Our spiritual life is a journey: a journey of grace. It begins when we hear God’s call to come and follow Him, to put our faith in Jesus Christ. This was true in the life of Simon Peter. One day, he was cleaning his fishing nets with his brother, Andrew. Jesus looked at them and invited them to come and follow Him. Immediately, Peter and Andrew left everything and followed Jesus. That decision changed their lives.

As I began serving as the global director of Sunday School and Discipleship Ministries International (SDMI) in August 2018, many people asked me, “When you speak about discipleship, what do you mean by ‘discipleship’? Do you mean ‘Sunday School’? Do you mean small groups? Or do you mean ‘one-on-one mentoring’?” I have wondered if they asked me that in order to see what “camp” I fell into so they could decide if I was worth listening to. Their questions, however, revealed that we had a problem.

The topic of discipleship immediately brings my childhood to mind. I was fortunate to be discipled by my parents. My parents’ lives modeled incarnational discipleship. The activities of the week and the family conversations around the table pointed each of us toward Christ. If there was a formal discipleship plan, we never saw it, but we knew the lessons by heart. It was who we were and what we did as Christians.

As I look back at my life, I can clearly see three patterns in the way my parents discipled us: presence, passion, perseverance.

Presence

Jewish tradition refers to Deuteronomy 6:4-5 as the Shema. Shema is a Hebrew word that means “hear” and is the first word in this Jewish text: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” Jesus, of course, quoted the Shema when He was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” Adding the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), Jesus revealed that all of the other commandments flow from these two—love God and love others.

Last spring, as I walked through our garden, I was thrilled to see the fast-growing tomato plants and the size of the fruit they produced. After several weeks of tending, weeding, and watering, the day came when the tomatoes were ripe and ready to pick. Walking carefully through the tomato vines, I picked several plump, red tomatoes; I thought back to my childhood and the big, lush gardens my parents grew. They always enjoyed gardening, and the fruit from their efforts was a blessing to our family as we sat down to enjoy meals together.

Coram Deo is a Latin expression that means one is before the face of God. What happens when we are in the presence of God? In Isaiah chapter 6, we see the prophet before God: Coram Deo. This experience incites despair in him. As he faced the Lord, he was so aware of his impurity that he thought he would not be able to continue living. “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5). This is no ordinary event.

Regeneration is an act of God who, by grace, gives new life to those who are dead in sin.¹  The worldwide body of faith identified as the Church of the Nazarene accepts that God graciously livens those who have been spiritually dead in sin. Essentially, regeneration addresses the idea that a person is given new life through the love of the Father, the complete and finished work of Christ on the cross, and the resurrection work of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:11).

James K.A. Smith opens his wonderful and ground-breaking book on worship and formation, Desiring the Kingdom, by inviting readers to imagine that alien anthropologists from Mars come to earth to study every aspect of humanity. Because they are especially interested in what humanity worships and venerates, they follow a large group of people into what they believe to be a sanctuary.

My great grandfather was a sharecropper in Southeastern Alabama, near the Georgia state line. He rented a small piece of land to work, and in return, he would give a portion of his crop to the landowner at the end of each year. My great grandfather decided he wanted a better life for his family than the poverty-stricken fields in the deep South, so he found a job in the cotton mill. Later, my grandfather began working there as well. After one shift, my grandfather realized that was not where he wanted to spend his life—he wanted to continue the pattern of making life better for his family.

Reinhold Niebuhr once stated that original sin “is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”¹ By this he meant that we only need to look at human history to believe in the reality of original sin. This doctrine goes all the way back to the garden of Eden where we encounter our first parents—Adam and Eve. In Romans 3:23, Paul made clear that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Paul described sin as “missing the mark.” According to Paul, this is the state of all of humanity.