Something that we need to be reminded about from time-to-time is that Calvary Baptist Church exists to glorify God. That is the primary responsibility of all creation that God established from the very beginning. The first approval we see is that of God’s…

And God saw that it was good (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25)…And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good (Genesis 1:31).

Creation had to meet God’s approval, nobody else’s.

Once we understand what our primary responsibility in all of life is and what it means, then we can begin to ask important, rubber-meets-the-road kind of questions. Like, “How do we reflect God’s image through the church.” The answer to that is both simple and complex. It is simple because I believe we could list four key elements that describes that for us: worship, discipleship, fellowship and outreach. It is complex because of everything that is involved in each of those areas for us as a church.

What I would like to do this week is take just one of those and inspire and encourage all of us in that one area. Let’s consider discipleship.

Discipleship is learning. It is the process through which we learn, change and grow spiritually. This process must be intentional for us as a church. We can’t think it will “just happen”…like we have some sort of discipleship fairy that sprinkles spiritual growth pixie dust on everyone who comes through the doors. That may sound ridiculous, but isn’t that how we are approaching the spiritual growth of the body if we don’t intentionally plan and practice for teaching and training one another in the Bible?

What God uses over and over again in my life to convict me of this is the great commission passage in Matthew 28:19, “Go and make disciples of all nations…” The command (imperative) in this verse is not the word “go.” The going is an assumption that Jesus makes. In other words, He never imagined that His followers would not go across the street or across the ocean (cf. Acts 1:8 for the ever widening influence the church is to have). The command is to “make disciples.” The way this is written in the Greek could literally be translated: “as you are going I command you to make disciples.”

Too much can take place in our church to side track us from this core value. Don’t you think the enemy would be happy if we busy ourselves with issues that take our intentional focus away from teaching the Bible?

Remember Whose approval we are after – the Creator of the universe’s. We desperately want to hear the God of all creation say to us that what we’ve done is “very good”; the opposite of that, even if it’s mediocre, is “very bad.”

Grace & Peace,