Discipleship
Have you been inoculated? Inoculation is the process by which the spreading of disease is curbed through the process of infecting a host with a neutralized version of a disease or virus. The intended result is the boosting of the host's immune system to make them resistant and unable to be infected by the actual disease.
As I was spending time with the Lord one morning, He began to talk to me about the power of inoculation and a correlation to one of the dangers facing His church today. In the same way medicine has brought us freedom from all manner of deadly sickness and diseases through the power of inoculation, the Lord began to show me that the enemy was using this same tactic in the church to rob people of an authentic encounter with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The enemy figured out that if he could successfully inject just enough of the truth of the message of the Gospel into a person's life to convince them that they were saved, but little enough that they didn't feel compelled into embracing the call to discipleship, that they would be fooled into believing they had embraced Christianity. The result would be that they would never truly experience the transforming power of the gospel that God intended to be released into their life, thereby inoculating them to the real gospel.
The results of this false gospel being propagated can be seen all around us today in the form of a watered-down or "neutralized gospel" resulting in a high number of false conversions. People believe they are saved simply because they prayed a prayer or because they attend a church, when in reality the gospel of Jesus Christ was intended to be infectious to the point that it took over and consumed the entirety of the life of those touched by it.
Christ's message is so clear: "Go into all the world and make disciples!" Unfortunately the reality that we are quickly awakening to today is that much of the church is working hard at making converts and doing very little to make disciples, and in the process we are inoculating the world around us against the realities of the Christian life.
I want to encourage you today to give an invitation to the Holy Spirit to come and search our hearts to see if you've truly been incurably infected, hopelessly and forever changed by the blood of Jesus; transformed into a disciple that makes disciples, or if you've just been inoculated with a gospel of convenience. It's time for us to get back on mission and start making disciples once again.