Discipleship in the Middle Ages Podcast Episode

That’s the real goodness I think, of having some sort of quote unquote map for our spiritual journey as disciples of Jesus so that you can identify in this stage of my life right now, what is the invitation of God to me? Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Excellent as always, to have you along. Isaac Funk is up from Peachtree City, Georgia. Welcome, Isaac. Thank you. Glad to be here. And Arlan’s here. We’re going to have a conversation about discipleship, which is not all that unfamiliar to our audience and to this podcast.  

I want to set the conversation up here today. I could be wrong, in fact, call me out if I am, but I think if you were to take a straw poll on a caricature of a disciple and who should be discipled, I wonder if most imaginations light up with young, immature beginning starters. Do you think that’s pretty close? Do you think that is naturally the caricature of who we think should be discipled? 

And sometimes I exclude myself from that caricature. I think we’re going to push on that a little bit in this conversation and expand that caricature. I think that’s been my experience. If you go to a Christian bookstore to their discipleship section, you’re going to find curriculum for beginner Christians or catechisms or something that’s going to be walking a new believer through first steps of doctrine and learning. 

You know, I have a crazy analogy, which may fit or may not fit. For a brief moment in my life, in junior high, I used to run the mile. The mile? You mean you were that fast. It was just a brief moment. And see, when I ran the mile a couple times, they said, you’ll have to do that again. 

But you know, it’s four laps around most track. And there’s something about how in that first lap, you’re feeling okay and it kind of goes well and that kind of thing. And then usually on the fourth lap, you see the end and you can get excited about the last little bit. 

But that middle section, that second and third lap. It’s so easy to just trail off or just get lost in the mundane of doing this again, same scenery, you know, same thing, not feeling as good, a little bit harder. And the reality is that area right there is where so much gain is made for those who are going to finish strong. 

Right? You have to keep pace. You have to keep your mental focus during that time. And I think there’s something here with this discipleship idea. We talked about the beginning and that can come back at the very end, but in that middle section, there’s still a lot to do. Well, I like that analogy, Arlan and I might actually play to it. Sure. 

With this comment for all who are real runners out there, but it seems like there’s a lot to learn about the start of a race. And there’s a lot to say about the end of a race. But what is there to say about the middle of the race? Right? Just like, don’t stop. But there again, it would be my ignorance, probably a runner out there saying, no, you’re missing it. You have to think about this during the middle of it. That’s further to my point. The literature is how to start the race, maybe how to end the race, but what is it in the middle? And now we’re talking spiritually, right? Isaac, does that fit more to your point? Yeah. I think it’s a little bit easier to measure those things, the beginning and the end of it, to your point. 

Right. You can tell when the person sets off, okay, their pace has changed. They’re moving now and you’re like, okay, great. But you don’t see all the inner workings. It’s going on with the runner in those middle sections, and I think that’s really what to Arlan’s point. A really essential aspect of being able to run the race well is what do you do as you’re running? 

And so, to go to a spiritual growth analogy, the initial start of conversion or a walk with Christ, often you see a lot of very quick, maybe rapid, very evident change of some type, obvious changes in one way, and now they’re a different way. And then if you go into the more middle ages of that walk or life or whatever you want to say, there’s still a lot of work going on, but it’s much deeper, much internal, much more underneath the surface. 

That really will set up, you know, for a good end. And there are a lot of times, I’m going back to that analogy, there were a lot of times in the second and third lap and you’re like, I’m going to slow down, or I’m just going to stop pushing, or, you know what, I’m going to go sit down for a while. Just think about how that correlates to our own spiritual walk. 

Yeah. Isaac, you’re really well read and well researched in this conversation. I’d be interested in your explanation, perhaps putting some words to what we’re saying here and what the analogies have been bringing forth. I mean, Christianity has had a long history of charting the Christian’s growth. Am I right about that there?  

There has been a great deal of thought put to this to elevate and bring to the surface some of that conversation. Yeah, so I think throughout church history there’s always been a large emphasis around baptism for a believer, it seems, and a lot of the learning like the cutting off of blatant sins and just basic obedience stuff that they’re learning and starting a rhythm of disciplines and, as Arlan said too, those are Those are pretty easy to measure. You can see that this person is building community, they’re getting involved in young group, all of that. And then, throughout Christian history, there have been different traditions in the church, different streams of the church that have all had similar language to these recurring movements of a Christian’s life that can happen simultaneously. One is purification where you’re continuing to remove these disordered desires or affections that we have in life, or attachments we have towards certain things or idols that sometimes overtake our love for God. Idols would be a word for that.  

Absolutely. So, purification and then illumination, which is really about growing in wisdom and discernment and practicing that as you grow. I think that’s a lot of maybe the middle stage kind of experience. And then union or communion, which is like a deepening of your participation in God’s life, being fully content, being loved by him, and letting that love flow through you to others, into the world around you. And those things, again, are not a linear journey that historical Christianity has laid out for us necessarily, but it is this upward spiral. I’ve heard it described where you continue to move through those different stages as it were from different vantage points and you just continue to grow into a person who is more like Christ being conformed to his image as Scripture puts it. I like that illumination, purification, and communion. I think that is the vocabulary, the nuances, the shades that I’m missing in laps two and three of running. 

Right. I don’t even know what I should be thinking about except just don’t stop. Yeah. But when you paint with some articulation as you have done, it really surfaces really rich practices, objectives, and benchmarks. Yeah. I think Scripture will speak to things like crucifying your affections and lust. It’s this language that you can see kind of thing. So, let’s use an example. Perhaps you have an issue with anger that’s been a besetting sin or something that you quickly fall back into. 

And I think in the early stages you maybe start to identify it and you start to maybe get a little bit of a handle on it, by God’s grace, and maybe less angry to most people than before or just more of a pleasant personality. But there’s a lot of stuff underneath the surface, which goes to that purification type piece. That’s the affections and lust that’s driving that anger which is a secondary emotion. You know, what’s underneath there? What’s the frustration? Why is that frustration being caused? What are the stories we’re telling ourselves? What are the lies we believe in?  

What are the entitlements that we are allowing ourselves? If we go through the hard work of working into those things, purifying those things, illuminating them, bringing them to light. Then you start to work at the root level. And if you don’t, you’ll be at that status quo for the rest of your life. But if you do, it takes you to a deeper fulfillment in the fullness of Christ. Again, that’s the language you see scattered throughout the Scriptures of those types of discussions. Yeah, and just to put some flesh on that, I can think of an experience in my life when a lot of my Christian journey was like behavior management for me. 

Yeah. And just making sure I wasn’t doing the wrong things, and I was doing the right things, and just choosing those over and over again. And I remember going to a Christian conference and the way that they spoke about just living freely in the love of Christ and so unhindered by anxiety, by anger, by lust, by greed, by pride and being driven to have this perfect image or impact on the world productivity. 

Anyway, like freedom from all of that, and they acted like it was so accessible to the Christian and they would bring out the things that Jesus himself would say, and you could look at the Sermon on the Mount. It’s very much about this heart level freedom and change, which I just remember being so compelling and leaving that conference being like, man, I want that. And I didn’t even know necessarily that it was that kind of freedom that was being offered to me. And I didn’t even know how to walk into that even after leaving that conference. But there was just some pull there that like, there’s got to be more to following Jesus than just not doing wrong things. 

Your vision was expanding and doing right things. Your vision was expanded. That’s right. In that moment. But I want to go back to that time where it was behavioral management. Would you say that was where you needed to be during those years? I want you to speak a little bit about that, so we understand that well. 

Yeah. I do want to be clear about that. I mean, that’s the starting point. Sometimes you just have to cut off the stuff that is going to be destructive in your life and in the lives of people around you. And start doing things that you know are going to set you up for the long haul, maybe. 

So, even in that explanation, we can see then that this growth takes some form and some shape, right? That’s where you needed to be at. Behavioral management at some level, maybe we’ll call it a stage. At that stage you needed to be there, but you’re not there now and you needed to mature beyond it. 

Am I thinking that’s the real reason for having some sort of map for our spiritual journey as disciples of Jesus not as some sort of hierarchy in terms of Christians, but so that you can identify in this stage of my life right now, what is the invitation of God to me? Okay, so I’ve just started this out. The invitation is to put off and put on. Yeah. And there will be other invitations and other stages of my life that will come to me just as a matter of taking on more responsibility, a spouse, children, job, ministry, all these things. And there will be different invitations in each of those stages or seasons of life. 

And when you say invitations, I think I know what you mean, right? Invitations from God saying, hey, step into this. There’s something here. There’s some sense of my deepening life in you here. That is going to be possible where you can become more a person of love, less a person of anxiety, less a person of ego driven living. 

And the way that you’re putting it sounds like there’s an invitation out to me if I should see it and receive it. I think that’s the challenge that I’m hearing in this moment, Isaac, is it sounds to me like you’ve just given a picture of God as one who invites us deeper. Should we know that the invitation is in our mailbox? And should we accept it?  

So, Isaac, you used the terms put off, put on, right? So go to that Ephesians passage where it speaks in chapter four. It says, put off the old man, which is corrupt through deceitful desires and put on the new man, right? But in the middle, there it says, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, right? 

Put off, be renewed. And then put on, and I think that being renewed is a little bit of this ongoing that we are talking about where our vision is being expanded, it’s being broadened. We’re realizing that there’s more opportunity and that’s spiritual work. It’s a work of the Holy Spirit within us. But it’s an invitation, like you said, to step into that, to really go to those deeper levels. 

There’s something really compelling about being able to see and foresee growth. Okay, so now let me use this story. I was an educator and I was taught something really important by a sixth-grade teacher. If you want to motivate sixth graders, tell them that you are preparing them to be seventh graders. 

That’s how you do it because every sixth grader wants to be a seventh grader. And that was really helpful for me because I was teaching kids and I was telling them about things way out there, like, you’re going to be able to have a job. Yeah, I’m missing that on a kid. Yeah. Because they don’t even really want a job. But they do want to be seventh graders if they’re sixth graders and they want to be eighth graders if they’re seventh graders. And that just came to me in this conversation, which is really kind of interesting. If we’re running the middle laps, sometimes motivation is lacking because we don’t know what the next step is, the next stage, what should I be growing into? 

Yep. Does that make sense? Now, I don’t want to at all come across like Christlikeness is that end goal and that’s beautiful and motivating. But there is something about your illustration there, Arlan, what if I learned about what’s driving my anger? Yeah. Is that the next step for me? 

Now that’s really helpful. It has to be attainable to your point, Matt, the next step has to be able to be envisioned and attainable. Or else we end up in these places, which are all really good. And we say, you know, Christ called us into the abundant life, and we are to become more like him and those kinds of things. 

But they stay out there in this realm of, well, to use your early example, you’ll get a job someday or you’ll be a really good college student someday. That’s too far out there. So, I like what you’re saying there, and that’s why I think it’s so hard, again, to use that running example in the second and third laps. It just starts to all blend together and you can’t see the finish line. In fact, you see it and you pass it and you start the next lap again. And you have to offer a level of closeness and attainability. What’s the next step?  

I think it’s interesting too, as you’re talking about this, I’m thinking about my own experience as a younger believer, and I think I had just huge plans for my life. I think I was going to go be the next Jim Elliot or something and really make impact. And not knowing exactly how that was going to happen but really desiring that. And I think I did explore paths that I thought might take me down that route. But as I have now entered into my middle years, and I’m at the beginning stages of my middle years, and I’ve realized this is how things are landing. 

Did Arlan call them Middle Ages? Middle Ages, kind of like the Dark Ages, Welcome Isaac’s little history analogy to the dark ages there. Yeah. Was that Freud? We caught his meeting. Yeah, I did it anyway. It struck way too close to home. I’m sorry, I digress. No, that’s the experience because you’re like, okay, this is what my life is turning out to be, and it’s not exactly how I anticipated it. Yeah. And it’s good and there’s so much grace in it and all of that. But my point is that the invitations now of God to me and my discipleship journey are just what’s in front of me. 

Actually. It is exactly in my marriage and with my kids and with the job. The role that I’ve been given is where I have to ask these questions that I think any mature believer who wants to grow and ask is like, where am I still grasping for control over something? Yeah. That I don’t have control over, or where am I avoiding some truth or where do I need repair in a relationship? You know, I think in marriage, somebody who is working through this is realizing I can’t love my spouse as they are because I realized I had an idealized picture of them. 

Okay? And so, the invitation in that stage is I have to surrender, release this idealized version of what my life, my marriage would look like and just receive what it is to me and work within that. Or as a parent, I am attached to the validation, the approval of my children. And so, I am anxious and I am controlling and just recognizing that truth about me and surrendering that, or in my work or my ministry.  

Wait till they get older, Isaac and you start to live vicariously through them. Wanting them to do what you could not and do it better than you. You know what I mean? So, therein comes such joy. Therein comes the invitation. It’s what comes through all of these. It’s what comes through dealing with loss, suffering, limitation. All of those things become the doorways that God is saying, okay, here’s where you can walk through to grow my life deeper in you. And here you see the beautiful complexity of the Christian walk that all of those steps are harder than we ever want them to be. 

Right. It is a hard thing, just like that mile example, running in those second and third laps and not slowing down and just keeping pace is harder and harder but it’s also more beautiful. The fruit from it, the result from it as you just faithfully continue on one step after a time. The beautiful fruit that comes from it is richer than we can ever imagine. Well, I appreciate casting that vision and the beauty of it a little bit because I love the list that you just gave Isaac, and I think some of the reaction we have when you talk through all that is, that’s too good to be true, right? 

For me to really let go of control, you mean for me to really accept my circumstances. And be good with them. You mean for me to really live in a place of joy, yeah. Right. So, I love that. How does a person step into it then? What does it look like? Isaac, for a person, I think to look at their stage and say, okay, this is my world. The invitation is out for me. Should I accept and step into it? What does the stepping into it look like?  

Yeah, well, let me just paint a picture. I’ll back up just very slightly to step into it then further. I’ve heard a scene from John 21, between Peter and Jesus used a lot to demonstrate or illustrate this. Basically, Peter follows Jesus as a young man. Follows, goes where he goes, has a whole lot of agency. Yeah. And then he’s just like you’re going to grow old and somebody else is going to clothe you and they’re going to lead you by the hand where you would rather not go. And I think that’s the picture that we have when we don’t even always understand where it’s going to lead us. 

We won’t always understand two, three steps down the line, but all we see sometimes is what is that one step in front of me? And so, I think a lot of times. When we understand, oh, this is a pain point in my life right now. You know this, whatever that limitation, loss, whatever disillusionment is, and sometimes it just looks like finding like a wise, trusted person being like, hey, I just need to tell you the truth about whatever this is in me or what I’m going through, and sometimes I think that it opens the doorway because you’ve brought somebody else into it to be a companion along this journey with you. Honestly, I think that’s a pretty important part of these middle stages of discipleship having a very close companion beside you to help walk out in some of that ambiguity. 

Yeah, it could look like that, and it could be like, man, you know what I, really regret this relationship with this person, my family, my kid, this person at church, like, what this looks like, what I’ve done. And that’s maybe just weighing on you. It’s like, I’m going to step out and just have a conversation with this person. 

Seek repairing and restoration in this relationship. And you just see where that goes. And what you do is just entrust it to God’s leading me where I would rather not even want to go through hard, but you’re willing. You know what to let God lead it. It is the same resemblance to that early-stage discipleship of confession and repentance. 

Isn’t that what you just explained? Which I think is actually very helpful. Okay. As we run the middle ages. Right. We still follow the shape and form of confession and repentance into Christlikeness, and I think that is just so often missing in too many places. 

Just the opportunity for it. We have a nice system for a new convert. Yeah. You go and you meet with your elder and you can confess, right? And you tell him what you’ve done, but as time goes on, we just don’t have places for that oftentimes in our lives. Like where do we go to just tell and I’m not talking about gross sins or anything like that necessarily? 

Although that’s important too. But even beyond that, I just didn’t want to tell you about some of my weaknesses. Or like, I’m going to try you. I’ve been struggling with my ego at work. Yeah. Or in my ministry. Like someone who we can just tell the truth to, I think, is so important. And instead, isolation becomes such a natural companion in itself. And what you said is so true. If you have someone alongside you that you trust that you’re able to be open and honest with, it makes the journey, it makes the running, it makes the path so much better. And that’s part of that process to step into it. It’s why community is so important in a discipleship journey. 

It’s a critical component of that. Yeah, true. I mean, I know why it’s hard in the middle ages because you mentioned the gross sins. It’s hard to confess. I was just at a meeting this morning and I felt competition come. And as I was sitting there, I was like, why am I feeling competitive right now? 

Right? Why am I trying to find the mistake or the error on the other side of the story? What’s going on. You know what I mean? I felt like that’s a hard thing to do to look at a person and say, I’m feeling pretty competitive against you right now. Right. The point is sometimes when it’s petty, it’s even more embarrassing. So anyway, but it’s more of the depth of the fullness of who we are that’s being conformed into the image of Christ. That’s one reason why I think this becomes so counter-cultural is we are surrounded by messages of ease and quickness and stories of victories and that kind of thing, and we lose sight of the ongoing difficult, hard, continued mundane that leads towards those things.  

You know, we like to celebrate, you know, being on the podium after it’s all over and we forget the hours and hours of training with very little visible progress that allows that to happen. But it’s such a beautiful thing if we can embrace it and step into it and encourage each other along that path. 

I think part of that too might be, you talked about just this society or culture that we’re in and I think we value productivity, and impact, you know, and that implicit message. I think I must increase so Christ can increase. That’s the implicit messaging that comes to us through that, rather than, I must decrease so he can increase, or he must increase, I must decrease. Right. And I think because we put so much value on just being seen as valuable, productive that it’s really scary to do anything that might cause people to think differently. I thought that he was. Yeah. Or she was. I’ve chased it down. 

It’s easier to say, I did a thing and I shouldn’t have. It’s harder to say, I am this type of person and I shouldn’t be. Yeah. I think that’s the repentance of middle age. Yeah. Let’s just sit with that for a minute. I think that needs to be heard. Yeah. Oh, I heard a story just recently of, you remember Mike Tyson? 

And the other boxer, I can’t remember the name of that guy, he bit off his ear. Do you remember that? So, whoever it was, in the interviews afterwards, I think Mike Tyson was just like, oh, I don’t know, it just came over me like lapse of judgment sort of thing. Evander Holifield. He deserved it. He deserved to be mentioned in this. 

Lost your ear. Yeah, he deserves it. Yeah, he was talking about this, I don’t know what happened, but the reality is what happened in the ring was who Mike Tyson was. The kind of person who, when pushed to that extent, would bite an ear off of a person. And I’m not coming down on Mike Tyson, but I’m coming down on us saying we are also that person when we are pushed to those edges of ourselves. 

How we react to disagreement, pain, loss, whatever, reveals a much deeper part of us than we otherwise are able to see. And so, yeah, the thing is not just what I did, but it’s actually I am this kind of a person who would do something like that. Yeah, Christ said it right? He said, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Right. So, what’s inside will come out. That’s the thing. I think sometimes we forget that he didn’t come just to make us nice people. He came to make us new men and new women. Right. Conformed so that we are him. That was the beauty that I was sensing at that conference. Wow, what an amazing opportunity to be revealed as who we are. 

Not that God would just leave us in that state, but that he would remake me, but he can’t remake us if we’re unrevealed. You know? He cannot heal what is hidden. And so, a lot of that middle stage is taking what is hidden and getting that revealed to ourselves first and foremost, because oftentimes that’s where it’s most hidden, but then also to other people. 

So that we can finish the race strong. So, I started with this caricature of who the disciple is, right? And I just think through this conversation, it’s been so redefined and that we all are in desperate need of a disciple. We all are, right? And I think that’s a really important message to capture. Thank you Arlan. Thanks, Isaac for sharing. I think when you, when you put it that way, you see how discipleship is just so much a part of the good news of Christ. That he not only gets us off, started and finished, but in those middle laps grows us in purpose in really beautiful ways. 

And to our listeners, thanks for listening. May we accept the invitation that God has placed in front of us in whatever stage we’re in to grow more into his likeness. You might be interested that ACCFS is putting on a discipleship conference in Bloomington, Illinois on April 18th. Registration is open. 

You can find that on our website. It’s going to focus on this topic of discipleship across the lifespan. If that is of interest to you, we would be glad to see you there.