Discipleship Letters 105-106

Discipleship Letter 105                                              Sept. 26^th, 2010

“Jesus’ desire for his followers is not one of leafy growth with little or no fruit. Like his first command to the man and woman in the Garden of Eden, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ God also wants us to be fruitful in our lives. But fruitfulness requires pruning, whether the pruning of the desire to eat of that original forbidden tree or the pruning of our contemporary desires to be like God” [Robert A. Fryling, The Leadership Ellipse: Shaping How We Lead by Who We Are (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2010), p. 52.].

Perhaps, we need to be pruned from having to be right all the time, to be pruned from self-righteousness, to be pruned from our excuses for irresponsibility, to be pruned from being perfect, to be pruned from our inconsistency, to be pruned from making many empty promises, to be pruned from our ignorance of God’s Word, to be pruned from being indifferent to the church and to the world, to be pruned from only showing interest to one’s own family, to be pruned from maximizing one’s own resources and minimizing His given resources to others, etc…

Jesus uses the language of pruning in John’s gospel. In the Synoptic gospels, it’s the language of repentance. For Paul, he talks about putting off the old self. For the author of Hebrews, it’s discipline: “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons…For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (12:7-8, 11). Our heavenly Father is the God of pruning because we are His adopted children through Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:5).  

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Discipleship Letter 106                                              Oct. 03^rd, 2010

“Always it is God to whom we are paying, or trying to pay, attention. The contexts, though, vary: in prayer the context is myself; in Scripture it is the community of faith in history; in spiritual direction it is the person before me. God is the one to whom we are being primarily attentive in these contexts, but it is never God-in-himself; rather, it is God-in-relationship—with me, with his people, with this person” [Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), p. 4.].

God is never in Himself, for He is always in relationship with God the Son and God the Spirit. In creation, God is in relationship with the other two Godheads. In redemption, Jesus is in relationship with the other two Godheads. In the Age to Come, the Spirit is in relationship with the other two Godheads.

The contexts vary; God-in-relationship remains unchanged.

For pastoral work, preaching, teaching, and administration are big angles. Being in relationship with this or that person is a small angle. Big angles may be changed by contexts; small angle ought to be context-less. For pastoral work, I believe that big angles ought to be grounded in small angle, for the kingdom of God, which is like a mustard seed, is tiny and hidden.

To be with this or that person, it is a mustard-seed kind of work that foreshadows the nature of the kingdom of God in pastoral, ordinary relationship.