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Published: Oct. 10, 2023, 7 a.m.

Welcome to Day 2214 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom What Does God Want – What is Discipleship – Daily Wisdom Putnam Church Message – 03/12/2023 What Does God Want? -  What is Discipleship? Last week, we moved beyond our story narrative overview of the Bible, answering the question: What does God want? The answer we discovered over the past seven weeks was that God wants you and everyone who will ever live. In other words, God wanted a human family. God wants co-workers to take care of His creation. God wants you to know/ who you are/ and why your life has value to him. /He loves you /and desires that you also love Him. So, we viewed an overall snapshot of the Good News last week. It is simple and yet very profound. What is the Gospel, the Good News? Now that we know what the Good News is, we move from the believing aspect, where we become members of God’s human family, to the loyalty aspect, where we will focus the next two weeks on discipleship. First, we will look at ‘What is Discipleship?’ and then move on to  “What Does a Disciple Do?” Last week, we learned that nothing we can do permits us to become part of God’s human family except belief by faith in that Good News, which is:

• God sent his Son...
• Who was born in the line of David...
• As the man Jesus Christ...
• Who died for our sins...
• Who was buried...
• Who rose from the dead...

That being acknowledged, believing the Gospel (Good News) is intended to be transformative. As we are told in 2 Corinthians 5:17. 17 This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! You may recall the answer to this question. Earlier, I said that a disciple was a follower—specifically, a follower of Jesus. I defined “following” as imitating or imaging Jesus. Being “conformed to the image of Jesus” is our ultimate destiny (Rom 8:29; 2 Cor 3:18; Col 3:10).   Our motive for imitating Jesus is not to make God love us, so he’ll let us into His family. God already loved each of us “while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8) and were God’s “enemies” (Rom 5:10). We get to heaven—we become part of God’s family—when we believe the gospel. Before that, we were lost, in need of a Savior (Luke 19:10), and alienated from God (Eph 4:18). When that was our situation, God loved us. He didn’t wait until we cleaned up our act to love us.   Our motive for imitating Jesus is not to keep God loving us, so we’ll continue to be saved. (Key) That which cannot be achieved by performance cannot be lost by performance. Salvation has nothing to do with our worth or merit. It has everything to do with what someone—Jesus—did for us. 2 Corinthians 5:21 21 For