Disciple Making in a Culture of Power, Comfort, and Fear

Matthew T. Dickerson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725254930, 9781725254947
• eBook ISBN: 9781725254954
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Speaking in and to a culture that worships power and comfort while cultivating fear as a manipulative tool, Matthew Dickerson offers a transformative alternative: authentic discipleship and disciple making. What does it mean to live as disciples of Christ, what would it look like to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, and how can we be open to that transformation? How can a follower of Christ live as salt and light in the midst of a power-hungry fear-mongering society? And how can we both teach and model that disciple life as we obey Christ's command to make disciples? In the tradition of spiritual theology and formation, Disciple Making in a Culture of Power, Comfort, and Fear draws deeply from Paul's Second Epistle to Timothy--viewed as a reflection on Jesus' great disciple-making commission--as well as on Dickerson's own experiences in disciple-making ministry on college campuses and his local church. Dickerson's writing is deeply informed by Scriptures, by the works of such important Christian thinkers, theologians, and writers as Eugene Peterson, John Stott, and Richard Foster, and also by the literature of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien whose works he has been teaching and writing about for more than thirty years.

6

The Lust of the Eyes and Flesh

A Threefold Look at Temptation, Part I

One of the things I know for sure is that those who are looking to us for spiritual sustenance need us first and foremost to be spiritual seekers ourselves. They need us to keep searching for the bread of life that feeds our own souls so that we can guide them to places of sustenance for their own souls. Then, rather than offering the cold stone of past devotionals, regurgitated apologetics or someone else’s musings about the spiritual life, we will have bread to offer that is warm from the oven of our intimacy with God.46

—Ruth Haley Barton

In my adulthood, knowing something about skin cancer and the damage caused by ultraviolet radiation, I try to avoid spending too much time in direct sunlight without protection. I love being outdoors, but when I’m outside in direct sunlight I make a point of wearing a hat and sunscreen to protect my skin in addition to the Costa sunglasses that protect my eyes. For summer days on the water in very bright sunlight or thin mountain air, I have a pair of cool, lightweight, but high-SPF, fingertip-less fishing gloves as well as various bandanas or Buffs to put around my neck—and in extreme sunshine, even over my nose and cheeks and ears.

Not so when I was in high school. I used to like to get a tan. It was a status symbol of sorts. But here is the thing: I couldn’t make my skin tan. None of us can. If I wanted an exercise in futility, I could sit inside in my room all day grunting and groaning like I was lifting weights at the gym, trying to force my pale skin to darken. Nothing would happen. No amount of self-effort can give me a tan.

The summer tan I desired could only come about as the result of the work of the sun and its rays. Though I couldn’t make my skin get any darker through self-effort, I could head to the beach and place myself under the power of the sun and let that sunshine do its work of transforming my skin. I could put myself in a place to be tanned and transformed.

Disciples of Christ are called to the work of disciple making in the lives of others. We are called to be a part of God’s transforming work—that is, to be transforming influences. For that to happen, however, we must also be open to God’s transforming work in our own lives. As Ruth Haley Barton noted in the epigraph above, “One of the things I know for sure is that those who are looking to us for spiritual sustenance need us first and foremost to be spiritual seekers ourselves.”

One helpful way to think about this (though by no means the only one) is in the context of obedience. Disciple making is about training in discipleship. Discipleship involves obedience. Remember where we began this book: with the Great Commission of Jesus to make disciples, teaching them to obey. The transformation process at work in our lives is one that brings us more fully into obedience to Christ through faith in Christ and relationship with Christ

Sin, by contrast, might be understood as the opposite of obedience; it is a word we use for disobedience. Sin is the cause of our broken relationship with God. It is appropriate, therefore, for a book about disciple making to considers sin and disobedience. Those seeking to follow Christ must take the topic seriously. Though reading two chapters about sin may seem like a big downer, these chapters are actually full of hope.

To consider sin, we must also consider the enemy against whom we wage battle. Satan’s goal is to destroy our relationship with God. Sin accomplishes that. Sin results in death, which spiritually speaking is separation from God. Satan works as a deceiver and tempter, as well as an accuser and devourer. The goal of his deceit and temptation is to lead us into sin. The Bible suggests a threefold pattern to how Satan seeks to tempt us: three primary categories of temptation—aspects of human nature—that the enemy repeatedly uses or seeks to exploit. John, in his first epistle, describes that pattern as follows: “For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world” (1 John 2:16, NIV). I would describe these three types of desires as follows: 1. a desire to possess, 2. A desire for physical pleasure, and 3. a desire for power: a desire to be in control, to have authority, to be god.

Interestingly, the same threefold pattern of temptation can also be seen in the tempting of Eve (and Adam) in the garden of Eden by the serpent, who is later (Revelation 12:9) associated with Satan. “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it” (Genesis 3:6a, NIV). Eve was led to believe that the fruit would bring her physical pleasure (it was “good to eat”); it appealed to her desire to possess and to the “lust of the eyes” (it was “pleasing to the eye”); and lastly the serpent tells her it would make her more like God, more in control. Interestingly enough, thousands of years later in the first-century church, John had to warn about the same three things. And, I would add, two thousand years after that, those three sorts of temptations are still present in the lives of believers; Satan has not had to be very creative in tempting us.

Similarly, the tempting of Jesus after his forty-day fast in the desert also follows a threefold pattern. Satan again appears as tempter. First he tempts Jesus to turn stone into bread in order to meet a physical desire. He then appeals to the lust of the eyes and the desire to possess, offering Jesus all the wealth of the earth. Finally, he taunts Jesus to prove that he is God, and to exhibit his power and control, by commanding angels to come and rescue him. Of course where Adam and Eve failed to resist temptation, Jesus succeeded. Still, three different times in Scriptures—in Genesis, in the Gospels, and in one of the final New Testament epistles—we see this threefold description of temptation, appealing to a desire to possess, a physical desire, and a desire for power. There are other meaningful ways we might categorize these three temptations, and certainly there is overlap between them, but I think this understanding can be helpful in our struggle against sin.

How can it be helpful? I believe God has given us strength and tools for our struggle—or weapons, to use one of Paul’s metaphors. I am not suggesting some simple three-step program to eliminate sin from our lives. That won’t happen in this age. Though Christ on the cross defeated death which is the ultimate consequence of sin, the final victory and the end of sin in this world won’t be realized until Christ returns. But we can ask how to win the next battle. In this chapter and the next we look at this threefold temptation seen in Genesis, in Jesus in the desert, and in 1 John, seeking principles and models for our struggle against sin.

First, however, we must look at some important biblical principles in contrast to common misguided ways to think about sin.

The Struggle: Wrong Approaches to Sin and Temptation

There are three popular but misguided ways to think about sin. (Indeed, there are many wrong ways to think about it, but three in particular we consider in this chapter.) The first wrong idea is that we can conquer sin and temptation in our lives by striving really hard against it. If I just work really hard, we deceive ourselves, I can overcome this sin in my life.

You can’t. Period. Self-effort at defeating sin in our lives will be no more successful than self-effort at trying to accomplish our own salvation. Self-effort at defeating sin would be no more successful than me lying in bed trying to make my skin tan. We are saved by God’s grace, and only by his grace, at work through Jesus on the cross. The entire New Testament makes that abundantly clear. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians contains one of the clearest and also best-known expressions of this principle. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9, NIV). Likewise, the process of our sanctification—our being made holy, and freed from sin’s power—is also accomplished only by God’s grace through the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives. In the seventh chapter of his letter to the Roman church, Paul captures a common experience for those who have struggled, and inevitably failed, to overcome sin by our own self effort. Thus he does not say to Timothy, depend on your own strength and ability; instead, at the start of the passage that has been central to this book, he writes, “Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus,” (2 Timothy 2:1a, NIV, emphasis added). If you want a tan, let the power of the sun work on you.

This, not surprisingly, leads to a second common misguided way to think about our battle against sin: the false idea that since all human struggle against sin will fail, we ought not struggle at all. Though this approach could lead to a life full of obvious outward sins, in some ways it may be a less dangerous temptation than the first one. Pride is the biggest hindrance to a walk with God. We are better off knowing we can’t defeat sin by ourselves than filling ourselves with pride in thinking we can. Nonetheless, choosing not to struggle against sin is also a wrong approach. The author of Hebrews chastised his audience toward the end of his letter, noting: “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (Hebrews 12:4,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Disciples as Disciple Makers (and the Importance of Lenses)
• Disciple Making and the Word of God
• Disciple Making and Relationship
• Disciple Making and Christian Community
• Three Metaphors for Disciple Making
• The Lust of the Eyes and Flesh
• Pride of Life
• A Short Conclusion
• Bibliography