GROWING SAINTS: MAKE DISCIPLES, NOT JUST CONVERTS!

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General John Gowans (1934-2012), the 16^th international leader of The Salvation Army, once said, “The Salvation Army was invented to save souls, grow saints, and serve suffering humanity.”  The same may be said for the church universal regardless of doctrine or denominational distinctives.  The fact is that these three aspects of mission are not to be separate initiatives, but a continuum of conviction and covenant for all Christians and every faith community.  When people come to faith in Christ, it is the mission and obligation of every Christian to help new believers become established in the Kingdom.  The ministry of every faith community is to come along side of new followers of Christ to help them stay on the journey with Christ, and to help them get beyond the siren songs of temptation and sin to a spiritual place of power over sin.

The challenge is to help saved souls to grow on to become mature, Spirit-filled disciples who can disciple others.  This means tossing out the self-serving idea that the only importance to becoming a Christian is to get saved and go to heaven, and maybe even save others who can go to heaven.  Getting into heaven is not the goal of the Kingdom.  Such a goal is self-serving and narrow-minded.  As someone said, "It's getting heaven into us."  The actual goal is Christ-likeness and purity of heart, filled with the Holy Spirit “to the measure of the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).  Why?  So that then God can do immeasurably more that we could ask or imagine. (Ephesians 3:20&21). Ultimately, the goal is glory to God. In other words, the goal is to multiply Spirit guided, Spirit compelled, Spirit empowered servants whose service brings glory to God, who let their light shine in such a way, the way of holiness, that seeing the glory of God is inescapable.

So we take Jesus seriously (Matthew 28:18-20).  Faithfully, we lovingly obey Christ’s Great Commission.  We make disciples.  It is a directive, not a great suggestion take it or leave it.  It means making disciples not just converts.  It means walking along side new believers to help them make a decision of faith and repentance, and then to continue the journey with them as they become rooted and established, built-up, mature in Christ, and transformed by the Holy Spirit, restored to the image of God (Imago Dei).  This is the calling of every Christian, to spiritually reproduce and grow saints who reproduce and grow more saints.

So then, just as you received Christ as Lord, continue to live in him,

Rooted and built-up in him, strengthened in the faith as you

were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

Colossians 2:6&7

Come to the Growing Saints Conference, January 29&30, 2016
https://www.asbury.edu/salvationa…/growing-saints-conference

THE WAY SOCIAL HOLINESS WORKS

The Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is social in nature.  While the three in one nature is a mystery, what is amazing is that God’s love seeks to draw us into the social life of the Trinity.  Our life in Christ is social, that is to say dynamic, interactive, interpersonal, intimate, collective, and filled with loving fellowship.  That is because at the very heart of life is the holy, love of God. For God so loved the world, loved us so much, that he took sacrificial action on our behalf (John 1:14).  Christ’s life and death was a labor and offering of unreserved love for us.  The gift of God’s very self at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, was a gift of perfect love, holy and pure.  The entire story of God and man is a love story, a social narrative of God’s grace and our response over millennia.  It is a story of God’s great gift of our restoration to holiness, his likeness and infilling.  It is a story of how God deploys human agency to make possible a full salvation.  Its a story of the way social holiness works.

Here is a snapshot of how God’s love is passed to us and then from us to others.  It is a snapshot of the social nature of holiness.  I’ve known Dr. David Rightmire nearly all my life.  I first met him at his sister’s birthday party in Waltham, Massachusetts when he was five years old and I was eight.  While we have traveled different paths over the years, we now live in the same town (Wilmore, Kentucky) only a block from each other and enjoy a renewed friendship.  David is a professor at Asbury University.  He is a highly respected teacher and scholar.  He is the author of Sanctified Sanity: The Life and Theology of Samuel Logan Brengle.  Brengle was a Salvation Army officer and a renowned proponent of Wesleyan Holiness in the early twentieth century.  David’s writing on Brengle is a labor of love, a gift of knowledge to others.  His book is so well written, covering the life and theology of Brengle, that after reading it I gave a copy to my daughter and son, and more recently to my

daughter-in-law.

My daughter read Sanctified Sanity thoroughly then took up reading Brengle’s Helps to Holiness and other books.  She began telling her husband about Brengle and gave him a copy of the book as a gift.  He then shared Brengle with four of his friends: a pastor, and three seminary students. This led the five of them to use Brengle’s writings on holiness as the focus of their weekly Bible study on early Friday mornings.  How wonderful! 

David’s labor of love, Sanctified Sanity, is now  available in a revised and expanded edition.  I expect it will be passed on to others inspiring a renewed interest in the writings of Samuel Logan Brengle, God’s remarkable soldier/saint.  This is how social holiness works. It moves from the love of the writer to the reader.  In love the reader passes the Good News of a full salvation exposited by Brengle to others  so, they too may be “filled to the measure of the fullness of God” (Ephesians 2:19), and then share the message of that fullness with yet others.  Thanks be to God for his unimaginable gifts that keep on giving!

That we might be partakers of the divine nature.

2 Peter 1:4

THE POTTER'S WHEEL

After thirty-one years, I still have the small, lovely vase I bought in Beijing, China in 1984.  It is only clay, but the potter shaped it to be both functional and beautiful.  I treasure it for its beauty and its capacity to bring back memories of that first trip.  It also reminds me of two verses in the Bible about the Potter and clay:

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father.

We are the clay. You are the potter;

we are the work of your hand.

Isaiah 64:8

Then the word of the Lord came to me:

O house of Israel, can I not do with you

as the potter does?  Declares the Lord.

Like clay in the hand of the potter,

so are you in my hand.

Jeremiah 18:5&6

The Bible is the Living Word.  It had meaning and purpose in Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s day, and so it does for us today.  If we will, God will take the clay of our lives and shape it into vessels to be “filled to the measure of the fullness of God” as we read in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (3:19), filled with the Holy Spirit, God’s essence, pure love.  God wills to do this, to shape us and fill us with himself for service for him to others, and ultimately for his glory.

I truly love the metaphor of the Potter and the clay and the accompanying idea of being shaped into a vessel both functional and beautiful.  Only recently has another dimension of the metaphor come to mind.  It is that of the Potter’s wheel.  God can do anything on his own, but as the Potter he chooses to place the clay of our lives on Potter’s wheels.  In other words, he uses human agency, social contexts, and circumstances to shape us with competence and character after his likeness. 

The Extended Raymond Family Potter's Wheel

What are some of the wheels that the Potter uses to express his loving creativity?  Every afternoon, Irene and I care for our little twenty-one month old grandson.  What a joy! The first Potter’s wheel is family.   Family life shapes the clay in Jesus name.  Families can be contexts of health or toxic.  So may schools, summer camps, community centers, churches, youth groups, colleges, and universities.  Just this past week, Irene and I returned from Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada) visiting The Salvation Army William and Catherine Booth University College (Booth College for short) where I spoke at their graduation.  Without question, Booth UC is a potter’s wheel, as are Asbury University,  Trinity Western University, and other Christ-centered institutions of higher higher education.  Their graduates choose to place themselves on a Potter’s wheel for four years.  Their opportunity is value-added because it is the Potter’s wheel. His hands and the college wheel itself is the human agency of faculty, staff, and leadership that continue to be shaped themselves as clay in the Potter’s hands.

I realize now that, if we are remain all throughout life in the Potter’s hands, He will continue the creative work of shaping, filling, and using us for the coming of His Kingdom and for the glory due His name.

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.

Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me.

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.

(then)

Make me a blessing, humble and meek,

Lord may I lift up those who are weak,

And may the prayer of my heart always be,

Make me a blessing (x2), I pray.