There is no such thing as Christian discipleship without the ever-deepening journey into self-sacrificing love. The object of our faith is a man who, although being fully God in nature, stripped Himself, emptying status and rights in order to love from the lowest level. (See Phil 2:5-8) It is easy for us to slide over that statement without inhaling the sweet, counterintuitive aroma of Christian glory: God became nothing so that you could become everything!

This is the backward, upside-down nature of Christianity. To go higher, we go lower. To receive more, we give away everything. To rule, we serve. To influence, we practice humility. This truth, like a constant drip, was taught by our Savior: “But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matt. 20:26-28)

Let me be really transparent with you… sometimes I read these verses and they seem utterly unattainable because I have a romantic, one-time, grand gesture view of sacrificial love. If a car was careening down the sidewalk towards you, would I push you out of the way and absorb the bumper? I will go out on a limb and assume many think like me. While this is not a wrong view of self-sacrifice, it is a shallow view. Life is far less dramatic than we imagine as children. Love is more often shown in the trivial minutia of life. It is the slow, aching pain that shows our love, more than the sharp, heroic bravery that ends up on the news. 

I am convinced that many of us (myself often included) are missing the delightful path of Christian discipleship because we do not see our everyday life and interactions as carrying appropriate eternal weight. This becomes painfully clear in how we view our role as Christians in following Jesus and obeying His command to make disciples (see Matt. 28:19).

Let me paint two scenarios… 

Imagine your friend is mowing his yard and has a dejected homeless man walk up to him, asking for prayer and hope. Your friend prays and shares the Gospel, and this wanderer gives His life to Jesus on the spot. He connects with a church, is baptized, and goes on to follow Jesus from that day forward. Conviction. Repentance. Full stop.

Now picture another friend, day after day, asking Jesus to open the eyes of her non-believing neighbor. She repeatedly crosses the street to ask how her neighbor’s week has gone, bringing encouragement and asking deep, caring questions. Searching for opportunities to share the love of Jesus, this woman is shot down, made to feel silly for her beliefs, and combatted by someone who does not have an interest in the God who made them. Or, she is simply met with apathy. This woman goes home, pouring her heart out before the Lord, asking for ways to serve her neighbor, bemoaning the Holy Spirit to intervene and change this person’s heart for their own sake. But all of this accomplishes nothing externally.

 

As you glance over these two people, are you inclined to think one person has been more obedient or successful than the other? The first option sounds way better to me! In some ways, it seems like God is more pleased with the interaction that produced a new Christian. That being said, I am not convinced that God uses the same metrics as you and I. 

I have recently re-opened one of my favorite books, Organic Discipleship by Dennis McCallum. The book is not particularly eloquent and the author is not wildly popular, but that undergirds my point. The words and thoughts communicated through typos and a quirky writing style are arresting. Discipleship (the process of following Jesus with our entire lives and reproducing our lives in others) is attainable because it is not simply based on our own merit and charisma. Following Jesus and leading others into maturity in Christ (see Col. 1:28-29) is best accomplished by intentionality and self-sacrifice under the submission to Jesus and His Word. This means that deep, reproducing discipleship is not for the spiritual elite!

I cannot bank my spiritual life on one-time, cataclysmic conversations with random people. That will rot me from the inside out when it does not happen. You cannot simply find comfort in a well-articulated soliloquy where you might articulate the believability of the Bible and refute an aggressive atheist. I can, however, faithfully love and serve those that God places in front of me. And so can you! You can adopt a self-sacrificing, disciple-making attitude in Jesus without having any robust communication skills or profusely impressive gifts. This is how God has made each of us to operate!

You can love like Jesus, by sacrificing every element of your life, one step at a time, for His Kingdom and His people.

If this sounds lofty and theoretical, let me offer three challenges for you to adopt into your daily life in order to accomplish practical, self-sacrificing discipleship:

1) Find someone who has been closely following Jesus longer than you…

Following Jesus is not something that we can do on our own, at least not for too long. If we want to be “solo Christians”, we may be able to go quickly, but we will not go far. Ask God to show someone who knows Him, His Word, how to walk faithfully with Him to lead you and push you in your relationship with Jesus. Study something with them. Ask them questions about God, life, and those God is calling you to love. Ask them to show you how you can better serve and love those in your life. Follow them as they follow Jesus! (This is an explicit and ancient image of discipleship)

 

2) Become a good friend…

This seems simple enough, but many of us do not know how to be good friends. To be a good friend means that we are thinking of the other person when they are not around. We are asking God to show us how to speak into their lives on a regular basis, and we are showing them that we care through our actions and words. A good friend knows what is going on in another’s life and is not bogarting conversation with our own problems and thoughts without thinking of them. (Self-awareness is a lost virtue… ask those around you if you are a good friend, and how you could be a better friend!)

3) Find someone who has been closely following Jesus for less time than you…

With the support and encouragement of the person(s) to whom you look, find someone that you can love and serve through a close relationship. First, ask those you trust, “am I someone that is worth following?” as you follow Jesus. Identify, through prayer, someone who would benefit from regular, deep conversations about God and what it means to submit ourselves to Him. Find an extra-biblical book or book of the Bible to sit down with this person and ask them if they would like to try it out! For goodness’ sake, learn to ask questions!

All three of these practical challenges fall under the recognition that we are always to be thinking about others and lifting them up to Jesus. This is why McCallum exhorts us by saying, “Part of the sacrificial aspect of Christian love is the extensive time and emotional investment in agonized prayer.” There is a slow-burn mentality when it comes to self-sacrificing discipleship, and oftentimes, the fruit is slow and methodical.

In John 12:24 Jesus says, “…unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies it will produce many new kernels - a plentiful harvest of new lives.” Jumping in front of a car for someone may get you on the nightly news, but laying yourself repeatedly in front of them, sharing Jesus’ truth, and allowing them to reject you or lean into God’s message, will produce new life. This is a slow, arduous process of selflessly sacrificing our time, interests, hobbies, and self-focus. 

Self-sacrificing in discipleship is learning how to live for Jesus by placing attention on others, both when they are around you and when you are alone and more tempted to forget about them… this is a difficult task, but it is one that you and I are built ready to accomplish, once Jesus has given us His Holy Spirit and the Church to encourage and push us. God has given us the plan, it is our job to run it!