In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects.

Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity.

Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.

– Matthew 5:48 MSG

The invitation of the Gospel is stark and unrelenting: Come and die in order to live. It is strange and compelling that Jesus, who healed so many, never once chose to heal his own disciples instantaneously. Instead, he continually beckoned them to the weightiest of challenges, probing the very depths of their souls—both the masculine and the feminine within them—daring them to come and die at the deepest levels of their human experience:

Pick up your cross and follow me.

If you want to save your life, you must lose it.

You cannot serve God and money. You cannot serve God and power.

Leave everything you’ve ever known, and follow me.

Unless you surrender all to me—giving up everything, father, mother, sister, brother—you cannot be my disciple.

Jesus’ language to his disciples is a language of initiation. He shaped and implemented a culture where men and women can realize their God-given identities. And from generation to generation, he guides his followers into a lifestyle of ever-increasing maturity through loving challenge.

If we allow our lives to speak, we will hear Reality inviting us to pass through a death and experience rebirth. At every moment, Jesus is freshly inviting us onto the ancient path of initiation. It is the center of his brilliant and loving work.

You cannot discipline your way out of woundedness and brokenness. At the same time, you cannot heal your way out of immaturity. Jesus’ way with the disciples is both: to heal and mature. By day and by decade, he not only heals what is lame in us but trains us to join him in walking on the water.

Join me and Conrad Schottel for a conversation as we dare to let Jesus lovingly challenge us.

For the Kingdom,