Just before he ascended to the Father’s side, Jesus commanded the eleven disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations…”. I am a Christian because they were obedient.

Those guys didn’t have a book to read on discipleship. All they had to draw on was their three years of walking with Jesus, of seeing how he built into their lives, how he turned them from doubters to disciples. And I think the trick of discipleship is that there is no trick. There is no program. There is no fast-track. It’s just life together.

The reason you can’t speed up the discipleship process is because you’re making disciples out of humans, and despite the speed of our culture, humans move at a very slow pace. We take years to learn simple lessons. We don’t get things until we get them, if you know what I mean; and nobody can tell you how or when you’re going to grasp it. This is life. It happens as it is happening.

Jesus is leading the process. This is why I don’t like to set goals or have benchmarks with others. I’d much rather hang out in the presence of Jesus and see what happens, all under the assumption that he will speak the words he wants us to hear. Who am I, after all, to have a plan for your life? Jesus is much better at making plans, and he’ll reveal them when he decides to reveal them. There is no destination in discipleship other than full Christlikeness (which we will never reach in this life), and the joy is in the journey of pursuing him together. Anyone who genuinely and wholeheartedly seeks to become a disciple of Jesus will not fail to become one.

It seems like all the most difficult questions of faith fall along the same general line: How can a good God allow evil to exist? Why would God allow natural disasters? Why did God let so-and-so die? Underlying these questions is another one: Is God really all-powerful? Is he truly in control? If he’s not, then we desperately need to rethink our conception of God. But if he is, then how can he possibly be good?

These are difficult questions. The deists thought they had found an answer when they created a God who was omnipotent but disinterested. But when God becomes disinterested and distant, everything else–Creation, sin, the Incarnation, the cross, resurrection–falls apart. You may as well be agnostic.

Part of the difficulty of these questions is the way we understand the term “allow”. Or, to put it in more theological terms, what we mean when we say “God is sovereign”, or “God is omnipotent”. We assume that, because God is sovereign and omnipotent, then he must give his approval to everything that happens in the world. On any given day a certain number of proposals cross his desk, and he rubber stamps some APPROVED and others DENIED. Those proposals which are approved, like Hurricane Katrina or the Haitian Earthquake, actually occur, and those which are denied do not.

I hope that seems silly to you, because it is utterly ridiculous to me. God doesn’t have a desk or a rubber stamp. He is not the bouncer standing at the gates of the earth. He is the King, and his kingdom is in rebellion against him. God created an ordered paradise (Eden) and gave a tremendous measure of power to human beings, who then used that power to turn on God, which resulted in the loss of order and paradise. More accurately, our sin resulted in the loss of God’s direct sovereignty over Creation, because if he were to exercise his power in all its fullness, there would be no more Creation. Now, in order to spare our existence, God exercises his power in humility.

Evil, sin, natural disaster, and death are not exceptional. These are normative for a world in rebellion against its Creator. They are not punishments, they are simply the natural course of events that follow from the overthrow of God’s direct sovereignty over Creation. None of these exist within paradise. But outside, east of Eden, they are inevitable.

The real “allow” question, the one that doesn’t make sense, is why would God allow his son to leave the throne room of the castle and come, unarmed and vulnerable, into the rebellious kingdom. Why would God allow his son to live east of Eden, where evil, sin, disaster and death are the norm? It can only be because he loves the rebels so much that he wants to save them from the foolishness of their own rebellion.

Knowing he couldn’t directly coax or command them out of it, he sent his son to be just like one of them and to die at their hands. And then the King did the most amazing thing ever–he raised his son from the dead! And by raising him from the dead, the King said to the rebels, “I forgive you for all of your rebellions and your sins. See, here is my son, whom you killed, but whom I have raised back to life! Look to him and have hope that evil, sin, disaster and death don’t have the final say, but that the last word belongs to me. Behold, everything is being made new!” The one act of evil that God did allow in this world–the death of his son–is the one act by which he is remaking the world and is restoring all things to a new and glorious paradise.

If you’ve been a Christian for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard the alarmists warning of the imminent demise of the Church. We are in a culture war, they say, and nothing less than the existence of the Body of Christ is on the line. Threats from without, compromise from within—the threats are increasing and the pressure is mounting. We have to do something or the devil will win!

Now I’m no alarmist, but I do believe the Church faces a serious threat today. But the greatest threat to the Church does not come from liberal theology, secularism, materialism, any political movement, or even Islam. No, the greatest threat to the Church today is that most people who call themselves Christians have no idea how to read the Bible.

Far too many Christians never pick up their Bibles; and what’s worse, when they do, they misunderstand it and have no clue how to apply what they read to their lives. We are biblically illiterate. We think “God helps those who help themselves” is one of the treasured promises of Scripture. The Rapture has become one of our most beloved doctrines! And when a skeptic confronts us with a so-called contradiction in Scripture, we panic and our whole world comes crashing down.

The saddest thing about our current state of affairs is that it is entirely avoidable. This shouldn’t be happening. We have more access (in America) to the Bible than any culture in history. We have more translations, more publishers, more authors, more supporting materials than ever before! Of all the books in the world, the Bible should be the one book that, by now, we know quite well. And yet it remains a mystery to most.

I don’t believe that the Church is on the verge of extinction because of this. But we are immeasurably weaker. We are easy prey for false teachers. We are ignorant of the promises and commands of God. We don’t know the story of how we came to be who we are or where we are going. We are wispy. Our faith is thin.

The solution is to engage the Bible with our minds—to learn how to read the Scriptures well. This takes work, time, and focus. We can’t just pick up the Bible, open to a random verse, and read until something hits us in the face anymore. We have to pay attention to the other 99% that we usually skim over. We have to learn how to ask the right questions of the text.

Because I’m so passionate about this, and because I love to see people learn to understand the Bible, I offer a class called Understanding Scripture that equips you to read and study the Bible well. But if you can’t take my class (or a class like it at your church), there are still many resources available to you. Two books I recommend are Grasping God’s Word by Duvall & Hays, and How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Fee & Stuart. You don’t have to be intimidated by the Bible anymore. You can engage with it. You can learn to know it well, and to apply it to your life. Learning how to read the Bible well is the best answer to the greatest threat facing the Church.

God has been teaching me so much lately, but the most important lessons I’m learning are the ones that seem most basic, but are the hardest to put into practice in my life. They are the lessons of agape love.

Agape is a love that lays down its life. We see it most extravagantly at the cross of Jesus Christ, where the Son of God laid down his life to atone for the sins of all humanity. Agape is also a love that refuses its rights. This doesn’t mean that we are spineless doormats, it means that we are strong enough to not become victims when someone else sins against us.

The hardest part about living a life of agape is dying to myself in all the tiny moments of the day. Just a few hours ago I was at a gas station, trying to use the air machine to fill up my tires. Somebody was parked right in front of it but not using it, so I waited patiently. When they moved their car, I started backing up. But then some other guy zipped around me and parked right in front of the air machine, only to let his wife out of the car to go buy something in the store. He wasn’t even using it! I was so furious! I desperately wanted to hop out of the van and give him more than just a piece of my mind, but I drove off, cursing him under my breath.

Honestly, I can’t even tell you what it would look like to have agape for a total stranger like that, but I’m sure it doesn’t look like my passive-aggressive anger. But I can imagine that, if I had died to myself in that moment, and politely asked him to move so that I could fill my tires, he probably would have agreed. But I chose to be offended. I chose to be a victim.

In the tiny moments of your day, before you get angry, or offended, or choose to be a victim, take a second to consider what agape would like. Ask yourself, “How can I live a love that lays down its life?” This is what it means to walk as Jesus walked.

Spiritual growth happens when we obey God. In the Old Testament, God commanded his people to obey his commands, to “walk in” them. Walking in God’s commands is a way of saying that your whole life is characterized by obedience to God.

The Hebrew word for “walking” is halakah. Jewish teachers came to use this term to describe a life of obedience. The halakah was a life lived in obedience to God’s commands, and therefore it was the best life that one could find.

For some reason, we Protestants (Evangelicals particularly) don’t often think that obedience is a necessary component to a spiritually healthy and vibrant life. Maybe it’s the ideal of American individualism, or postmodern anti-authoritarianism, or a misunderstanding of salvation by grace alone, but we just don’t think about obedience. We don’t have a well-defined halakah.

But I can’t think of any better way to grow spiritually than to obey God. Obedience often demands that we risk a step of faith or that we die to ourselves in some way. Obedience is active faith, and any time we take a step of faith, we walk with God.

If you’re frustrated with where you’re at spiritually, and you feel like you’re not growing, it’s probably because you’re refusing to do something God is telling you to do. You need to take that step. You need to do that thing God is urging you to do. Only when you step out in obedience, when you live the halakah life, will you begin to see the transformation of character you’re longing for.