Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, March 13, 2022
 To be a disciple is primarily to live and to have our course corrected by the Lord, often in the voice of disciples who are a little ahead of us. Which means we need to be receptive to ‘feedback,’ and we need to realise that means we need to be ready to repent.

We’re all in favour, and we’re very happy to call a lot of things ‘discipleship’, but what is it?
Maybe it’s easier to start with what it isn’t. It’s not going and having a coffee with a more mature Christian—though that can be a very helpful thing to do. It’s not attending a course or an event—though courses and events can be great. It’s not growing your church or in-depth Bible study or a midweek group that meets in a home or having fun with other Christians or making younger Christians into copies of yourself.
All of the above can be good things in the right context, all of them are sometimes called discipleship, and not one of them is.
Apprentices
The word disciple just means learner. I do wonder if shifting away from the religious term would help us. ‘Apprentice’ is probably closer in our normal use to how the word ‘disciple’ would have been used in the New Testament. I like the way John Mark Comer talks about being apprenticed to Jesus as a metaphor for the Christian life, it’s a more holistic vision than when discipleship means meeting someone for coffee once every six months.
I’ve designed apprenticeship programmes for leading Universities and an award-winning global graduate programme for Rolls-Royce. I know how these things work.
When most people hear “apprenticeship,” or perhaps even “discipleship,” they imagine training courses. Which explains the way that lots of big churches approach the Christian life, “let’s run a course,” we imagine very quickly that the correct way to treat discipleship is to create the right programme. We proliferate our programmes to treat every area of life because what we think we need is skills.
This model then infects smaller churches as well because we use the courses produced by these big churches. None of this is wrong, but often rests on two faulty assumptions, one theological and one methodological. Firstly, we assume that what we need is skills, when we need character, but secondly we assume that this is how learning works.
We think if we need to learn we should run a course. The training programmes I designed included very little by way of training courses. We worked to a learning model as a guide that suggested 10% of an apprentice’s learning would come from courses and that these would be specifically targeted at specific needs.
The vast majority of our learning comes from experience, with a sizeable chunk from feedback and reflection—our guide would have been 70% experience and 20% reflection and feedback.
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The temptation of other religions or unbelief belongs to the flesh, and this includes both overt idolatry as well as perverse worship outside of Christ. If we worship Christ in any way not commanded in his word, we fall into this sin. As church history makes clear, we are ever prone to worship God how we want to and not how God wants us to. 

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. — Galatians 5:19-21
Think how often you are left standing there asking yourself, “Why did I do that? What was I thinking when I said that?” Words escape your lips, and thirty seconds later you regret what you said. Yes, this is the war of desires that roars within us. This is how sin stays alive within us our whole life long. In his letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul writes:
For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. (Gal. 5:17)
And it doesn’t get easier the longer you are a Christian and the more mature you grow. As Luther pointed out, the more godly a man is, the more he feels the battle. And Calvin put it this way: we don’t even perceive our full depravity until we mature like a tree. Our growth in sanctification is not a realization of how holy we are, but it is humiliation at how often the flesh gets its way.
Yes, the war between the flesh and the Spirit wages throughout our lives. This side of heaven, there is no armistice in this conflict—no peace treaty. Yet, this truth of our life, our ever struggle with sin, should not cause us to despair. At first glance, this battle is fairly discouraging: the flesh will get its sinful way until we die.
The Guidance of the Spirit Is Greater than the Flesh
Yet, the unceasing hostilities don’t mean that the flesh and the Spirit are equally matched. The score doesn’t remain tied. Rather, Paul writes,
But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. (Gal. 5:18)
The Spirit is our general, our tour guide, our master. The guidance of the Spirit is greater than the flesh, for the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ.
The Spirit gets the better of the flesh not merely by getting us to do the good, but by making us forsake our works to trust only in the works of Christ. The Spirit leads us to the once and forever victory over sin and the flesh—the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Spirit enables us to recognize that even our better works are still tainted with sin. The Spirit leads us to Jesus and reminds us of our justification, all of grace and through faith alone. Our best moments of obedience and love still fall very short of perfection. As we fail to do, the Spirit sets before our hearts that Christ did it all for us. This is the beauty and sweet comfort of the Spirit of Christ.
Though, in our battle with the flesh, Paul does want to remind us what are the deeds of the flesh. Even if we still stumble, the Spirit calls us to resist the flesh, to put to death the fleshly deeds. We need to know what deeds and desires must be killed off by the Spirit working in us. So, Paul gives us a list of the flesh’s works, which he says are evident. Having the Spirit, it isn’t hard to recognize the flesh. Yet, he does give us a list of 15 vices to deepen our perception of the ways of the flesh and to give us a more profound discernment so that we resist the flesh better and not be blind to its sophistication. Now, this list of 15 can be grouped into roughly 4 categories.
Sexual Perversity
Sexual Immorality (1), Impurity (2), and Sensuality (3)
The first three vices fall into the first category of sexual sins: sexual immorality, impurity and sensuality. These cover transgressions such as premarital sex, adultery, pornography, homosexuality, prostitutes, strip clubs, and so on. And it is fitting that Paul puts this category first, for sexual sin is one of humanity’s deepest flaws.
The created good of sex in marriage is perverted most often. Thus, we need to remain vigilant against these desires and not be complacent—but for the grace of God there we go as well. This is especially the case as our culture is constantly sticking in our faces sexual temptations. In fact, sensuality to which Paul is referring here particularly has the sense of losing all self-control and restraint.
Exercising this self-control isn’t just about our will toughing it out; rather, it is built into our life structure, into our community. We avoid tawdry places, we block perverse websites, and we help each other by keeping one another accountable. Paul’s command—not to fulfill the desire of the flesh—is helpful here.
Sexual lusts can just pop up in our minds with little provocation. If God hadn’t made humans so beautiful, this would be a lot easier.
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Written by Stephen G. Adubato |
Sunday, March 5, 2023
Ultimately, what keeps me from playing with witchcraft is the certainty that Christianity promises me a kind of hope and meaning that the occult could never give me. I find it much more satisfying to conform my will to that of a loving Creator and to receive what He chooses to give me rather than conjuring spirits that would help me manipulate and impose my will onto reality.

In a recent New York Times editorial, Ross Douthat called into question the naive, materialist readings of the new statue of a female pagan deity that was installed outside the New York courthouse. To those who think experimenting with “magic” and “spirituality” is a mere form of “playacting,” he warns of certain dangers that are “skated over in a lot of American spirituality,” urging people who think the statue is a mere ode to female empowerment to be “really careful in your openness and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.”
As someone who dabbled in witchcraft as a teen and has since “seen the light,” I found that Douthat’s words resonated deeply. I wonder how my own path may have turned out differently had I read his piece 20 years ago.
I got involved in witchcraft and occult practices after reading “Harry Potter” when I was about 10 years old. That said, I’m not the kind of Christian who thinks reading stories about witches and spells is intrinsically evil and that “Harry Potter” should be totally banned (book bannings usually end up having the inverse effect, anyway). But as Douthat indicates, the American materialist ideology that deems books like “Harry Potter” to be “neutral” and the stuff of pure fantasy overlooks the spiritual realities that the book taps into and the risks they carry with them.
For context, I grew up in a Greek family that is culturally Orthodox Christian and dabbled in folk witchcraft. In a lot of ways, I thought the rituals we took part in at church overlapped with the occult practices my grandmother and cousin did. There was something mystical, or as Charles Taylor would say, “enchanted,” about all of it, and it fascinated me. It filled me with the sense that there was more to life than meets the eye and that spirits were indeed present in our midst. Both Eastern Orthodoxy and witchcraft served as escape hatches to the stifling, unimaginative confines of bourgeois suburban materialism.

Several of my family members had a sort of spiritual “sensitivity.” I have an aunt and uncle who were a nun and a monk, respectively.
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