Live
Like Jesus class was going to be epic. I
had thought a lot about the checkpoint study and had concluded that two things
had been missing from the evening services that I could incorporate in the class. Number one was commitment. As a high school student you have to come to
class every day. Sure it’s by compulsion
but I wasn’t against that yet in my life.
To make it clear how serious LLJ class was going to be I handed out a
covenant for them to sign on the first day of class. I had grown up with covenants. I thought they were binding to dedication but
truly they only bind us to guilt when we fail.
Here is the covenant…
Live
Like Jesus
Covenant
I, ________________________, have
exchanged my life for Jesus life.
I will look to encounter Him daily. Y/ N
I will enrich the lives of others because of
Jesus in me. Y/ N
I will engage my world with Jesus love. Y/ N
I will emulate Him with my whole heart, mind,
soul, and strength. Y/ N
I promise to forget the failures in
my Christian walk prior, and promise to make new strides in my emulation of
Jesus Christ future. Y/ N
Today I make a willful commitment to
this experience and will give 110% on a daily basis. Y/ N
As I become enemy number one of the
Enemy number one I commit myself to prayer, for myself and others fighting this
battle with me. Y/ N
I understand it will not be easy, but
I will fight for victory by Christ who strengthens me. Y/ N
I will open myself up to the Holy
Spirit to work in me. Y/ N
I will open up to my peers who are in
this with me. Y/ N
I will be unashamed to become a new
creature, unrecognizable from the creature that first began. Y/ N
To all of these things I commit, this
will be the year that defines me. Y/ N
____________________________________
Signed
Oh my goodness I thought this was a good idea? First of all, the first line
proves that I was living in a paradigm where I needed to somehow buy Jesus. This is false. I will forget my failures? Ok, that’s actually smart. And try harder? Oh no, I really thought that would work? I did.
Give 110%? That isn’t even
possible. The year that defines me? No pressure though right?
4 students bailed out after that first
day of class. At the time I bragged that
we were doing something so legit that the flakes couldn’t keep up. Now I question the ones who stayed. At this point I am tempted to go into
self-loathing and wonder if I should be fired for this. No, everyone involved thought this was
great. Thousands of people today would
think this is great. It looks great. But it doesn't work.
Here is the second thing I added to the class
we didn’t have in Illinois…assessment.
Every good class has assessment.
Now believe it or not I still held onto grace and knew that we could
never rightful grade each other’s walk with Christ. This truth was a seed planted in me that God
eventually caused to grow.
Our assessments looked like this. As we did the Bible study students would
write down in their notebooks all of the Jesus checkpoints. At the end of each week we would go around
the room one by one and select a checkpoint to apply to our life. Then a week later we would report strengths
and weaknesses associated with it and select a new one going forward. I graded them gracefully, as long as they
shared they got A’s, it didn’t matter how they did.
It started off great, high energy good
reports. But then mid-semester people
start forgetting their checkpoint, lying about checkpoints and by semesters end
a few people are openly not involved.
Visibly I was disappointed and “encouraged” them on to do better. Privately I was exactly the same. I had weeks go by that I couldn’t remember
what my checkpoint was either. I had
weeks I didn’t want to do it at all. And many times my checkpoint seemed to
hard for me to do on my own. But we had to.
That isn’t a relationship with Jesus,
and that isn’t Christianity. That is a
mess that causes spiritual retardation.
I began to wonder if my relationship was just broken. Because I couldn’t make myself grow. The checkpoints weren’t as powerful as they
should have been. I wondered if the
students would eventually think the whole idea was a sham.
All this time God was at work in
me. And eventually He would flip the
script and show me how these “checkpoints” were really opportunities! He would work a mistake into something good. To be continued…
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