In our last blog, we talked about how to get Christ-Centered leverage in loving God, loving people, and making disciples. Today we want to talk about the fulcrum of that leverage—the disciples’ relational triangle.
This gets very visual and practical in helping us build loving Christian friendships that make following Jesus both meaningful and effective.
Welcome to Be the Church, a blog that equips and encourages us to love God, love people, and to make disciples.
How do we get leverage to accomplish those commands? We make friends. We build relationships. This requires us to converse with one another. We need to have conversations with each other and with Jesus.
Here is a tool that can keep us focused on doing that and help us be a better friend and follower of Jesus.
Three Relationships of a Disciple of Jesus
The points on the Disciple’s Relational Triangle represent 3 essential relationships to being a disciple of Jesus. If we want to experience the abundant life he offers, we must engage in conversations that build Christian friendships.
At the top of the chart you see Soul-Connecting Conversations. A developing disciple is hungry for soul-connecting conversations. What is that? Well, It’s goes beyond cliché talking. (“Hi, how are you?” “I’m good.”) It more than chatting about the weather, sports, or the news.
It’s also not gossiping or recruiting allies to help us justify our bad attitude or behavior. Those are soul-destroying. We have a soul-connecting conversation when, with an open heart and mind, we tell our story in meaningful and appropriate ways.
It’s simple. We can mutually share something that’s good and something that’s not so good in our lives right now. How could we help each other? What does God want for us?
Who do we have these conversations with? We can start with any disciple of Jesus.
Soul-Connecting Conversations with Other Disciples
So the top left point on the triangle represents having soul-connecting conversations with other disciples.
I promise you they are out there in abundant supply. Followers and friends of Jesus are hungry for real, grace-filled, love-of-God-based friendships.
But remember, in training to “be the church,” we are opposed by the world, the flesh, and the devil. These enemies are doing everything they can to distract, entice, and confuse us. They don’t want us to engage in powerful relationships.
Let’s stand our ground and connect with other disciples!
Soul-Connecting Conversations with Non-Disciples
We also can have soul-connecting conversations with non-believers. In the Great Commission, Jesus commands us to make disciples. The best way to do that is to play, story, and eat with people. We will be more specific in later blogs about this.
But briefly, “storying” is initiating Spirit-led dialogues where we listen to understand. We ask respectfully curious questions until they believe we’ve heard them. We can then share our story with gentleness and patience.
This is a loving process that could take years of simple soul-connections, or sometimes God’s timing is sooner.
Daily Life-Giving Conversations with God
All this begins and ends with a daily, life-giving conversation with Jesus. This can happen when I slow down and invite God to fill my mind with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual understanding and wisdom.
“Jesus, how do you want me to love you, love people, and make disciples today? What simple step could I take?”
We can move toward the Father, Son, and Spirit with open, expectant hearts—assured of his loving response. We can activate our wills and choose to obey Jesus.
As a result, our fear then turns to faith, anxiety to peace, anger to patience, guilt to forgiveness, and our insecurity to confidence.
We matter to God, and when we’re connected to him we know it, feel it, and love it! Want to know more about having a life-giving conversation? Jesus gives the perfect metaphor. In Blog 4.1, it’s about the vine and branches.
Up Next: Conversations with Jesus: a Connection
Next time we’ll see how Jesus’ teaching about a grapevine can help us better understand how to stay connected to him and be more fruitful than ever.
Would you like to share this with your friends? Here’s the slideshow for today’s blog so you can talk about it with them!
Recruit Some friends to have these Conversations!
Perhaps you have some friends who might want to have an ongoing conversation with you about God and having a daily conversation with Jesus. Here is a tool to help you start and keep those conversations going with either disciples or not-yet disciples.
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