Tag: sanctification

GCD Resources for Discipleship (& What’s Coming!)

I am very pleased to announce the launch of www.gospelcentereddiscipleship.com (GCD). The mission of GCD is to promote resources that make, mature, and multiply disciples of Jesus. Currently, all our content is free! This week we launched with:

GCD will be posting new resources every single week. We have a stash of great articles, some eBooks, more articles currently being written, and curriculum should be available down the road. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered, feel free to drop us a line on our contact form.

Fight Clubs Book Released!

My first book, Fight Clubs: Gospel-centered Discipleship, is now available! Click here for an explanation of the book and the Table of Contents. You can get it in the following formats:

This book was written for the church, for disciples who struggle to follow Jesus well. It’s intended to equip you to fight the fight of faith in the power of the gospel, and to do so as Jesus intended, in community. My hope is that it will strengthen your resolve to fight the good fight of faith well (1 Tim 6:12), and in the strength that God provides (1 Pet 4:11). I hope it helpfully dismantles legalistic and loose patterns of discipleship and frees you to follow Jesus by grace. May it inspire you with the rich gospel motivations God has given us in the Son and the Spirit to follow hard after God!

God's Agenda: Religion, Spirituality or Serenity?

Tim Chester‘s book You Can Change is refreshingly simple, biblical, and practical. In it he shows us God’s agenda for change in us through Jesus, an agenda that is far from duty-driven religion, detached spirituality, or placid serenity:

Jesus shows us God’s agenda for change. God isn’t interested in making us religous. Think of Jesus, who was hated by religious people. God isn’t interested in making us ‘spiritual’ if by spiritual we mean detached: Jesus was God getting stuck in. God isn’t interested in making us self-absorbed; Jesus was self-giving personified. God isn’t interested in serenity: Jesus was passionate for God, angry at sin, wept for the city.

Tim explains that God’s agenda for us isn’t religion, spirituality, or serenity but the good and holy life. Noting that we often mistake holiness for joyless moral conformity, he says that “holiness is always good news.” What is holiness?

For Jesus holiness didn’t mean being set apart from the world, but being consecrated in the world…Jesus isnt’ just good for us. He is good itself. The secret of gospel change is being convinced that Jesus is the good life and the fountain of all joy.

Do you believe this good news, that Jesus is the good life and the fountain of all joy? Or is something else competing for your joy today? Look to Christ who not only offers us the good life but also his life, his death, for our joyless living and life-stealing choices. Ask him to change your heart, to show you that he is the fountain of all joy.