Apprentice 2 Jesus

Discipleship/Spiritual Formation

  • The call to discipleship

    I am working my way through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Discipleship, and I am challenged once again by the simplicity of the call to Jesus. Discipleship is commitment to Christ. Not the idea of Christ. Not the doctrine of Christ. Christ himself. Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship; and a… Read more

  • The truth of the Kingdom of God

    I was on a personal retreat this past week. The Lord had me take a hymn with me along with passages of Scripture. The words of this hymn drilled deep into my soul. All my struggles are nothing. His kingdom is FOREVER. Focus on the PROMISE not the PROBLEM. Read more

  • Christ is able to know our hurts

    “Jesus is not Zeus. He was a sinless man, not a sinless Superman. He woke up with bed head. He had pimples at thirteen. He never would have been on the cover of Men’s Health (he had “no beauty that we should desire him,” Isa. 53:2). He came as a normal man to normal men.… Read more

  • The desire for the old wine

    Luke 5:36–39 (NIV) 36 He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine… Read more

  • Basic discipleship

    What Jesus treated as basic discipleship in his time on earth we’ve made into a rarity and some “specialist” work. In Mark 9 Jesus has come down from the Transfiguration and a father runs straight to him. Read more

  • What have I left for others to follow?

    I am working through 2 Timothy 3:10-17 and Paul gives a tough assessment of what is going on in the world and all that Timothy will have to undertake. It is a real assessment that reads like it seems hopeless. What to do? Read more

  • The cost of following and not following Jesus

    This is about the longest break I’ve taken from blogging in a long time. There was a bout with COVID, dealing with a physical injury… and time slipped away. Read more

  • How I want to live

    I think again about “Last Third” living and come across a marvelous quote from Winn Collier’s outstanding biography on Eugene Peterson: “His life and work had been more like tracing a scent than following a map. Discovery, not direction.” Read more

  • The nourishment of my soul

    I have finished Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton. There are some key thoughts from his book that stir my own story. Nourished by the Sacraments and formed by the prayer and teaching of the Church, we need seek nothing but the particular place willed for us by God within the Church. Read more

  • WITH God is communion

    I am not there, but my heart longs for this as I walk with Christ: From With, by Skye Jethani: Read more