Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1186 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
What Is Discipleship? - Worldview Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before.

Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase wisdom and create a living legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1186 of our trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.

To establish a Biblical worldview, you must also have a proper understanding of God and His word. On our Worldview Wednesday episodes we are in a series in which we are covering another detailed review of a book from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. We are taking a deep dive and will share Dr. Heiser's insights into the question, which is also the title of his book “What Does God Want?”
What Is Discipleship?


The gospel is intended to be transformative. Anyone who has embraced the gospel has been transformed according to 2 Corinthians 5:17, "This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!" What does that actually look like? You may recall the answer to this question. Earlier I said that a disciple was a follower—specifically a follower of Jesus. I defined “following” as imitating or imaging Jesus. Being "he choose them to become like his Son" is our ultimate destiny (Roman 8:29; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Colossians 3:10).

Our motive for imitating Jesus is not to make God love us so he’ll let us into heaven. God already loved each of us “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8) and were God’s “while we were still his enemies” (Romans 5:10).

We get to heaven—we become part of God s family—when we believe the gospel. On our own, we are lost, in need of a Savior (Luke 19:10), alienated from God (Ephesians 4:18). When that was our situation, God loved us. He didn't wait until we cleaned up our act to love us.

Our motive for imitating Jesus is also not to keep God loving us so we’ll be saved in the end. That which cannot be achieved by performance cannot be lost by performance. Salvation has nothing to do with our own worth or merit. It has everything to do with what someone—Jesus—did for us as we are told in 2 Corinthians 5:21, "For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ." We can take no credit for salvation. Jesus gets all the credit.



That is why it is important that we are thinking clearly about discipleship. We need to think carefully about how all that applies to discipleship. Because of the performance trap I talked about earlier, we need to have a clear grasp of the fact that salvation and discipleship are not the same thing.  Many believers unconsciously begin to add their own works or performance to the gospel because of guilt for their sin. The result is spiritual bondage, not the rich and satisfying life Jesus wants us to have (John 10:10; 2 Corinthians 1:5; Ephesians 3:20).

Salvation is a gift given to us by God when we believe the gospel. It is undeserved. Nevertheless, God offers it to us despite our sin and hostility toward him. Discipleship is something we do as a result of believing the gospel. We imitate Jesus to show our love for him and for God. Jesus was the ultimate imager of God, so we want to live the same way as Jesus did.