This Sunday is the Austin City Life Worship EP release! Lamar Stockton and the Resonate band, as well as JJ Plasencio and the Gateway Band will open. If you are in Austin, plan on joining us for a night of vibrant worship at The Parish, 6pm this Sunday!
Preview the entire EP for free at My Space.
More details on the album here.
Boundless is running a new article (Failed Disciple), a version of a post I wrote a few weeks back on Creation Project called Confessions of a Failed Disciple. This article was adapted from the introduction to my forthcoming book Fight Club: Gospel-centered Discipleship, which is getting very close to being finished! An excerpt from the article:
“Along the way, I’ve come to understand that following Jesus alone is not really what it means to be a disciple. Both the church and the parachurch taught me that being a disciple means making disciples. I was told that this meant two primary things. First, I should be active in “sharing my faith.” Second, I should find Christians who are younger in the faith to tell and show what it means to be older in the faith.
It took me quite a while to realize that this practice of making disciples was incomplete. Making disciples requires not only “sharing my faith,” but also sharing my life — failures and successes, disobedience and obedience.
Making disciples is not code for evangelism, nor is it a spiritual system whereby professional Christians pass on best practices to novice Christians.”
We need the prayers (and the wisdom) of elderly saints. My wife has befriended an elderly saint. We will call her Emma. Robie visits Emma with our two kids. It’s good for them because the average age in our church is about 30. Emma seems to really enjoy their visits too. Recently, Emma sent Robie this email containing a prayer for our church:
As I continue to read through A Praying Life, I find myself pausing, repenting, rejoicing, deepening in prayer. In the chapter “Spending Time with Your Father”, Miller makes the point that Jesus acted like a child. Whenever asked about his Father, his comments were laced with affectionate dependency and admiration. Was this Jesus just “saying the spiritual thing, the right thing”? After all, he is Jesus; isn’t he powerful enough to do all the miracles on his own, to fulfill his calling on his own?
Miller asserts that “Jesus was the most dependent human being who ever lived.” Why? Because his entire sense of self is not self-reliant, self-centered. Rather, Jesus is because the Father and the Spirit are.
Unlike us, “Jesus has no separate sense of self, he has no identity crisis, no angst. Consequently, he doesn’t try to ‘find himself’. He knows himself only in relationship with his Father. He can’t conceive of himself outside of that relationship.
Here we have a very practical unpacking of perichoresis. Prayer was a constant expression of his identity as Jesus-in-relationship-with-the-Father. There is no other Jesus. Our trouble is that we have a self that is created out of relationship with the Father, a sinful, self-reliant not God-reliant self. Prayer returns us to our proper place of self, restores our identity as Jonathan-in-relationship-with-Father-Son-Spirit. Prayer reminds us of who we really are, where we find our identity, where we are most loved and best fathered. We spend time alone with God in prayer, not because it is a Christian duty, but because he is our father, because we love him, and we spend time alone with those we love most. We pray because we live with Him.
