Answer: Biblical references to discipleship = 0. References to discipleship w/o biblical references = 8,440,000. In my repentance, I will substitute the appropriate ‘biblical’ phrase in place of ‘discipleship.’

Walking down the street, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?” Jesus said, “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do. We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world’s Light. (John 9:1-5 The Message)

I believe discipleship (the life of Christ) happens in our everyday, ordinary lives. It happens in our sleeping, eating, working, and walking-around as we discover how radically differently God thinks. Our passage today illustrates this idea.

As Jesus and His disciples were doing their everyday walking around, they encountered a sad situation: a man who had been blind from birth.

In the course of their conversation the perceived cause of this man’s circumstance comes up. The disciples, to a man, trace this poor beggar’s curse of blindness to sin—his or his parents’. Jesus chides them and says they’re missing it. He informs them that this illness is not a sin problem and that there are no humans to blame.  Jesus implies that their wrong thinking will lead to bad decisions. (If you want to explore this story in greater depth, you can go to the archives of MwM and check out “Listening To God (Saturday) – 2 Chronicles 7:11-22.”)

Jesus brings them to a fork in the road. One sign points to the left; it says, “Blame It on Man’s Fallen Nature.” The sign that points right says, “What God Can Do?” This intersection was further complicated because there was another fork whose signage read, “Somebody Else’s Problem.”

We may not always be conscious of it, but, in light of God’s intimate awareness of our lives, discipleship (Christ’s life) is always underway—or at least it can be if we have ears to hear. Again, whether we are conscious of it or not, I believe we each have an ongoing conversation with God. He sees to it that we always encounter impossible situations and that, in each one of them, we make a decision. So let’s review four principles of discipleship (living in Christ) our passage flushes out:

1) God is intimately involved in the ordinary stuff of our lives.

2) Better listening permits us to join the conversation.

3) God invites us to intentionally engage our personal Missions Impossible.

4) It is Father’s way to bring us to crossroads where our decisions are our responses to Jesus as Lord.

There is another word in this passage that should greatly impact the choices we make. It is the word “we.”  

 We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world’s Light. (John 9 The Message)

Jesus’ use of “we” effectively rules out the Somebody-Else’s-Problem trail. He was trying to say that blindness and human suffering are our problems and that dealing with them is the work of Jesus and his disciples. I think it would be fair to say that Jesus’ life was our illustration of what it looks like when he answers the prayer: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In other words, healing is a work of God that we need to energetically pursue while the sun still shines. Jesus is telling us that He and His disciples (which can include us) are living within a window of opportunity:

 When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world’s Light. (John 9:4 🙂  The Message)

I see many who have taken the trail that limits the Holy Spirit to being the interpreter of scripture. This path applies scriptural principles to the fallen nature of man as if this is the primary business of God in the earth. While I love and respect this part of the family, I can’t follow this trail because Jesus said it would be expedient that He send us a Helper when there was, as yet, no Bible. So the Spirit’s helping must have been in the doing of all the works that Jesus demonstrated. The Spirit didn’t sit around waiting until the canon of scripture was formed so he could finally get to work interpreting it.

Is it possible that redemption is providentially hidden in the seemingly random circumstances of our lives? Is it possible that, where evil and impossible circumstances seem to abound—that grace and redemption are actually present—even in the potentially impossible circumstances, in the all-the-more capacity Jesus’ promised?

When will our night fall? Will it be as we draw our last earthly breath or when we are snatched up in to the air? We don’t know the answer, but Jesus’ point is that as long as we are drawing breath, our window of opportunity to do the works of God is still open. The Holy Spirit, who remains in the world, provides plenty of light for the remaining works we’ve been called to do.  He’s the world’s light and He resides in us.  Let the work continue.

Father, help us to see our destinies as Your Kingdom agents called to reconcile this world to Your rule. Help us to expose the bullying administrators of darkness, who press their lie upon us that not all things are possible with You. Help us to see the lies beneath futility, bad theology, and all hopeless circumstances.  Help us to be those who energetically work the works of God. Thank you for sending us the Spirit to work in and through us while the sun still shines. Amen.

Note: I have only recently caught my error. I would like to disavow my use of the word ‘discipleship’  and apply ‘Christ’s’ life retroactively to MwM. While ‘discipleship’ sounds right (after all there were disciples) there is a great risk that one or more (or all) of the 8,444,00 hits will imply that a mature Christian is the byproduct of some patentable process. I don’t believe the original 12 ever thought about their experience with Jesus or the Holy Spirit as ‘discipleship’. We probably shouldn’t either. My supplemental prayer is…

Father, may the life of your son, in all its mystery and majesty, eclipse every man made notion of Christianity. All to your glory, forevermore. Amen.

 

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