John 15:16 You did not choose men, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit -- fruit that will last.

1. Jesus ____________ us to be His disciples when He ____________ us. Now we live our lives ____________ what that looks like.

2. A disciple is a person who sits at the feet of a ____________ and ____________ what the teacher has to give.

3. Christian disciples are those who are ____________, that is, those who have received God's ____________ in Jesus Christ.


Scripture Readings
Isaiah 35:4-7a
James 2:1-10,14-18
Mark 7:31-37


Take It With You!

Here are some further thoughts to help you contemplate and living the life as a baptized child of God!

To speak among the baptized, those who are dying and being raised (Romans 6:4), is to enter into a world of odd communication and peculiar speech. Baptismal speech need not conform to the reasons of this world (Romans 12:2). Conversation among the baptized is ecclesial in nature, political. A peculiar polis is being formed here, a family, a holy nation, a new people where once there was none (the images are all baptismal, 1 Peter 2:9).

Forgetting the baptismal context of our preaching, we risk distorting the gospel into an intellectual dilemma: how can modern, twentieth-century people believe a first-century Jew? It becomes a matter of subjective affirmation ("this seems right to me"), or of nodding whenever our particular gender, racial, or cultural button is pushed. But the gospel is none of these.

Rather, in baptism, we are subsumed into a story of water and word. A story of creation formed out of dark waters. A story of a God so righteous that he was willing to make war on the world he created, only to hang up his bow and to promise never to give up on us again. A story of a people, created out of nothing, by a God determined to be worshipped rightly, led through waters into the desert as imperial chariots foundered. A story of a Jewish woman visited by God in a way that confounded her fiancé but caused her to sing. A story of a crazy man out in the desert proclaiming a new kingdom coming in water and fire. A story of one who saved by an issue of water and blood.

William H. Willamon, Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized