Book Ruminations: The Imperfect Disciple

The Imperfect Disciple: Grace for People Who Can’t Get Their Act Together

This is not a review, but a collection of quotes and thoughts from the book. See the introduction here. There is so much good material in this book that if I were to post all the quotes that I highlighted, I would basically be copying the whole book. I’ve tried to just pick out a few.

How about a book on discipleship for people who don’t feel saved each morning until they’ve had at least two cups of coffee? How about a book on following Jesus for the guy or gal sitting there in small group always wondering if it’s safe to say what they’re thinking? For the sake of the cut-ups and the screwups, the tired and the torn-up, the weary and the wounded—how about we demystify discipleship?

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

This is the promise of the book in a nutshell. Demystifying discipleship, encouraging the weary and bringing the gospel to bear on an area where it has often been lacking. Wilson delivers on that promise and does so in spades.

I was committed to looking like the best Christian kid I could be. This is a hard place to be if you’re not exactly sure Jesus loves you, or even likes you. I kind of felt like I was a Christian only because the Bible says “God is love,” and so if I signed on the dotted line, he had to take me. I was exploiting his own loophole.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

I dreaded going to Sunday school and not being able to answer for why I hadn’t witnessed to anybody and why I was a terrible Christian who deserved to live in the cruddy “We Had to Let Them in Here Because They Prayed the Sinner’s Prayer” section of heaven for all eternity. I grew weary from the good works I wasn’t doing.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

These sections resonated with me so much. I have often struggled with the feeling of being saved on a technicality, and Wilson just hits the nail on the head with this.

It is also so easy as Christians to beat ourselves up over the good we aren’t doing. Sometimes we should, but often it is so unhelpful. And they also point to the effect that losing the gospel when it comes to Christian living has on our children. It’s crushing. We need to give our kids gospel all the way through. Gospel that leads to changed hearts and changed behaviour. But Gospel, not Try Harder.

I have that ominous organ playing inside me. My heart is a haunted house—broken, ramshackle, weathered and boarded-up and filled with the mournful sound of the Hound of Heaven howling through the slats.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

Okay, this is just beautiful. And I didn’t get the reference two years ago, but now I do and it’s even better.

Jesus wasn’t blowing smoke. His major contribution to the world was not a set of aphorisms. He was born in a turdy barn, grew up in a dirty world, got baptized in a muddy river. He put his hands on the oozing wounds of lepers, he let whores brush his hair and soldiers pull it out. He went to dinner with dirtbags, both religious and irreligious. His closest friends were a collection of crude fishermen and cultural traitors. He felt the spittle of the Pharisees on his face and the metal hooks of the jailer’s whip in the flesh of his back. He got sweaty and dirty and bloody—and he took all of the sin and mess of the world onto himself, onto the cross to which he was nailed naked. In his work and in his words, Jesus is making promises to the beaten, the torn, the broken, the depressed, the desperate, the poor, the orphan, the abandoned, the cheated, the betrayed, the accused, the left-behind. He is, believe it or not, promising to fix it all.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

One of the beauties of this book is that Wilson has a wonderful way of seeing old truth with fresh eyes. We get so used to our story of Jesus that we forget what a scandal he was. And what a saviour he is. Wilson goes on later to make that exact point:

I think this is the big problem disciples of Jesus have with the gospel. I think this is the big problem disciples of Jesus have with Jesus. We take him for granted.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

One of the themes of the Imperfect Disciple is that what you look at matters:

What all this boils down to is this: we have, fundamentally, a worship problem, and so long as we are occupying our minds with little, worldly things and puny, worldly messages, we will shrink our capacity to behold the eternal glory of Jesus Christ, which is the antidote to all that ails us.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

And so it turns out that the direct route to God-honoring behavior is born not of good behavior but of good beholding.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

I didn’t simply have a behavior problem but a belief problem, a worship problem. And what eventually served to cure my taste for this shiny death was not “getting my act together” but finally, truly seeing the glory of my crucified Savior.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

Discipleship isn’t about doing and performing, it’s about being and beholding. The core of Wilson’s book is that seeing Jesus for who he really is, that shapes us. It changes us from the inside out. And it brings more joy than performative discipleship ever could.

The Imperfect Disciple also stresses the absolute importance of the church in discipleship. Something that a lot of discipleship material seems to basically miss entirely.

What do all of Peter’s descriptors for the church have in common? They are collective nouns. Race. Priesthood. Nation. People. These concepts cannot be manifested individually.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

But if you’re like me you hate dances—great big ones, especially. If you’re like me, you approach the dance as one who wants to look like he belongs there without really participating too much. You want to stand against the wall, bobbing your head to the music while not actually getting onto the floor. Because then you’d look like an idiot. And a lot of people try to do church like that. Just enough involvement to not get hassled about not being involved but not enough involvement to actually be involved.

And then we wonder why our walk with Christ never really seems to take off. We treat the church the way we hope Jesus never treats us, keeping us at arm’s length because we’re weird or messy or socially awkward. But if the holy God of the universe affectionately welcomes all those losers to himself, who do we think we are when we refuse to do so ourselves?

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

But unlike a lot of other material, Wilson also managed to thread the needle of reminding us that Church isn’t our saviour either:

Too many church folks are expecting their pastors or their churches to complete them, to virtually “be Jesus” to them. But only Jesus can be Jesus to us. There’s only one Messiah. So if we’re expecting all our inner dysfunction and awkwardness and hurts and fears to get fixed by the experience of Christian community, good luck with that. Everybody else is expecting the same thing. We’re a bunch of beggars demanding the other beggars give them bread.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

And again, and again he brings it back to the gospel:

At its root, impatience is confusion about control. Impatience is the rotten fruit of self-sovereignty. We are impatient because people and circumstances do not tend to operate as if we are the center of the universe.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

So how does the gospel cultivate patience in us? It begins with that same humbling we spoke of earlier. The gospel puts us in our place. We are sinners who stand only by the virtue of grace. We are saved by Christ alone.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

We bring nothing to this relationship except our nothingness. We bring our emptiness and Christ brings his riches. We bring our pit and he brings his rope. But sometimes we are tempted to think he’d just as soon hang us with it as help us.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

There are so many more riches in this book which I could have covered and didn’t. There are a lot of lovely sentences that the writer in me admires. Jared Wilson has a gift for communicating truth in a way that rewards remembering and returning to. I’m just going to highlight four of those before concluding.

On sanctification under your own steam:

What is the use of telling a guy in bare feet to pull himself up by his bootstraps?

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

On Messy community:

The church has got to be a place where it’s okay to not be okay.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

On Holiness:

You cannot grow in holiness and holier-than-thou-ness at the same time.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

On Hope:

It is true that sometimes God doesn’t become our only hope until God becomes our only hope.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

Wilson concludes with wonderful words. And I think this sums up why I loved this book. It wasn’t about “replacing discipleship” with some new model. Out with the bible reading, out with the quiet time, in with the introspection and the antinomianism. Not at all. Rather, Wilson consistently, constantly points us to Jesus. And he simply says: Bible reading, prayer, growth, evangelism – these are good things. But they are not God and they cannot save you. Neither can failing at them damn you. So read, pray, and rest in the grace of God.

What I’m trying to say is this: you are not your quiet time. Okay, day to day, you kind of are your Bible reading. The spiritual disciplines—the rhythms of the kingdom—do shape us and help us become more of what Jesus is making us through them. But in the end, you are not your quiet time. You are not your cruddy prayer life. Prayer is vital and necessary. When you pray, you strip your soul down to your proper proportion, helpless and needy and desperate. Prayer of all kinds is basically confessed need of God. It is an expression of our un-God-ness and God’s total God-ness. But in the end, you are not your prayers. Jesus is mediating for you and the Spirit is interceding for you, making up for all your prayerlessness. You are not your standing before people. You are not your past. You are not the accumulation of harsh words from others and negative self-talk. You are not even your sin, as primary and as serious as that problem is. I’m not trying to affirm your sense of goodness. I’m doing the opposite, in fact. I want to, by God’s grace, give you the freedom to own up to your not having your act together. I wrote this book for all who are tired of being tired. I wrote this book for all who read the typical discipleship manuals and wonder who they could possibly be written for, the ones that make us feel overly burdened and overly tasked and, because of all that, overly shamed. You are not your ability to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. You are not the sum of your spiritual accomplishments and religious devotion. You are a great sinner, yes. But you have a great Savior. Child of God, you are a child of God. And he will never, ever, ever leave you or forsake you.

Jared Wilson, The Imperfect Disciple

P.s. This still isn’t a review. But if it was, then I would give this a high number of stars on an arbitrary review system. I would also recommend that you buy it and read it.