This past Sunday, we explored how we are both conformed to Christ and transformed into Christ. Drawing on Paul’s letter to the Romans, we were challenged to conform ourselves to Christ’s teachings, Christ’s grace, and Christ’s Kingdom while also allowing the Spirit to transform us and our faith.
So then what does that look like to conform ourselves to Christ and allow the Spirit to transform us more and more as people of faith who seek God’s will?
Well, in the next four weeks of worship (through September), we’ll embrace this question as we explore what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus. But fair warning: what we’ll hear in our Gospel passages isn’t fuzzy-wuzzy comfortable stuff. Discipleship asks something of us: to lose ourselves, to live in community even when there’s potential for hurt, to forgive one another, and to extend God’s boundless generosity with those that we’d rather not associate with or even think about ever again. Not easy asks. And yet, as we reach this point in the Gospel of Matthew, as Jesus himself begins to turn himself toward the cross, this is the message Jesus has for his disciples – and for us.
So as we make our way through September, I hope you can join us as we dive into, and adopt, these marks of discipleship. On our own, these upcoming teachings would be too much to absorb. But led and transformed by God’s Spirit, all of us (indeed, all people), are ushered into God’s Kingdom.