Real Discipleship

I've been thinking a lot over the past few months about what a real disciple of Jesus looks like. When you look at his first disciples, you can't help but be amazed that these guys dropped everything in order to follow Jesus. Nothing else mattered but following him and doing everything in their power to become like him, doing the things that he did.

Rob Bell in one of his Nooma videos talks about the fact that Jesus' disciples had not been selected as disciples under any other rabbi, and that this meant that they were second-rate, not-quite-good-enoughs, B-team, ordinary. So for this rabbi Jesus to come along and call them to follow him meant everything to them. Suddenly they had a future. They were called, chosen, loved, valuable, and important. As a result, these guys would go to the end of the earth for Jesus.

And they found out that the kind of disciple that Jesus wanted them to be was one that died to himself, that valued serving over everything else, that insisted that losing your life was a necessary prerequisite to finding it. I have to think that this was just as hard for them as it is for us, yet they did it. Nothing else mattered but following Jesus and patterning their lives after his, becoming like him and doing the things that he did.

Part of learning to be a disciple of Jesus today means learning to lay aside everything else to follow him. But this kind of radical discipleship seems almost nonexistent. We tend to make space for Jesus, but not transfer everything to him. But when you think about it, what's so bad about dying to yourself, giving up your life for him? When you take stock of what kind of life you're living now, are you really going to miss it?