Christianity is not cultured spirituality, but a new creation. Discipleship is well, but it was not discipleship that conquered the world for Christ, it was apostleship. It was not a disciple church but an apostolic, a church not of Christian learners but of Christian confessors. Since the decisive things of the cross, the Tomb, and Pentecost, the Christian is much more than a disciple of Christ - s/he is a member of Christ; s/he is a confessor and a regenerate. Discipleship is no match for the degeneration and egotism which are in the world by lust. We are not now Christ's disciples merely but His purchased property; and Christianity before it is a discipline is a salvation....above all He is the Lord God with something more than a value for us - with an eternal and costly right whose value we but poorly prove. (P T Forsyth, Faith Freedom and the Future, 276-7)
Words to give us pause about what it is we are about when 'making disciples' suggests a more promising future for Christ's church than bearing costly personal witness and confessing His Lordship over our lives, to our actual cost. Forsyth's spirituality of the cross presupposes Christian lives bought with a price, no longer our own, and called to live as those purchased outright as redeemed confessors, whose lives speak His truth by the eloquence of sacrifice.
As always, Forsyth points to depths of Christian truth and experience that might make contemporary Evangelicalism with our passion for the practical, our desire to accentuate the accessible, seem just a little, well, shallow. 'Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me' is a hard lifestyle to sell to others; it's even harder to live it for ourselves.
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