The pursuit of God is not a part-time, weekend exercise… Abiding requires a kind of staying power. The pursuit is relentless. It hungers and thirsts. It pants as the deer after the mountain brook. It takes the kingdom by storm… The pursuit of God is a pursuit of passion. Indifference will not do. To abide in the Word is to hang on tenaciously. A weak grip will soon slip away. Discipleship requires staying power. We sign up for duration. We do not graduate until heaven.  R.C. Sproul

.“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” A disciple of Jesus Christ is a follower first and we cannot ‘disciple’ until we have learned to ‘follow’. Discipleship is embedded in following. Inevitably, when we are following, we are also discipling.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship; “These men without possessions or power, these strangers on earth, these sinners, these followers of Jesus, have in their own life with Him renounced their own dignity, for they are marked by mercy. As if their own needs and their own distress were not enough, they take upon themselves the distress and humiliation of others. They have an irresistible love for the down-trodden, the sick, the wretched, the wronged and the outcast”. It is a grand commission to cultivate a life-giving culture through mentoring and discipleship.