The rights to this book have reverted back to me and I am able to offer it on Amazon at a more affordable price. Click here.

Contact:

josh@joshhhunt.com

575.650.4564

Disciples are made in the context of community, part 1

I was chatting with my longtime friend Lance Witt the other day, when he asked, “You know what most people long for?” Lance posed the question because he wanted to answer it. I let him. “Most people long for the kind of friendships that we enjoyed in college.” I think he’s probably right.

The college Lance and I attended afforded the perfect opportunity for friendships to develop. Wayland University had, at that time, about five hundred resident students. Our freshman year, Lance and I happened to be next door neighbors. Bill Sloan, David Edwards, Rex Bell, and Andrew Large all lived close by. We would all walk to meals together, play cards together, and spend our evenings together talking about the issues of life. In a small school such as Wayland, everyone knew everyone else anyway, but the six of us developed a friendship that we will always treasure.

Friendships such as these are not as easy to develop in the adult world of kids and jobs and yards and bills. Still, they are just as important for adults as for anyone else. This means that what came naturally for the six of us at Wayland will need to be developed intentionally in the real world. We must work to form these kinds of friendships.

Our souls crave this kind of friendship. Our souls long to be close to someone else. It is part of being created in the image of God. The three persons of the Trinity are in relationship with each other, and since we are in God’s image, we were made for relationships.

The Bible has a great deal to say about relationships. They form the basis of church life. In addition, love is to be the distinguishing mark of the people of God. Jesus taught that both Christians and non-Christians will know that we are his disciples if, and only if, we love one another (John 13:35).

Unfortunately, we need to rethink many of our ideas about love, relationships, and friendships. For example, many people teach that love is nothing more than a decision. The Bible teaches otherwise:

“Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart” (1 Peter 1:22).

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).

What do you think Peter has in mind—love as a decision? love as resolve? love as commitment? These things are important, but we have emphasized “love is something you do” so much that we have forgotten some key biblical teachings about love:

• Love feels. It is a matter of the heart.
• Love wants to draw near, to get close.

Love is the real me connecting with the real you. No masks. No hiding. No pretending. Christian love is the real me connecting with the real you as we represent God to each other. We normally think of ourselves as ambassadors of Christ representing God to a world that does not know him (2 Corinthians 5:20). But it is also true that we are Christ’s ambassadors to one another. We represent God to each other.

Christianity is all about drawing close. It is about a God who, in his triune state, models closeness. It is about a God who created people to bear the image of this closeness. It is about a God who drew close by walking with the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. It is about a God who drew close by actually becoming one of us. Hebrews 4:15 states, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.”

Christianity is about people drawing close to each other in love. Yet many churches are characterized more by polite distance than by the connection of hearts and souls in love. Disciplemaking teachers recognize the need to create environments where deep friendships, friendships like the ones my friends and I experienced in college, can develop. Disciple-making teachers understand that friendships such as these won’t develop on their own. Disciple-making teachers know that they will need to be very intentional in helping to develop close friendships.