The past two posts have dealt with changing what we care about so that discipleship is our only goal. But as we say in the South, what in the Sam Hill is that?!

Some would tell you that discipleship means simply getting people “saved”. In this model, discipleship equals evangelism. Others say discipleship is an intense, one-on-one or small group Bible study environment where a teacher leads the time with the students. In this model, discipleship equals education.

There’s a HUGE problem with both: Jesus’ model of discipleship was neither!

The clearest example is Luke 9-10 when Jesus sent out “The Twelve” who would go on to become known as The Disciples. In this part of the story, The Twelve got sent out and a chapter later they had not just added to their group but they had multiplied! The Twelve were now The Seventy-Two! These 72 would then turn into the 120 in Acts 2 who would then turn into the 3,000!

From that simple look we see that when Jesus said, “Go! Make disciples!” he clearly intended one thing: a true disciple not only follows Jesus, but also reproduces!

That’s why a church should not gauge itself on simply how great their service is, how many people attend their church, or (hang on to your hat!) even great things like how many poor people are helped or simply how many are converted. All of these should be happening, but Jesus said what we should care most about is seeing disciples reproduce. And then that’s what the first church did!

So at OneLife, our measure of success will be seeing disciples reproduce disciples. That means seeing lost people find Jesus and then in turn lead more lost people in their lives to Jesus so that they, too, can reproduce. And then on and on it will go.

That means your life will make a difference as you impact the eternity of others. It means our church will grow because of what OneLifers do Monday through Saturday, not just what a staff and volunteers do on a Sunday. It means the needs of our community will be met when groups of disciples see and meet that need rather than waiting for a pastor to point it out and organize an event.

But to get there, this must be what we care most about. So OneLife, hang on! We are changing what we care about, and that changes everything!

Are you ready?!

I’ll never forget one of our early staff meetings at OneLife. Sitting around my kitchen table, I shared with our ragamuffin group of part-time staff guys that I sensed a problem for our two-month old church. We were doing a great job having an event once a week, but we weren’t being a church. They all had been sensing the same thing so we made a dramatic change that day without even realizing what we did.

We changed what we cared about.

The natural makeup of our team lends itself to us having great services. Our talented bunch of creative types and volunteers has led us to a place where our Sunday production of homemade stage sets and duck-tape-held-together-equipment-from-eBay would rival that of any church in our area with big budgets and professional staff. I don’t say that boastfully, it’s just our natural strength. In fact, I heard last week that a Knoxville blogger deemed us “Best Worship Production” of the 50 churches he visited. Big whoop. That in and of itself won’t lead to a life-transforming movement of doing what Jesus said we should do: making disciples. It can help, and I believe to reach certain demographics of our culture it is necessary, but it won’t do it on its own.

So there had to be more. We set out on a quest to discover what that would be. For over a year we talked about it, changed things, planned differently, met with other pastors, and did whatever we could to find out how we could “make disciples.” But not just claim to make disciples. I mean really make disciples.

I’ve seen and read of churches who say they value doing what Jesus said we should all do in his last words on earth, but at the end of the day they aren’t making disciples at all. Because disciples reproduce other disciples. They don’t just attend Bible studies or one-on-one sessions for years on end while talking about how “making disciples” is why they don’t work to make their church relevant to anyone this side of 1993 (aka, why we are lazy). This approach leads to little – if any – true impact. Because if disciples aren’t reproducing, guess what?! They aren’t disciples.

In the middle of that tension of not wanting to be solely about a Sunday morning show but also not wanting to be a church that just claimed to be about making disciples came a recurring reality: it was time to once again change what we care about.

So over the past six months we’ve been making a shift in some subtle ways and in some major ways to do just that. Over the next few days I’ll share more about what this looks like for us. But for now I leave you with this:

What do you care most about at OneLife or your local church? Whatever it is, chances are you need to change it.

“Grace?! She passed away thirty years ago!”

Quick! Name that movie…..yep. Christmas Vacation.

Ok, now that that’s over, reality is most of us don’t have a much better idea of what grace is than Aunt Bethany. My hope is that OneLifers at least grasp the technical definition of grace since we’ve talked about it several times, which is “the opposite of what is deserved.” So we approached the topic this week with a question about what Jesus did for us that we did not deserve. We asked, “Why did Jesus have to die?”

Really…think about that. How would you answer the question? Couldn’t have God found another way to forgive? Why did it require Jesus’ blood?

To boil it down, we learned that the payment for sin is death. Somebody has to pay for our sin. It could have either been me and every other person who has lived, or it could be God. God chose to pay. So He sent Jesus to live a perfect life. He never sinned, but yet he died. And in doing so, he paid for my crime so that I wouldn’t have to. He gave me the opposite of what I deserved. Have gave me life. That is grace.

I wrapped the sermon up with a story I found that illustrates grace beautifully:

One day an Indian Chief discovered that someone in the tribe was stealing. This angered the leader greatly and he brought all the people together. He said, “Let the thief come forward and receive 10 lashes for his crime.” No one came and he upped the ante to 20 lashes. Then 30, then 40 lashes. He stopped there for he knew that it would take a strong man to survive 40 lashes with the whip. The crowd dispersed and the leader sent his men to find the thief. Within a week they brought the thief to him and the leader gasped, for the thief was his own mother. The guards were wagering among themselves as to what this great and wise leader would do. Would he keep his word, obey his law and whip his mother? Or would he let her go free, thus disgracing himself and the laws he sought to enforce? If the crime went unpunished, surely everyone would steal. The leader gathered the tribe together. They brought his mother forward and bared her frail back. “Ah, ha,” thought the people, “he’s going to whip her.” Then, just before the whip master brought the whip to bear, the mother cried out to her son and the leader strode over to his mother, tearing his shirt off as he went and draped himself over her frail body, taking the 40 lashes himself. The crime was still punished, but he took the penalty for her crime. That’s exactly what Jesus did for us. Jesus took our punishment on the cross. We should have rightly died for our sins, but Jesus took our place.

That is grace. Amazing grace.

The past three years of my life have been unreal. In some ways good, in some not so good. And the biggest thing I’ve learned is that both good and bad can be distracting from what God wants me to do.

Harrison and I were talking a couple weeks ago about how our life together has been anything but normal. Two weeks from now, on March 6, 2011, it will have been three years since I popped the question. Since then, here’s the craziness that has been our lives.

• We planned a wedding, honeymoon, rehearsal dinner – the whole shebang.
• We started a new church. Not for the faint at heart, to say the least!
• We got pregnant and started a family, complete with 15 weeks of morning sickness, 40 weeks of showers, planning, and buying, and now 4 months of smiling and laughing until my face hurts.
• We bought a foreclosed house under construction, finished building it while being homeless for 4 weeks, dealt with a mortgage company for 5 months, and moved.

Every single one of these events was life-changing, and every single one was a true gift from God. However, as we talked about the most recent in that list, it hit us that we let each of these do something that we’ve since allowed God to deal with us about – each was a distraction.

Most recently was this issue of our house. Every step of the process went completely different than planned. Construction took 3 months longer, which meant we were literally homeless and bumming a room from friends for 4 weeks. Budget went thousands over. Mortgage company threw curve balls and unexpected costs at nearly every turn. In fact, this past week before we closed was literally one of the worst in my life, not knowing what would happen next and the constant fear of “what if?”

Now that we finally are past it, Harrison jokingly asked, “What will we do next?!” My response? “Live. We’re just going to live.”

As I’ve processed that conversation, I am realizing more and more what I meant by that comment. I’ve realized that I let these things distract me. I should have allowed them each to point me to Christ instead of pointing me to self. I should have cut some busy-ness to just rest and beg God to use every second of my life to make a difference.

So going forward, I am not asking God to take away opportunities or big changes. Instead, I am begging him to help me not get distracted by those things. I want to be more focused on being like Jesus. I want to pray more. I want to focus on my marriage more. I want to focus on being an awesome daddy. I want to focus on leading the Church well. I want to write more, plan more, study more. I want to do whatever it takes to focus on allowing God to use my one life to make a difference.

So I challenge you – whoever in the world reads this blog – to join me in my own personal challenge. Let’s embrace the chaos that is life. But let’s do it with focus. Let’s be done with distractions.

This past Sunday we kicked off a new series where we are looking at the basics of our faith and why we believe what we believe. The first message in the series was about the Bible. Check it out here if you missed it. We discovered that…

• The Bible was written by 40 different authors.
• The Bible was written over a 1500 year time period.
• The Bible was written in 3 different languages: Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic
• The Bible was written on 3 different continents: Europe, Asia, Africa
• Despite all of this, there are no real contradictions (see below) and there is only ONE central message to it all! “The story of God and His people He created.”
• The New Testament is the most reliable historical document of all time. There are more than 25,000 manuscripts dating to as early as the first century, only one generation removed from the actual events. The first runner up is Homer’s Iliad with not even 650 manuscripts and 400 years removed from the actual events!
• Archaeology has never refuted a biblical account. In fact, archaeology continues to prove the Bible. One of the most famous examples is the story of Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda.
• Even historians are baffled at the statistical chances that one person – Jesus – would actually fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. Taking only 8 of the dozens of prophecies and accepting historical proof that Jesus fulfilled them hundreds of years after they were written leaves us with a statistical probabilty of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 that one person would do that!

For further study, here are some great resources:

• Nearly Every Question about the Bible Answered
• History of the Canon of the Bible – How the Bible as we know it today became organized
• A List of Bible Contradictions Explained – From the petty attempts to find contradictions to more reasonable attempts, this scholar has a well-researched answer for each.
• The Case for Christ – A great book for the skeptic willing to consider the other side and for the believer wanting to better understand “proof” for our faith.

This week we tackle another fun topic – creation! It’s going to be another great one. See you Sunday at 10 or 11:30 but don’t come alone!