Mindset of a Disciple

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We have defined a “disciple” as “a Christ-follower who is constantly about the task of bringing every aspect of life into obedience to Christ.”

This is the mindset, the settled life posture, of the disciple. I am a Christ-follower, so I make it my life’s aim to obey Jesus in every aspect of my life. There are no “No Trespassing” signs in my heart. Nothing about my life lies outside Christ’s claim of lordship.

I’ve used that definition for years now, but I think I may have spotted a problem with it: that definition seems to suggest that there is such a thing as a Christ-follower who is not about the task of bringing every aspect of life into obedience to Christ.

In fact, there is no such thing.

Every genuine Christ-follower is preoccupied with the life-long task of bringing his life patterns into alignment with the commands of Jesus. Anyone who self-identifies as a Christian who is not about that task is either walking in disobedience or is a Christian in name only (a “cultural Christian”).

We all know the old saying: “Life is ____________. Everything else is details.” And you can fill in the blank with various pursuits: football, fishing, stamp collecting, whatever. And there it is, in a pop culture nutshell, the mindset of the disciple: “Life is obeying Jesus. Everything else is details.” Everything else – my habits, my ambitions, my relationships, my stewardship of the resources God has entrusted to me, everything else – is only an arena where my obedience takes shape and manifests itself.

Keeping my obedience to Jesus front and center is the essence of the mindset of the disciple.

The problem, of course, is my sinful heart.

“Mission drift” isn’t just a problem for organizations that have lost their connection with their original vision. It’s a real temptation for Christ-followers. With the deadly combination of my own sinful heart and the influence of other sinful hearts around me, combined with the broken systems of human culture, it’s far too easy to organize my life around some other, faulty, idolatrous center-point.

Usurpers to the throne of my heart are legion, and they range from the nefarious to the apparently harmless. Gross sin is an obvious threat: lust, greed, self-absorption, sloth (that’s my list, yours may be different), what the writer to the Hebrews called “besetting sins.”

But there are other challengers clamoring to take center stage in my life, and they are mostly good things: my ministry, my marriage, my parenting, my career. These things all threaten to assume the role of an idol (which Tim Keller has helpfully described “a good thing that we treat as the ultimate thing”).

Bottom line: it is alarmingly easy to live as if I were not in fact a Christ-follower, to insert something else into that blank – “Life is __________...” and set up an idol that can never support my messianic expectations.

All this sounds so theoretical and therefore irrelevant.

So what? Knowing how easy it is to deceive myself, how can I know what actually does occupy the throne of my heart? I think there is one fairly sure indicator, a question that I should always know the answer to: What do I fear most? 

Our fears are never far from our minds. Our fears sometimes keep us up at night, and they greet us early in the morning. When our minds are free, our fears come out from the shadows and present themselves again for our consideration. When we meditate on our fears, we call it “worry.”

And our fears are revealing: they repeatedly and insistently urge us to protect the thing we cherish most, the thing that we most dread losing. And it is that most precious thing that resides on the throne of my heart.

•         If I am vain (that is, if I have made an idol out of the approval of others), my greatest fear is looking ridiculous.

•         If I have made an idol out of my family, my greatest fear is that some dreadful ill might befall my loved ones.

•         If I have made an idol out of my career, my greatest fear is professional failure.

Which brings us back to the mindset of the disciple.

If my life’s aim is to obey King Jesus, what will I most fear?

I won’t fear that somehow I might forfeit my place in God’s family. Jesus’s death and resurrection settled that question once for all. But if my aim is to obey Jesus in every aspect of my life, I will have fears, healthy and legitimate fears.

•         Because I cherish the glory of Christ, I have a healthy fear that by my sin I might bring dishonor on His name.

•         Because I love my spiritual brothers and sisters, who like me have been adopted into God’s family, I have a healthy fear that by my example I could lead another believer into sin.

•         Because I know that God has “provided me with everything I need for life and godliness” (2 Pet 1:3), I fear that I may be a wasteful and irresponsible steward of the resources God has put at my disposal.

I want to have not just the habits but also the mindset, the settled life posture, of the disciple.

I want to be the man who is continuously organizing his life around the goal of obeying the Master, the man for whom every other consideration is secondary to that singular objective. I want to be the man whose only fear is that he will let some usurper lay claim to the throne that rightly belongs to Jesus alone.

I want see Jesus as King and see everything else as details.