Disciple of Christ

                I remember one day having the Jehovah’s Witness missionaries knock on my door and ask me how you could tell who was a real disciple of Christ. I replied that a disciple of Christ is someone that follows Christ to the best of his ability. I stand by that. There are specific answers that fall under the broad category of following Christ, and I will discuss some of them, but a true sign of a disciple of Christ is obedience to and an earnest searching for the will of God.

                In Luke 14:33 Christ teaches that to be His disciple we each must forsake all and Omni 1:26 adds to that that we must come unto him with our whole souls as an offering to Him.  Being a disciple is more than just listening to the word of God. It is giving up what you have to make the word of God the priority in your life. It is setting aside other things to seek out His will. It is giving up what we are, the natural man in a fallen state, to ask for the path to our eternal exaltation.  In the words of C.S. Lewis If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. We cannot expect to obtain salvation, a state without sin, if we cannot give up our worldliness to get there.

Omni 1:26 emphasizes the act of coming unto Christ, an action supported by Christ’s words in Matthew 13:44-46 when he declared that we must search for him. The very definition of a disciple describes a person who follows another. “Follow” is an action word just as “search” and “come” are action words and they all describe movement. We cannot expect to be followers of Christ if we do not actually follow him. We must be moving as He leads us. We must be searching for His direction and His path.

This is a hard road to follow. Christ himself can testify to that. If he was shunned, beaten and killed for claiming to be the Son of God, can we expect less for following Him? We are fallen and live in a fallen world. The perfect path to salvation will not be easy in such circumstances. None of us will get it right all of the time. Being a disciple of Christ does not mean being perfect. It means doing as He has asked us. That includes repentance for falling short. He knows that we cannot perfectly follow him. He does expect us to try.

 We must follow Christ to the best of our ability always.