It might sound boring, but at a fundamental level, God wants the exact same thing from you and me as He has wanted from every other person who names the name of Jesus as Lord: He wants us to truly follow Jesus. To be His disciples. That was, after all, the marching orders Jesus left for His church: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations . . .” (Matt. 28:19).

The problem is that disciple is one of those words in the Christian vocabulary that has been so often used, so often quoted, that we’ve lost a bit of its meaning. If this is what God ultimately wants from us, then that definition should be incredibly meaningful. We should be mining it for all it’s worth, trying in an ever-increasing way to understand it more fully. So what, then, does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?

Literally, the word means “to follow.” Disciples of Jesus are followers of Jesus. They walk not only where He walks, but in the manner in which He walks. It means that we acknowledge the lordship of Jesus and seek to see that lordship actualized in every area of our lives. That’s what disciples do.

Michael Kelley, Boring: Finding an Extraordinary God in an Ordinary Life (Nashville: B&H, 2013).

I have just completed a series of lessons based on Michael Kelly’s book, Boring. They are available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions, as well as part of my Good Questions Have Groups Talking Subscription service. For a medium-sized church, lesson subscriptions are only $10 per teacher per year. Lessons correspond with three of Lifeway’s outlines as well as the International Standard Series.

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