How God gave me a passion for discipleship
By Bill Schlipp
I'd like to introduce myself. I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ and the founder of Fertile Ground Ranch Discipleship Ministry (FGR). In this opening blog, I want to tell the story of how God gave me a passion for biblical discipleship. Through it, I hope that you, too, will become passionate about it and all we hope to accomplish, by the hand of God, at FGR.
If you haven’t already, please read the brief description in the “About” section on our website.
It was during my conversion experience in 1997, when I was freed from the bondage and idolatry of drugs and alcohol, that I was given not only faith to finally trust God and the peace that came with it, but also a passion and a purpose to tell everyone – especially my fellow addicts – what I’d experienced. I couldn’t wait to tell others about the effortlessness of receiving the free gift of salvation through the finished work of Jesus Christ. This passion propelled me to exploit any opportunity God put before me to practice my newly found life purpose. I experienced many things, both encouraging and discouraging, during the early years of my Christian walk. These experiences were fruitful in helping me develop an understanding of what it means to be and to make disciples of Jesus.
I plan to share and explore these experiences with you in further detail as this blog about discipleship plays out. But at the root is a single, major revelation that came to me in a class I took at Moody Bible Institute while working on a bachelor’s degree in biblical studies. This class, “Life-on-Life Discipleship,” revealed to me that, while the Bible gives explicit examples of the qualities and commitments of true disciples, it also demonstrates the teaching methods Jesus used to develop these traits and how we are similarly instructed today to carry out the Great Commission of Matthew 28.
There is no shortage of books on discipleship in Christian bookstores today (and I’ve read many of them). There are just as many discipleship programs in good and well-meaning churches. But there is no substitute for the simple and clear Word of God when it comes to discovering Jesus’s plan to use disciples as the way to reach the whole world with the gospel.
My humble prayer is that God will use me to share and explore with you all that God has been showing me from His Word and through my own clumsy-yet-well-intentioned desire to make disciples of all nations.
If you haven’t already, please read the brief description in the “About” section on our website.
It was during my conversion experience in 1997, when I was freed from the bondage and idolatry of drugs and alcohol, that I was given not only faith to finally trust God and the peace that came with it, but also a passion and a purpose to tell everyone – especially my fellow addicts – what I’d experienced. I couldn’t wait to tell others about the effortlessness of receiving the free gift of salvation through the finished work of Jesus Christ. This passion propelled me to exploit any opportunity God put before me to practice my newly found life purpose. I experienced many things, both encouraging and discouraging, during the early years of my Christian walk. These experiences were fruitful in helping me develop an understanding of what it means to be and to make disciples of Jesus.
I plan to share and explore these experiences with you in further detail as this blog about discipleship plays out. But at the root is a single, major revelation that came to me in a class I took at Moody Bible Institute while working on a bachelor’s degree in biblical studies. This class, “Life-on-Life Discipleship,” revealed to me that, while the Bible gives explicit examples of the qualities and commitments of true disciples, it also demonstrates the teaching methods Jesus used to develop these traits and how we are similarly instructed today to carry out the Great Commission of Matthew 28.
There is no shortage of books on discipleship in Christian bookstores today (and I’ve read many of them). There are just as many discipleship programs in good and well-meaning churches. But there is no substitute for the simple and clear Word of God when it comes to discovering Jesus’s plan to use disciples as the way to reach the whole world with the gospel.
My humble prayer is that God will use me to share and explore with you all that God has been showing me from His Word and through my own clumsy-yet-well-intentioned desire to make disciples of all nations.
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