generations called it, and “the active life.” But it’s a healthy tension, a both-and. After all, the opposite of contemplation is not action but reaction."

Me: My well-documented aversion towards drawing from anything inward should be obvious by now.

Concluding thoughts so far: I have been far more aligned with this chapter than the two before it. Not much to say other than to once again praise JMC's "Hospitality" section. We, the Church, must get back to being a people who regularly (weekly, at least) invite others into our homes to eat with them, just as our Lord invites us weekly into His presence to eat with Him.