The Complete Book of Discipleship - Hull

The following are excerpts from my readings over the sabbatical. The following excerpts come from Bill Hull’s book, The Complete Book of Discipleship. I hope these help you as you consider what it means to follow Jesus.

We don’t just amble our way into discipleship. We make a conscious decision to live by faith. We agree to join others who’ve committed to follow Jesus rather than try to lead Jesus. We fundamentally give up the right to run our own life. In other words, you can follow your heart, your dreams, your gifts, your personality profile, and seek the right fit. But all that’s inferior to following Jesus.
(119)

Saying no to self in order to say yes to God. The only righteous role of self-denial is to eliminate any obstacle that blocks saying yes to God. When my will conflicts with his will, self-denial makes following his will possible. Jesus wants me to deny myself the right to be in charge of my own life.
(121-122)

First we choose the life. We set aside any competing priorities and follow Jesus. Then he reveals our mission en route.

When we wait at the entrance to the path of obedience for full instructions before we start walking, we can never find our mission. That knowledge is found only en route.

By accepting non-discipleship Christianity, many people don’t have a mission. So they sit in the pew and wait. All those missions never completed – what a tragic loss to people’s lives, and how much poorer it has left the church and the society we live in.
(124-125)

Accompanying Mother Teresa, as we did, to these different activities
for the purpose of filming them – to the Home for the Dying, to the
lepers and the unwanted children, I found I went through three phases.
The first was the horror mixed with pity; the second, compassion, pure
and simple; and the third, reaching far beyond compassion, something
I had never experienced before – an awareness of these dying, and
derelict men and women, these lepers with stumps instead of hands,
these unwanted children, were not pitiable, repulsive or forlorn, but
rather dear and delightful; as it might be, friends of long standing,
brothers and sisters. How is it to be explained – the very heart and
mystery of the Christian faith? To soothe those battered old heads,
to grasp those poor stumps, to take in one’s arms those children
consigned to dust bins, because it is His head, as they are His stumps
and His children, of whom He said whosoever received one such
child in His name received me.
Malcolm Muggeridge (132-133)

I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are
turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into
something a little different from what it was before. And taking
your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your
life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a
Heaven creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature
that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with
itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with
God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one
kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and
knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror,
idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at
each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

C. S. Lewis (138)

Training, not trying: I think we should outlaw “trying.” Trying occurs when disciples try to reach a goal without the proper tools. Training, however, means that we commit to rearrange our lives around the practices of Jesus. We don’t try to practice spiritual disciplines: fasting, silence, solitude, chastity, sacrifice, study, and so forth. Instead, because Jesus practiced them, we train in spiritual disciplines. We’ve answered the call to follow him and to learn from him, so we want to live our life the way Jesus lived his. And over time, through a patient process, we allow the positive effects of discipline to change us.
(143)

. . . you can’t give yourself as a sacrifice and at the same time manage your image.

(144)

. . . Jesus led with weakness, failure, and rejection. He moved straight into everything that the human spirit naturally abhors. An attitude of willingness is the rite of passage to ministering as Jesus ministered, to following in his footsteps, to giving ourselves for others. As an associate of Mother Teresa once commented, “She is free to be nothing; therefore, God can use her for anything.”
(146)

Trust is key, because we only take in the truth we trust. And that trust has to do with the messenger as much as the message. When you trust someone to the point you become vulnerable, you’re giving that person permission to speak into your life. This is where transformation traction takes place.
(156)

Just as humility is Jesus’ primary character trait, it should be the foundation we build on as we seek to follow him and be formed into his image. Think of it this way: without humility, there’s no submission; without submission, relationships of trust can’t exist; without relationships of trust, we won’t make ourselves vulnerable; without vulnerability, no one can influence us; and without influence, we won’t change.

Submission means saying, “I choose to let others love me.”
(158-159)

In fact, the most pressing need in most local congregations is that we own the truth that all of us are ministers. It seems that most Christians believe they’re consumers. They see their faith and life in the community of their congregation as a way to receive benefits from Christ, a way to set some sore of “get into heaven” card that salvation provides. This leads to acceptance of non-discipleship Christianity.
(172)

Eugene Peterson put it bluntly when asked if the church can reform:

Hasn’t happened. I’m for always reforming, but to think that we can
get a church reformed is just silliness . . . We have a goal. We have a
mission. We’re going to save the world. We’re going to evangelize
everybody, and we’re going to do all this stuff and fill our churches.
This is wonderful. All the goals are right. But this is slow, slow
work; this is soul work, this bringing people into a life of obedience
and love and joy before God. And we get impatient and start
taking shortcuts and use any means available. We talk about
benefits. We manipulate people. We bully them. We use
language that is just incredibly impersonal – bullying language,
manipulative language.
(173)

The world needs more than the secret holiness of individual
inwardness. It needs more than sacred sentiments and good
intentions. God asks for the heart because he needs lives. It
is by lives that the world will be redeemed, by lives that beat in
concordance with God, by deeds that outbeat the finite charity
of the human heart. Man’s power of action is less vague than
his power of intention. And an action has intrinsic meaning;
its value to the world is independent of what it means to the
person performing it. The giving of good to the helpless
child is meaningful regardless of whether or not the moral
intention is present. God asks for the heart, and we must
spell our answer in terms of deeds.
Abraham Joshua Heschel (181)

We make a conscious decision to live by . . . (Jesus’) pattern of life: a life of submission, sacrifice, and obedience, built on a foundation of humility.

This part of the process both marks the starting line and represents the essence of discipleship. We make following Jesus our life’s goal and intent. Faith is following and following is faith. The first action requires creating time and space to train. We don’t try to become like Jesus; instead we make a commitment to train to become the kind of person who naturally does what Jesus would do.

Mission refers to God’s mystery that you only find yourself when you lose yourself in serving others. . . Perhaps the greatest sacrifice is giving up the right to run our own lives, putting to death the dream of creating our agenda and of being in control.
(191-192)