Title: Marks of Discipleship: Share
Date: 03/16/2014 
Key Speaker: Amanda Wagoner-Meade 

The 40 days leading up to Easter, the church season of Lent, asks of us to be very introspective and evaluate how our lives measure up to the faith we profess in Jesus. Is it a casual acquaintance? Or is it a devotion with the seriousness of Calvary’s cross? And just how do measure such things?

Faith in Christ is not really about checklists and report cards. (Do this so that you can receive that.) Faith is about patterning our lives after the gratitude we have for what God has done for us.

Still, there are some marks of discipleship that we can study and evaluate—always looking for growth. During Lent we will look at five of these: worship, sharing faith, prayer, study, and serving.

This week we focus on the importance of Sharing as a sign or mark of our faith. In America we love the idea of “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps”. We love the concept of doing it all on our own, and that we can take all the credit for our own successes. But in the church we take a very different stand, here it is more about “us” and not just “me”. We worship together, study together, pray and serve together. Jesus came from a community of faith himself, and had both his disciples and the women who supported his ministry. As followers of Jesus, we have chosen a different path to not face the world alone, but together. We have decided that the caring for others and seeing the bigger picture beyond ourselves, of sharing our lives and our stories changes the world.