The Discipleship

Mathew 28:19

As we become more Uncommen and continue our pathway to Spiritual growth and maturity, we are called to make disciples. We are instructed to love God, love others, and make disciples. It seems to be a simple task. Love God and extend His love to others through the Holy Spirit who has been given to you through Jesus. Spend intentional time with others and then repeat the process. 

It was through a loving community that I realized the importance of discipleship relationships, which lead me to begin the Uncommen charter in Iowa. I will also share that the most crucial discipleship relationship we can start begins at home with our children. Let the kids see you in the morning, starting the day reading the Bible or sharing a devotional with your spouse. 

Too often, the day begins on Facebook, email, or text messaging, and the screen time addiction begins way too soon. Stepping into a group or jumping out in bold faith to lead a group grows your faith exponentially as well as that of the family when leading by example. Together we can build stronger faith-filled families when we center ourselves in Christ and share His message intentionally. The Holy Spirit will fill you in Uncommen ways as you draw nearer to Him. It is time to step out, be bold, and go on an Uncommen mission.  

Uncommon Questions:

Are you willing to invest in 2-5 individuals?

Are you willing to begin a discipleship relationship with your children?

Uncommen Challenge: 

I challenge you to develop at least three intentional relationships this year.

The Community

Gal.6:2

Heb.10:24-25

We are called to be in a community to encourage and support each other at all levels of faith. We are to lift each other, teach each other, and learn from each other. In times of crisis, when my wife fell ill, it was our church community that came to our support over and above our immediate family. The brothers of Uncommen have been instrumental support. 

By merely being a friend when we needed it most, the impressions left upon our family have been life-changing and Divinely appointed. We can never place a monetary value on those friendships; however, we can pour into others the same way we have been in a time of need.  

Community changes your perspective. It has transformed our children. Our 10-year-old daughter sponsors a child in Haiti, and our son reaches out to children crying on the playground to hold their hands and comfort them. Just as Jesus changed everything, being in a community can take your transformation of the heart to the next level.

Uncommen Questions:

Are you willing to let your guard down and let others into your life?

With whom are you in a community?

Do you have a Spiritual mentor?

Uncommen Challenge:

As we know we cannot do life alone, I challenge you to open your vulnerable self and let the light of others in through community. Are you ready to accept the light of others in to push out the darkness that dwells?

The Transformation

Acts 9: 1-19

If anyone would have asked me what I would be doing at the age of 52, I am sure my answer would not have been pursuing a master's degree in ministry leadership with a concentration in church planting. We must stop and ask ourselves: "is what we live for worth Jesus' death?" When I answered this question five years ago, I fell far short of honoring the reason for Jesus' death. I was a Jack! I thought I didn't need His Word, and I could do it on my own. I was wrong; through Jesus, I realized I needed to change. As a new husband and father, I needed more than me. I had to remove myself from the equation; let Jesus into my heart, give Him the room to work, and that is when life changed.  

Transformation happens within us when we act and believe differently than before. We become Uncommen through our actions, our words, and our expressions of love. We are ultimately influenced by what we think, and the mind is a very powerful influencer. When we use God's truth to replace our old ways of thinking and identify with His Word, we become transformed, we become Uncommen, and we become unique to those around us.  

The book of Acts is compelling and transformative in many ways. Forty miracles are recorded of which thirty-nine happen entirely outside of the walls of the church. One place you will not find the Apostles much is inside the church. We, Uncommen men, are no different and can develop relationships anywhere we may be. The church goes far beyond the walls to seek the lost. When examining Acts 9, the most significant transformation of Saul exemplifies how God uses everyone in and through His design. 

How do you think Saul may have felt at that moment in Acts 9? Jesus knew who was to be His messenger despite the uneasiness of the other apostles. Paul suffered and suffered; however, he proved to be exponentially influential in the multiplication of the church, discipleship making, and leadership training. Paul is an example of God using anyone and everything to advance the Kingdom.

The faith life does not guarantee a comfortable experience, but it will create a transformed life in ourselves and others.  

Uncommen Questions:

Ask yourself, what would you do in Paul's position when surrounded by the light of heaven? 

Ask the Holy Spirit for guidance in your life for promises to believe.  

Uncommen Challenge:

I challenge you to go into the city, go into the world, and be UNCOMMEN. Suffer for Him, create new relationships, and believe what you confess.

The Call

John 14:6

Jesus makes an authoritative announcement: "Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6, NIV) He is denying any other way to the Father other than through Him. This is God's design. It is not a fancy network marketing program or any select evangelistic program presented by a church; it is through Him and only Him.

Jesus died for all nations. To Jesus, it was world evangelism with no distinction between foreign and homelands. Jesus planned to train and develop others, people just like you. Jesus saw great potential in men who were willing to learn. He saw far greater potential in them than they thought capable. By the means and standards of man, the crew lacked knowledge. However, Jesus saw great potential as leaders and fishers of men. 

Each of us carries an Uncommen potential to be fishers of men. How would you have answered Jesus when He said, "follow me"? Would you lay down everything and pick up the cross or would you say "I'd love too, but first I must __________"?

My call to ministry came at a time in my life when I would never have expected it. I was sitting in a Bible Study for Dummies class at my local church. Indiana Wesleyan professor Dr. David Smith was teaching and as he spoke these words "God will use you regardless of your age" I felt the nudge of the Holy Spirit, and then Dr. Smith uttered the following statement "you are never too old for God."

I felt it was directed right at me as that was the thought going through my mind. When it comes to God, never say never as He will call you when you least expect it. It was the summer of my 50th birthday when I found myself jumping into Seminary and one year later starting the Uncommen charter in Iowa proving you are never too old. God wastes nothing in using our stories to reach others. 

Uncommen Challenge:

I challenge you to trust God for His plans for you. Know that where He's placed you is exactly where you should be.

Modern Day Idols

Gen.32;24 -32

Isiah 53:12

Jacob was a man who had certain goals in mind, but we see how one Old Testament hero’s selfish ambition led to his downfall.  

For one thing, he wanted to have his old brother’s birthright and blessing. He was hungry for power. He chased it down, though it involved deception and even disguise.

He received both – temporarily. He then began pursuing the next thing – money. Jacob worked hard as a farmer. He was very successful and accumulated wealth. But then he needed to leave it behind.

Jacob’s relationship with the beautiful Rachel was the stuff of movies. He loved her from afar and worked hard to win her hand in marriage, only to be tricked into marrying her sister, Leah. 

Jacob couldn’t quite get his hands on any of his goals. When he did, they proved to be fleeting at best. They slipped out of his reach in a short while.

Jacob’s pursuits of his idols are similar to our own selfish ambitions. Money, power, sex and romance can be good things, but they are elusive and always leave us wanting more. Chasing after these idols is like grasping water in your hands. 

But then Jacob encounters God. When all his idols failed him and when he feared for his life, Jacob finally turned to God. In a mysterious yet beautiful passage of Scripture, Jacob spends one night wrestling with God in prayer – and finally wins God’s blessings.

Jacob was a man who could never fully grasp and hold on to his idols. Yet, ironically, he holds on to a Holy God and wrestles with Him. 

God feigned weakness and allowed Jacob to win that encounter. Jacob received his blessing.

That same God, allowed himself to be made weak and take our sin upon Himself on the Cross, so we could have a relationship with Him. 

Our idols elude us but God gives himself to us. He poured out Himself even unto death.

Who would you rather choose? Worthless and elusive idols or a holy God who gives Himself to us fully?

Re-Writing our stories

Rom.6;1-7

TV soap operas reveal messy, complicated relationships replete with multiple affairs, dramatic death scenes, and over-the-top emotions.

You don’t expect to see those kinds of plot lines in the Bible.

But, Scripture has plenty of larger-than-life drama, not the least of which is the saga of Isaac’s sons, Jacob and Esau.

We learn the rather bizarre events that unfold in Isaac’s family. 

It starts off with Isaac favoring his first-born son, Esau, over Jacob. The rivalry between the two brothers begins pretty early – in the womb. And it continues through their growing years. Esau loves hunting and the outdoors, continuing to win his father’s approval. Jacob seems to be a mama’s boy. The animosity grows – like any soap opera, tensions are high and characters almost become caricatures. 

Esau ends up selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. Jacob lives up to his name of “deceiver” and tricks Isaac into blessing him instead of his older brother. Rebecca is on the sidelines, always plotting to get her way. Esau gets highly upset with his younger brother and plots to kill him. 

But God doesn’t wait for them to clean up their act. God had a plan – and, as Scripture says, His plans cannot be thwarted. From the line of Abraham, God had planned to bring forth the Savior of the world. And that was not going to change.

Despite their blatant and grievous flaws, God’s grace toward the three patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - is relentless. So, for 42 generations, from Abraham all the way to Jesus, God’s grace continues to pour out onto this family.

God doesn’t look for perfect people from perfect families. He uses the broken and the flawed so His grace shines through the cracks and the fissures.

God shows us that He can work despite our situation. He is far more committed to our transformation than we are.

God rescues us from the penalty of sin through the substitutionary death of Jesus.

But that’s not all there is to the redemption story.

God is interested in rescuing us from the power of sin. As entrenched and generational as the sin may seem, nothing is impossible for God. 

No matter how dark or convoluted our past, no matter what baggage we carry, God is transforming us, even as we cling to Jesus. He is re-writing our stories.

Before and After

1 Peter3;3-6

2 Cor.3:18

With Sarah, we find a dramatic spiritual transformation in her life. Sarah’s ‘before’ picture is characterized by her beauty, her barrenness and her bitterness.

Sarah’s beauty was legendary. Sarah was so extraordinary in her beauty that two powerful leaders – Pharaoh and King Abimelech – wanted to make her their own. 

Sarah’s ‘before’ story is also marked by barrenness. For twenty-five years (and even before that) Sarah longed for a child. But nothing changed. Day after day, Sarah waited for a child. 

Blessed with beauty, but grieved by her barrenness, Sarah became a bitter woman.

These three qualities - beauty, barrenness and bitterness – continue to mark our lives today. 

In today’s world, we are all in pursuit of physical beauty. It’s a fleeting and frail beauty. It’s a beauty that entrances us for a moment – and then leaves us wanting. 

In chasing after this beauty that can never satisfy, we come up empty. It’s a grasping, a chasing, a constant striving that leaves us exhausted and empty. This type of beauty leads to spiritual barrenness.

And when we wander long enough in that spiritual barrenness, we end up bitter.

We allow ourselves to become a spitting image of Sarah’s ‘before’ picture: perhaps outwardly “beautiful,” but barren and bitter on the inside. 

But God changed the ending to Sarah’s story. Sarah gave birth to a son and her ‘after’ picture is remarkably different. Sarah’s temporary beauty and her bitterness are replaced by the unfailing beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. 

God is in the business of transformation.

He takes the bitter, the broken and the barren and He replaces is with inner beauty, wholeness and fulness. Through the power of the Cross, God transforms us into the image and likeness of Christ Jesus. That is jaw-dropping change that no picture can ever capture!

A different question

Ps.27:14

James 1:4

We’ve all been in life’s waiting room. It’s one of life’s non-negotiables. We’ve all had to wait for something - a job, a promotion, an exam result, a spouse, a child, retirement, a holiday… the list goes on.

The one question we need to ask ourselves is: Who is waiting?

The obvious answer, of course, is: Me, that’s who!

But what if waiting periods are actually times of God waiting for us?

Imagine a 10-year-old boy asking his dad, the pilot, if he could fly the plane instead of his father. Obviously, the dad’s response would not be, “Sure thing, son.” He would, instead, wait for his son to grow up, train as a pilot, and become skillful enough to handle an aircraft. It is the father who is waiting for the son to get to where he needs to be to handle the task.

Consider an example from the Bible. God tells Abraham that he will be a father. And then Abraham waits. And waits. And waits some more. It stretches to 25 years of waiting.

There’s little doubt in our minds that the answer to the “Who is waiting?” question is: Abraham.

But maybe the obvious answer is not the correct answer. Maybe it was God who was waiting for Abraham to be ready to take on the role of the “Father of many nations.”

Maybe you’ve asked God for a certain something or somebody. You feel like you’ve been twiddling your thumbs in the waiting room for a long time. You’ve even tried to expedite the waiting process, but your little plot didn’t work and now you’re back to square one.

Maybe you should ask yourself, “Am I waiting, or is God waiting for me?” or more specifically, “For what is God training me during this waiting period?”

When we see a purpose in our seasons of waiting, it brings us closer to God.

Perhaps, He is asking you to delight yourself fully in Him so He can give you the desires of your heart.

Maybe, He wants to expose the idols in your life that have taken precedence over Him.

Maybe He will use this time of waiting to develop your perseverance so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 

Every season of waiting is a doorway through which more transforming grace enters our lives.

Relentless God

Gen.12:10-13

Phil.1:3- 6

Abraham, the father of the faith, was not always faithful to his call. Like every human, he too fell into sin. In fact, Abraham compromised his integrity by committing the same sin twice over. 

Almost immediately after God’s call to leave Ur, Abraham and his family went to Egypt to seek shelter during a famine. Here, Abraham resorted to asking his wife Sarah to pretend that she was his sister. Sarah was extraordinarily beautiful and Abraham feared that the Egyptian men would kill him in order to have Sarah. 

Despite his deception, God chose to remain faithful to Abraham.

And despite God’s grace, Abraham chose to deliberately fall into sin again.

This time it was the same trick at a different place. While Abraham was in Gerar, he again asked Sarah to pretend to be his sister so that King Abimelech of Gerar would save them. Again, the same sin. Again, the same God of mercy.

In both instances, God came to Abraham and Sarah’s rescue. He saved their marriage and Sarah’s integrity. He showed them His faithfulness. 

God showed them – and He shows us – that He is a God who pursues His people with a persistent love. He doesn’t wash His hands off of us when we land ourselves in trouble. Not even when we are serial offenders.

God is in the business of heart transformation. It is a slow process. It is hard. It is painful. But it shows us that He who started a good work is faithful to complete it.

Grace can change your story too!

Gen.12:1-4

Rom.5:6-8

“The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and The God of Jacob.”

It’s a line we may have glossed over while reading Scripture. 

Perhaps, you may not have stopped to ask yourself why God chose to identify Himself as the God of these three specific men. And, yet, God uses this title over and over again to describe Himself.

At first glance, it seems likely that it was because these men were stalwarts of courage, faith and obedience. But, it is not merely these heroes’ faith, but also their flaws that ought to draw our attention. The Bible doesn’t skim over the egregious mistakes of these men. And we have no reason to, either. Their flaws are important – because God uses their mistakes to showcase His transformative power.

The stories behind these heroes of the faith reveal that they were just like you and me. 

God called Abraham to leave behind his country and his people and go the land where God was taking him. It was an incredible calling - Abraham was to be the father of a new nation. And, yet, right from the get-go, Abraham chose to disobey God. 

In taking his nephew, Lot, along with him, Abraham was only obeying partially, consequently sowing the seeds of discord and opening the door to an ugly web of sin.

We, too, are often reluctant to make a clean break from past sin to pursue God wholeheartedly. We’re tugging along a suitcase full of our pet sins – all of which stem from our self-centredness and our need to play God. 

And, yet, no sin is beyond the transforming power of God’s grace. 

No matter how dark your sin or mine, God can change our story. No one – not even the Bible’s greatest heroes – is perfectly holy. That’s why God sent Jesus. And that’s how your story can be forever transformed.

You're Magnetic

Mark. 2:16

God loves us—just as we are, right now. Wow. That’s kind of difficult to accept, isn’t it? I mean, it’s hard to feel worthy of that love, with all our mistakes, our imperfections. Don’t we need to be perfect and holy too, just as He is, before He can love us? No, brother, He loves us—just as we are, right now. If we’re ever going to understand God, if we’re ever going to understand ourselves, in relation to God, we’re going to have to bend our minds toward that truth.

He is perfect and holy; we are not. True. What’s not true is that, because of His perfection, He’s drawn only to more perfection. What’s not true is that, because of His holiness, He demands our holiness before He’ll love us, accept us, want anything to do with us.

God knows our mistakes, every imperfection. Nothing is hidden from Him (Hebrews 4:13). And, actually, precisely because He knows, He executed the ultimate act of love: He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be our King and to save us from our mistakes and imperfections (Romans 5:8). So, the truth is—like a doctor to the sick—He’s actually drawn to imperfection and sin (Mark 2:17). Our relationships with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, begin to work when we accept and welcome that love.

Okay, so what do we do?

Throughout this week, take these words as God’s promise, just to you. Meditate upon them. Let them sink in deep.

“. . . neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate [me] from the love of God in Christ Jesus . . .” 

(Rom. 8:38-39)

Restoring Connections

Isiaha  61:4

Three relationships broke when man fell so long ago: the relationship between man and God, the relationship between man and himself, and the relationship between man and other men (and women). Our jobs now, brother, are to repair and rebuild those relationships, in our own unique ways, as much as we can during our lifetimes . . . and to encourage and assist others in doing likewise. Our King, Jesus Christ, gave us our instructions—love “God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and love “your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). His two-part directive covers all three relationships: love God more than anything else; love yourself sufficiently; and love other people at least as much as you love yourself. It’s all there.

So how do we begin? Well, we restore relationships with God when we soften our hearts, decide to trust Him more than we trust ourselves, and bend ourselves toward obedience. We restore relationships with ourselves when we soften our hearts and decide to care for ourselves as God intends, finally dealing with self-condemnation or idolatry or addiction (to work, to food, to alcohol, to pornography, or anything else). And, we restore relationships with others when we soften our hearts, decide to look around for people who need us, and bend our lives toward loving and serving and forgiving them.

Okay, so what do we do?

Take a moment to survey your life. Which type of relationship is most broken? If none is obvious, take time for listening prayer. Ask your counselor, God the Holy Spirit, to guide you. Once you’ve focused-in on what’s most in need of rebuilding, what’s most in need of repair, you’ve got your own, individualized blueprint for “what’s next.” Begin working on it this week. Start with something practical.