Scot opens this final chapter with these comments:

The gospel is designed to unleash the cycle of grace for the good of the world. When the world is filled with grace we call it the kingdom of God. But, the kingdom of God, because it is a vision for broken humans trying to love other broken humans in a broken world, takes time (and more than that)...

Once again, the gospel makes astounding claims: that humans can be converted from isolated and selfish individuals into God-loving Eikons whose missional focus is the good of others and the world. But, this doesn't happen overnight. It takes time, sometimes a long time, to convert individualists into Eikons...

Some fear that "messy" stories will glorify a messy faith. For my part, I am more afraid of a gospel that does not permit us to tell the messy story of authentic faith.

Perhaps a biblical example will make this clear...

Scot then recounts the story of the apostle John, which he did as well in The Jesus Creed.  Because the Creed's version (chapter 11) is more full, I present it below. But before we unfurl John's example, let restate what we're up to in this study.

The Process of Change

We human beings have been created in God's image. We are his "Eikons," to use the Greek word for image. As such we are designed to be a community that reflects God's character and commitments. Our image-bearing capacity has been damaged, however, through folly and self-absorption. Because he is good, God is about the business of restoring us to himself, to one another, and to our original task of image-bearing. It is though the work of Jesus, Israel's messiah, and his Spirit, that the image of God is re-created in us. This transformation, as Scot noted above, is no simple, one-day project. It takes time. And it takes work--on both God's part and ours. Paul understands the need for an integrated work force:

Dear friends, you always followed my instructions when I was with you. And now that I am away, it is even more important. Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear. For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him (Phil 2:12-13).

Growth takes time. A budding plant just breaking through the topsoil doesn't sprout into a magnificent oak tree overnight. But growth also requires the proper resources. Without the means of growth, without sunlight, nutrients, soil, and water, the whole process comes to naught.

Knowing that transformation into the image of Christ, the image of God, is a process that requires time helps us be hopeful when the going seems slow. God is at work. Change is afoot. Things are underway. This applies not only to ourselves but to those in Christ around us. Impatience with the all-too-slow rate of change in others might be reigned in when we remember that change takes time.

"It is good occasionally to back off from our immediate situation and to look at how far we have come. We may be surprised at the changes we can see when we compare ourselves as we are now with the person we were ten years ago. We tend to measure ourselves by absolute standards and find that we fall short of complete integration and integrity...But we forget that God does not use a magic wand to accomplish his work in us instantaneously. His purpose is to make us grow into maturity...

"When looking at another Christian we should not merely see where he or she is now in the Christian life, but rather from where and how far he or she has come. Our criticism of this person's shortcomings will often turn to praise for the work God has done in his or her life!" Earl F. Palmer, Integrity: A Commentary on the Book of Philippians (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1992), 49.

Knowing the transformation is a process that requires work encourages us to be resourceful. It the seedling took the lazy path and forsook any recource to "outside resources" it would be in trouble. Cut yourself off from sun and soil, nutrients and water, and you cut yourself off from life. Similarly, if we detach ourselves from what the reformers called "the means of grace" we too will shrivel up.

John's story will teach us to be hopeful. Change times time. After we rehearse his transformation, we will revisit this matter of work and our need to be resourceful in we are to continue to grow in grace and the knowledge of  the Lord.

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John: The Story of Love by Scot McKnight

The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2004), pp. 102-110.

GOSPEL READINGS:  Mark 10:35-45; Luke 9:49-56; John 13

Good biographies tell the truth.

Israel's once-famous King Saul is the Pete Rose of the Bible. Propped up by magnificent gifts, he had some splendid successes and some blatant failures. His end was tragic. Chosen by Samuel to be Israel's first king, he's a shoo-in for hero in Israel's storybooks for millennia to come; but, no, Saul breaks the rules. The Bible has a knack for telling the truth about people. Think of Adam and Eve, Abraham, and the kings of Israel.

At the other end of the spectrum is Christian biography, some­times called "hagiography." Such Christian biographies often drift into fiction as the authors wipe away every trace of sin in order to make the person's life exemplary. But the Bible tells the truth about people.

Telling ugly truths about leaders may encourage sin, so doting biographers tend to hide the facts. But shading the truth may exhaust other Christians who conclude that they could never live such a perfect life. What is the solution? Tell the truth.

Telling the truth is exactly what the Christian leader and Old Testament scholar John Goldingay does in his book of reflections on faith, Walk On. John's wife, Ann, suffers from multiple sclerosis, and he explores the ups and downs of his own faith as he lives with her crippling disease. In his chapter on "Friendship," John says this:

I have had several experiences of women telling me they have fall­en in love with me when I had no such feelings for them. I have also had the experience of getting sexually entangled with some­one and thus doing wrong by her, by Ann, by God-and by the people who think I am an upright man who does a good job of living with the loss involved in his wife's illness. [After quoting a letter from a student who found John and his wife's relationship an encouragement to marriage, John adds this line of truth:] I wish the student's letter were more unequivocally justified.

I don't retell John's story to pounce on him or to rationalize his behavior by appealing to the all-too-easy "we are, after all, sinners." Instead, this story is true; it is part of John's life. Because John is a clear-minded reader of the Bible, he told his own story the way Bible authors told the biographies of others.

Around the table of Jesus, his followers were telling the true stories of their lives. We've already heard the stories of Joseph, Mary, and Peter. Another one of those about whom the Bible tells a true story is the apostle John. John's own story has been shaded more than perhaps anyone's in the Bible.

DO YOU KNOW JOHN’S STORY?

Readers of the Bible rarely put together a complete picture of the apostle John. Instead, most readers focus on the glowing picture of what John was like later in life.

One word comes to mind when we think of the apostle John: love. But John's own "story of love" is not pretty. Love, for John, didn't come easy. In fact, if we sort out every reference to John in the Gospels we see this: John is with Jesus at some dramatic moments, but not once does John do anything that would lead us to think he would later become the celebrated apostle of love. We know this because the gospel writers told the truth about John's life.

If we were to ask John about his life, he would respond by telling us the story of learning to love. Here is where he would begin:

1. I LEARN ABOUT LOVE

The skinny on John begins with his family context. Many scholars think John was a cousin of Jesus. John's father, Zebedee, was a Galilean fisherman who employed John and his brother James. James was also an apostle of Jesus.

Jesus rocks the boat of all three when he calls James and John to "follow him." To follow Jesus means to travel with him, to learn from him, and to live as he lived. John will later write a gospel and a significant letter to Christians, explaining to them and to us what he had learned from Jesus. The one theme that consistently runs through John's writings is the theme of love. John sums it all up by telling us that Jesus gave to his followers a "new" commandment, and it was to "love one another." Why is it "new"? Because Jesus added the "love others" line to the Shema of Judaism when he taught the Jesus Creed. John even ties together the two parts of the Jesus Creed in another of his statements: "Whoever loves God must also love his brother." What John learned from Jesus was "love God, love others." When he sums up what he learned from Jesus, John says he learned about love.

But, learning about love doesn't mean living lovingly. Or knowing is not always the same as doing.

2. MY LOVE IS TESTED (AND I DON'T DO WELL)

In a moving, tender story of the love of a father and son, author Brian Doyle talks about the ups and downs of his own love for his parents:

Like most children, I loved my parents without qualification until I was a teenager, when I began to hate them for the bound­aries they placed about me; and then when I woke up from those years, at about age nineteen, I began again to love them without qualification but also with a deepening sense of the thousand ways in which they had given their lives for me, to me.

The rest of Doyle's book is a story of love, but a story incom­plete if those five years are not mentioned. As Brian Doyle “learned” love from his parents, so the apostle John learned love from Jesus. But just as Doyle didn't always practice it, so John didn't either. As Aesop said about what really matters, "Deeds, not words."

John is about to be tested to see if his deeds match up to his Words

This young apostle of Jesus, the gospel writers truthfully tell us, had some love to learn. In fact, they tell us—if we listen to what they are saying—that  John fails when he is tested in love. Three times. We blame Peter for his three denials. Let's not forget John's failures. What are they?

First, John and James approach Jesus and, banking on grace, state: "We want you to do for us whatever we ask." Jesus humors their obvious pettiness and asks them to proceed to their request. "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory," they say. We are not surprised to learn that the rest of the apostles bristle over the snobbish chutzpah of these two brothers. If love is service (which is what Jesus goes on to explain to the brothers), then John fails in love.

Second, John's love for others is tested when he doesn't recognize someone exorcising demons in Jesus' name. John tries to stop the person from doing miracles and "tells on him" to Jesus. To which Jesus gives the agelessly valuable response "whoever is not against us is for us." Anyone following the Jesus Creed would not denounce someone who is breaking down demonic walls. Except John.

Third, John hears that some Samaritans refuse hospitality to Jesus "because he was heading for Jerusalem." John's response: "Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?" Ouch! He prays for hell to fall on these people. John was in the Thunderbolt Gang before he was an apostle of love. Jesus explains that his followers are not to think of Sodom and Gomorrah, to call for "ash in a flash," every time they encounter someone who doesn't respond properly. When John's love for the Samaritans is tested, he fails.

For someone who spends his last days writing about love-Iove­-love, John sure fails when his love is tested. John may learn about love, but as a young man, he is crusty and cranky. But he does have something going for him: he spends plenty of time with Jesus. Perhaps we need to join him with Jesus. "Example is better than precept," as Aesop also said. John has both precept and example in Jesus: Jesus keeps on loving John.

3. I AM LOVED ANYWAY

Nothing is more important for the development of love than being loved—we may be taught the importance of love, but to experience it is to know it. This is why Lewis Smedes, in his marvelous memoir of his own slow and painful growth in love of God and others, describes the love he looked for in his mother:

Every comfort I was taught to see from my heavenly Father I looked for in her, my earthly mother, but, all the time I was growing up, she was working too hard and working too much to have either time or energy to get close to me long enough for me to find God's comfort in her. I was never conscious of my missing father whom I had never known, but I missed my mother all too often.

But Lew's growth in love all comes together when his mother was eighty-six and broke her hip for the second time. Lew is able (by providential accidents) to spend every afternoon with her. One afternoon Lew opens his heart of pain to his mother. After his mother expresses gratitude to the Lord for forgiving all her sins, Lew probes another serious issue.

Why had she never gotten married again? [He asked her,] "Didn't you ever want a man in your life? A man to take care of you? A man to talk to at the end of a day? A man to sleep with you?”

"Oh yes," she said, "I did; I felt so tired and so alone, and I sometimes wished that I had a husband, but I was afraid that if another man came into the house, he might not care for my chil­dren as I did."

I knew then [Smedes continues] that I had found the love of my heavenly Father tucked into the love of my earthly mother.

For Lewis Smedes, a painful process leads to a personal knowledge that God loves him. That love had not been obvious in the love of his parents, but one day, many years later, he does see that God's love has been there all the time in his earthly mother. To be loved is to know love.

John learns that love is more than learning. He had learned the Jesus Creed from Jesus, and he had seen Jesus live a life of love, but he is struggling with loving others himself. What eventually circles him is Jesus' love.

John knows what it is to be loved. He is, after all, "teacher's pet." Jesus loves him so deeply he includes him in everything. Several incidents in the life of Jesus reveal how specially Jesus treats John. When Jesus goes to the synagogue ruler's home to heal his daughter, he takes John along. When Jesus is transfigured on the mountain, he permits John to see it take place. And when Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, he asks John to stay close by. In each of these, John experiences the special loving attention of Jesus.

So much is John the teacher's pet that John refers to himself in his Gospel as "the disciple whom Jesus loved." Perhaps the most fascinating dimension of John's calling himself the "disciple whom Jesus loved" is when he describes a famous meal with Jesus and says he was "reclining next to him [Jesus]." Literally, the text says that John was "reclining in his bosom." Now, it is a short step from this statement back to John's statement about Jesus: "No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side." Literally, this text says "who is in the bosom of the Father." Put together, John's own language suggests he thinks the love he experiences from Jesus is the same sort the Son experiences from the Father!

John knows what it means to be loved by Jesus, even though when tested, he goes belly-up. The love he experiences in the bosom of Jesus is what eventually transforms John's story from Thunderbolt to an apostle of Love.

4. FINALLY, I LEARN TO LOVE OTHERS

We know Mr. Thunderbolt became the apostle of love from John's later writings. Several considerations show the transformation of John's life:

First, John abandons his idea that he is the most important apostle. In fact, so profound is John's own self-humiliation and service to others that he doesn't even identify himself in the narrative of the Gospel he wrote. John gives himself only one name: the "one Jesus loved." The would-be MVP becomes the anonymous loved one.

Second, John writes for us a theology of love. The young apostle who wanted to turn Samaritans into ash and who thought gifts of exorcism were limited to one small group of disciples comes full circle. It doesn't take much imagination to know how John would have responded to each test later in his life.

Third, we need to count some words. The epistles of John are about 2 percent of the New Testament, yet they contain more than 20 percent of the instances of the term "love." It is not just usage. It is about centrality. John learned from Day One that Jesus wanted his followers to love God and love others. If Jesus adapts the Shema in his Jesus Creed, John adapts the Jesus Creed ever so slightly: “This is his command," John says, "to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us." That is, love God, believe in Jesus, and love others.

This is the story of John: the rascally thunderbolt becomes a tender apostle of love. This is the true story of John's life, and by telling the truth, we see the fullness of God's gracious work in his life. We need to tell the truth about our lives too.

By telling the whole story of our lives, we awaken sleeping paragraphs in our own lives and in the lives of others, and when they awaken, they give to our lives a fullness, a continuity in time, and a richness.

In the community of Jesus there are many stories, none more exemplary than this story about the apostle John. As an old man, it is said, all John wanted to talk about was love. His own students were amazed at how loving he was. He would have been the first to remind them that "it was not always so."

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The Process of Change Requires Time and Work

John's story above shows us how time and resources combine to catalyze change, change of one's character into the image of Christ. Paul reminded us in Philippians that we are to "work hard." This means we need to be proactive if we are to mature in our faith, hope, and love. We touched on this earlier in our discussion of The Epic of the Eikon: Eschatology (scroll down to the last section: "Seeing to our Part of our Transformation"). But this should be no surprise. Most things in life require effort. Let me just give three examples: good friendships, developed understanding, and experienced skills sets.

• My closest friendships have thrived because we both invest ourselves in the relationship. We talk to each regularly, see each other often, and fill each other in on what's happening at home and in the workplace, with our studies and struggles. We help each other work through life's struggles and we help each other grapple with questions big and small. It's a big treat--and it's well worth the investment. But it doesn't happen automatically.
• My understanding of theology, emergency medicine, and biological sciences didn't happen by osmosis overnight by tucking a textbook under my pillow. The acquisition of this knowledge required energy. Like the friendships I mentioned, this too has been a worthwhile endeavor. Learning, like loving, is a real pleasure.  
• Skill sets also develop with practice. During my residency training, I learned how to interpret basic x-rays. But this took some effort. It took practice. Learning a new complex skill take time, and it takes work.

The author of the extended sermon we call "Hebrews" cautions us to be proactive with our lives lest we slip into default mode and fall away. "Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it" (2:1). This word "drift" brings to mind an image of 19th-century steamboat that is supposed to be moving upstream on a slowly moving river. It will take some labor in the boiler room if the boat is to move forward. Laziness downstairs will shut down the paddle wheel, causing the boat to reverse direction, drifting with the current of the Mississippi River. We must "attend to" our "means of grace" lest we drift the wrong direction. Just because we're currently heading upstream is no guarantee we'll continue on and reach our destination. The whole letter of Hebrews is written with just this dread reality in the background. "Hold fast and stay true!" is his repeated refrain, lest his audience, despite their strong start, should fall back and drop out of the race. For an overview of Hebrews, see these lecture notes.

So, what can we avail ourselves of to help us and our community press on, hold fast, and stay true? Below are a few questions to help us think through what resources and opportunities already surround us, both relationally and educationally.

So what resources/opportunities are ready at hand?

Relational

• Are there more seasoned "saints" that you know who would let you hang out with them? Perhaps a monthly coffee date would be the place to start.
• Are there most junior saints, younger in the faith, who would benefit from your experience and wisdom? Just getting to know them is the first step in helping them along the way.
• Are there friends you have where a little more investment of time and energy could take the friendship into richer and more rewarding territory?
• Are there some "people Jesus misses most" in your life whom God is calling you to care for? To visit? To call? To help? To listen to?

Educational

• Would God have you learn more of him? of his work in the world? of his story in Scripture?
• Are there books you could read, or sermons you could listen to, or classes you could take to advance your understanding of grace or kingdom or Bible?
• Would you benefit from an overview of the Bible, or learning how to read the prophets, or a class on prayer, or a walk through Romans or Revelation with an experienced guide? Let me know. I have suggestions for each of these topics.
• Would it be valuable to arrange to meet with a couple friends this summer and read through one of Tom Wright's NT guides from the "For Everyone" series?

I'll close with Peter's exhortation and prayer. As a prayer, this verse looks to God to do his part in our growth. As an exhortation, this verse prompts us to do what we can in this whole process: Peter tells us: "Grow in grace and understanding of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:18). Peter also prays: "May God help you grow in grace and understanding of our Lord and Savior."  May this be true of us.