Year 5, Day 45: Ezra 7

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Information, Imitation, Innovation

• Information: This is the initial phase of become a disciple of Jesus.  Before we can do anything meaningful we must begin to understand what we are doing.  We may never gain full understanding of God and His ways, but God calls us to study Him, His Son, and His ways as the foundation of being His follower.
• Imitation: This is the second over-arching step of the discipleship process.  First we gain information, then we imitate our spiritual mentor.  Imitation leads to innovation of spirituality in our own life.
• Innovation: When we have studied God and learned to imitate Him, then we can begin to apply what we have learned and practiced into our life in new and innovative ways.  In this way we truly become the person of God that He sees us to be.

I love the description of Ezra in Ezra 7:10.  Ezra studied the Word of God.  Then he did it.  Then he taught others to do it.  To me, this is absolutely a demonstration of the information → imitation → innovation model.

Ezra studied the Word of God.  If we want to be God’s people, we must be rooted in His Word.  How can we ever hope to talk meaningfully about God if we do not know His Word?  Now don’t get me wrong.  Academic knowledge of the Word is not enough.  As Satan demonstrates when he tempts Christ in the wilderness, even Satan has an academic understanding of God’s Word.  Therefore, academic knowledge of God’s Word is not the end.  But it is absolutely the beginning.  We begin our relationship by learning about who God is and what God wants from us.

Then, we learn to imitate what we see.  We imitate Christ.  We imitate the followers of Christ that we hear about in God’s Word.  We imitate the people of Christ that we see in this world.  In other words, we put what we learn to practice.  Our lives change as we let God’s Word become alive within each of us.

Then we learn to innovate it into our lives and the lives of the people around us.  As we grow in faith and become more skilled in allowing God to shine through us, we find ourselves in positions to teach other people.  We find ourselves to be in a position to invite other people to learn and study God’s Word.  As we approach the innovation stage, through God’s hand we are capable of inviting people around us into the beginning of the information stage.  We see this lived out and celebrated in Ezra in this chapter.

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