Over the past 20 years I have noticed a growing lack of commitment to personal relationships. Today’s commitments, responsibilities and social roles have turned people’s lives upside down. Personal and social priorities demand we take care of number one.
We are left to find our own way in this rapidly changing world, to find the road that we think will fulfill us. What am I here for? What’s my purpose? How/where can I figure all this out? And it is not just young people struggling for answers. It has taken me decades to get as far as I have. Isn’t there an easier way to figure things out? I believe there is. There is hope, but it’s not going to be an easy task. It means swimming against the tsunami of opposition. Like swimming down when the net of social and cultural pressures drags us to the surface to drown, unknowingly forced to our own demise.
Romans 12:1, 2 tells us that we need to be transformed, not conformed. The big difference here is active versus passive response. Being conformed is passive. We allow the pressures around us to stuff us into a preset form, like a mold or cookie-cutter. In every case, a material is either pressed into or a form is cut out of a material. It is a passive process for the product and the material has no control over the process or the outcome. It becomes what another force decides. In this case it is the world and the invisible forces of God’s enemy.
Transforming, on the other hand, is an active process, the person makes certain decisions that produce a known outcome. The person is a part of the decision making and thus part of the outcome. Like the butterfly, it instinctively does what it is supposed to do
With the abundance of Christian self-help and Bible Study books lining the shelves of bookstores, we have replaced the personal discipleship process with do-it-yourself Christian growth. While these are not bad, they cannot replace true one-on-one relationship with God. Books cannot usurp lived experiences. Books cannot hold accountable those under their tutelage. Most of all, books lack the ability to love, to give and receive intimate personal contact.
I have personally known only a few people who have invested their lives into others for the sake of the Gospel. They brought their disciple into their homes, modeled it with their lives. One disciple watched as his mentor corrected rebuked immoral wanderers and shared the gospel with others those who have strayed from their path and lovingly guiding them back to Christ. It is not just an investment of time, it is a sacrifice of oneself for the sake of the kingdom of God. We were, as Dawson Trotman one wrote, “Born to reproduce”, to train up others in the art of living by the Spirit and not by the flesh. The Apostle Paul said it this way, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ”.
If you are lucky, you know or have known that kind of one-on-one commitment from someone who has walked with you and exemplified personal discipleship.