It’s funny – back in high school, I had a long-running joke with several of my peers.  You see, I told my friends and at least a teacher or two that upon my graduation from high school, I was going to make a large donation to the Charlotte Country Day Upper School library.  Now, that in and of itself wouldn’t have been so funny.  What made it humorous was that I was planning to donate the definitive collection of Cliff’s Notes to the library to help untold generations of high schoolers avoid reading those dreadfully dull novels the English teachers were so fond of assigning.

Now for those of you who don’t know, Cliff’s Notes are chapter by chapter synopses of great books.  Generally included in them would also be a list of characters along with relevant data about each of them.  Also, recurring images or themes would be highlighted in the Cliff’s Notes.  The idea behind them is that you had a companion that as you read the actual book which could help make sense of things.  In reality though, many people tried to get away with just reading the Cliff Notes and not the actual book.  

Two things should be pointed out in case there any kids getting the idea that reading Cliff’s Notes is a good alternative to reading the actual book.   First, I know I did very poorly on tests and quizzes whenever I used the Cliff’s Notes.  Also, irony of irony, as much as I tried to avoid reading some of those books, I ended up majoring in English, in which I read several of those books later and loved just about every one of them. 

Nowadays, I think that Cliff and his notes have been widely ripped off, at least the general idea.  If you don’t want to go to the store, you can just get Spark Notes.  If you want something with a little greater depth, there’s always the “For Dummies” series.  In case you were wondering, I have some of those “For Dummies” books on my bookshelf in my office.

The reason I bring up Cliff’s Notes this morning isn’t because I’m planning on assigning y’all War and Peace or anything like that.  I mention them because sometimes it is quite helpful to have at our disposal some quick guide to help us understand matters more clearly.  In fact, for a great many of us, myself included, sometimes I think it would be nice to just open up our Bibles to get a clear picture of what being a Christian disciple is like. 

That’s where Romans, chapter 12 really comes in handy.  Although I can’t say that it touches on every single aspect of Christian discipleship, it does do a remarkable job and steering us all in the right direction.  And make no mistake about it; we’re called not just to be social Christians.  Now what I mean by social Christian is the kind that comes to church and for an hour on Sunday.  They may feel rather connected to God for that hour or a few soon after.  But for the most part, right after they depart the church door, they largely forget and/or ignore everything we’ve just heard, choosing to follow their own lead and not be real disciples of Jesus Christ.  That’s not the calling of our lives.  Instead, Jesus Christ himself in the power of the Holy Spirit has called us to be his disciples.

But what does that mean, really?  What is a Christian disciple? 

Christian author Chip Ingram once found himself flummoxed by asking a group full of Christians what they thought being a disciple of Jesus Christ meant.  He said that he was stunned by how few people had any coherent idea of what a Christian disciple truly was and, that if he were perfectly honest about it, he wasn’t as clear as he would’ve liked to have been. 

I’m fairly well convinced that things have gotten even less clear over the past decade.  During the past 20 years, Americans have seen the proliferation of non-denominational churches, each catering to their own audience, each with their own particular vision of discipleship.  It’s kind of like pick your flavor.  If you’re into social justice but don’t want to be bothered much with the Bible, guess what, there’s a church for you.  So too if you just want someplace to come on Sunday morning to receive a nice, moral message, there’s a church for you.   And so on and so on.  Under such circumstances, figuring out what a Christian disciple really is becomes increasingly more and more difficult. 

The good news, of course, is that we have source material.  We don’t have to take one particular pastor’s definition of what it means to be a disciple; we can instead open up the pages of our Bible and get a pretty clear picture.  That’s where Romans 12 comes in.  In a good way, Romans 12 operates for us like a Cliff Notes on Christian discipleship.

The best news for us is that this claim of God’s is actually very, very good news for us as well.  Jesus Christ himself tells us that “his yoke is easy, and his burdens light.”  But even beyond that, what we see as we read the Bible is that we live fuller lives when they’re totally engaged in His service.  We worry less, we’re less anxious, fear of scarcity of security become things of the past.  A host of brothers and sisters in Christ gathers around us in good times and bad.  That is to say that our fullest life is found as we turn more and more of it over to God.   

Throughout this year, we’ve come to Romans on several occasions to do some in-depth study.  We’ve done so because as Christian author John Piper once claimed, Romans in the greatest letter ever written.  In Romans we have a clear, coherent document which handles all sorts of Christian belief and theology.  If you’ll remember, in the 11 chapters that precede chapter 12, we’ve learned all sorts of things.  To begin with, we’ve learned about our predicament.  Were sinners and all have fallen short of the glory of God.  The only thing we really merit at all is God’s wrath.