Kevan Duke

At one point Jesus speaks to a bunch of religious leaders who want to put an entire culture under the microscope of their “behavioral modification program”. He says some pretty interesting stuff to them. First, He tells them that they are a bunch of actors, pretending to live the way they say other people should live. He says they put heavy weights on everyone else’s shoulders but don’t lift a finger themselves. He tells them that they need to become humble because they are full of pride and only pursue status for themselves. He even says that they lock people out of heaven and make converts that are twice the children of hell that they are. Have you ever heard the phrase, “the blind leading the blind?” Well, Jesus coins it here. He says that they always give their money but they don’t care about justice, mercy or faith. And then he tells them that they are like beautiful tombs: lovely on the outside but full of death and filth on the inside. I mean, these are the ‘religious leaders’.…

Discipleship has a first step. And while it is simple, it is also difficult; while it is a decision you make once, it is also a decision you make every day. Every disciple must stop negotiating with Jesus.

In the ancient world, ‘disciples’ were quite common. They were people who willfully accepted the invitation to sit at the feet of a specific teacher in order to learn his worldview and in most cases, become like him. Some settings were more formal than others; some teachers more selective than the rest. In Jesus’ part of the world, highly educated and well respected teachers called rabbis would select students they felt were capable of becoming like them and they would spend a considerable amount of time investing into them. The core qualification for becoming a disciple was that you entrusted the formation of your worldview to your teacher. There were no exceptions. If you wanted to be a student of Aristotle,  you submitted yourself fully to his worldview. If you wanted to become …