Disciples of Jesus want to make disciples for Jesus.
This is not a matter of duty; it is the overflow of the life of Christ within us. Experiencing the love of God revealed to us in Jesus’s sacrificial death on the cross, we long that others will come to share God’s mercy in the personal knowledge of sins forgiven and peace with him. The joy that is our daily refreshment, as we trust Christ and walk with him, is something we long that others will share, in our culture of doom and gloom. The sure and certain hope of Christ’s return, in power and glory, to bring in his eternal kingdom of new heavens and a new earth, so transforms our prospects and outlook that we want many others to come to know this undergirding, shaping reality for life in the here and now.
Not easy
But making disciples does not happen easily. In a context like ours, where the tides of atheism are continually eroding what remains of our Christian heritage, we are becoming desensitised to our faith being routinely caricatured as unbelievable — at least for normal, reasonably intelligent, 21st-century people. The constant daily diet of the news bulletins is of war and violence, appalling atrocities and mindless slaughter, poverty and famine, disease and death. How can there possibly be a God of love and mercy in the face of such suffering, unprovoked and undeserved?
