5 Dimensions of a Disciple - Episode 00

Welcome to Happy & Holy! In our inaugural episode, learn more about your host -- writer, speaker, and Bible teacher, Kate Boyd -- as well as the Happy & Holy life and discipleship framework.

The 5 dimensions or rhythms of a disciple or in discipleship:

• Personal: Being rooted in spiritual disciplines and healthy habits as a foundation for life.
• Relational: Connecting to a community to serve, be served, and experience God together
• Intellectual: Learning about your faith, the world, and culture to see God everywhere you look and point others to him.
• Mental: Finding your confidence in your identity in Christ and the courage to act because of it.
• Missional: Serving others outside your community and having spiritual conversations with joy and compassion.

Which one do you need help in? Share on Instagram @kateboyd.co

If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review on your favorite podcast player to help more people find us and learn with you.

Full Transcript available here.

Kate Boyd - Book | Bible Studies | Coaching | Newsletter | Instagram

Transcript

Unknown Speaker : 0:03

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the inaugural episode

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of happy and holy, I'm very glad that you're here. I'm honored to be in your earbuds at the

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moment.

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And so to start, I thought it would just make a lot of sense, if you got to know a little bit more about who I am and what this podcast will be all about. So, starting with me, um, you know, my official bio will say that I'm a writer, speaker and Bible teacher, and I really see myself as a spiritual mentor. That's what I love to do. I love to help people connect

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dots.

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I feel like that's my chief

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gift.

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And so that's what I hope to do with this podcast.

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But I didn't always sort of see my life as a series of dots to be connected back to God. word like the Bible was part of my spiritual life.

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But

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it didn't really like go beyond that it was a to do list item. And let me tell you,

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I am amazing at checking off

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to do you list items, you probably are too. Don't we all just feel wonderfully productive when that happens. But it meant that my fate stayed in a very organized, neat box. And I like boxes that I can file away and compartmentalize. And though I looked at my life through that lens, it didn't necessarily my beliefs didn't connect all the time to what I was doing. Or even understanding why I was doing what I was doing based on my beliefs. But eventually it came to be pretty painfully obvious that that just wasn't

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going to be

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good. It wasn't gonna cut it anymore.

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You know, I couldn't just engage it when I went wanted, I couldn't just turn it on and off, saying yes to God is a thing that I had to do, and that I had to do every day. And then it meant that my faith would actually have to permeate my entire life. And this actually happened not when I was young, I grew up in a Christian school Christian family, and I'm so grateful for that foundation of knowledge. You know, and even the disciplines and like, the rich history that I was given the legacy of faith that I've grown up in, but I really what really changed my heart and my life was being on the other side of the world.

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I had a job that allowed me to see

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believers who were coming to faith rapidly and in, in in places where the gospel had not yet been or hadn't been in a long time or where they may be the only Believers around. And when that's the case, these people, they could have hidden their faith, it would have been very easy. And sometimes they had to in certain contexts, but most of the time,

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they lived their faith in a big way.

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You know, they faced persecution because of it. They walked over mountains to share the gospel they gave of their limited resources to care for their neighbor. Like the things that you see Jesus do that you see his disciples to you that you see Paul do these were things that these people did every day, and it really convicted me. And that changed how I read the Bible and how I interacted with my faith because it wasn't just about knowing a lot of things, or checking it off a list. It was about allowing it to change my life and engage with things differently. And that really, that job was what began the journey that led me to who I am today. Which is someone who doesn't look at discipleship as a series of classes to take, or skills to master. Certainly those things are in there, right? They are a part of that. But really, discipleship is a foundation you can build upon for your life, and it grows out of your life. So the main thing that I hope that you take away from the podcast and you'll even hear this in the intro, is that your life is spiritual. You don't have a spiritual life, your life is spiritual. There is nothing that getting your spiritual house in order doesn't touch right. So for me that changed how I view my body how I take care of my mental health, whether or not I talk to my grocery store clerk, even though I'm highly introverted and just and get a little bit of anxiety at the grocery store, where I spend my extra money, how much how I watch and approach movies and TV and books and art, what I look for when I travel, what I do when I travel and how I build really In my church and outside of my church,

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my faith discipleship,

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this lens of Jesus

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became the foundation and filter over my life. And so you'll hear me talk about Jesus goggles on the show. And that's really what it was. I got the Jesus goggles that now allow me to see what life is through the lens of God. And so that's what I want for you. I want you to be able to put on your own pair of Jesus goggles and live abundantly because of it. And when I say live abundantly, I translate that into happy and holy, which is what I'm going to talk about next.

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Because it's a because it's fun to say happy and holy,

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and because it does affect you know, the joy that you have here on the earth, but also that righteousness peace that you have for The future for heaven for eternity. So it is both in the here and the now. And in the future, right? You may have heard people talk about the tension between the already and the not yet, right, we have been made new, we're being made new. And there's even a more,

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you know, great

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transformative version of that in our future. So that's really what happy and holy means. It's like living like the people of heaven on earth. It's balancing this here and now this physical life with our spiritual life and all of those things. Because here's the reality is that what you believe about God 100% affects who you are, and what you do. And if you've picked up my Bible study guide,

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then you know that I talk

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about you know, when you read the Bible, you should boil it down to three things what you should what you believe about God and yourself. And what Who should you become like? What are the characteristics that you should be embodying based on that? And then what do you do because you're that person.

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It really gives feat to your faith.

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And I think that's how the two greatest commandments, at least according to Jesus, are connected right?

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is through this

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belief and love of God, love of people. So, what Jesus said the greatest commandment is and this is from Matthew 2237 through 40 it it says Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, this is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and prophets hang on these two commandments, which means everything else that you hear from the Bible,

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like that you should live out of

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should come from these two places, either loving Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your mind or loving your neighbor as yourself. Which means you also have to love yourself a little bit, right? So when I wrestled through what discipleship should be, I knew it needed to be built on those things loving God loving, self loving others. And it had to be this foundation that then you could build on with action. It had to go beyond the knowledge and into the rhythms that you create in your life, to embody faith and live abundantly, hence the happy and holy, right. So, as we go through this podcast as we, as you learn from me, I really sort of have five

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areas

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that I have in mind discipleship framework to help you pursue all of life with this spiritual lens with those Jesus goggles.

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So the first one is personal.

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Your personal rhythm, right? These are being rooted in the spiritual disciplines and healthy habits. So spiritual disciplines are those things like reading your Bible praying, and you know, meeting and worshiping with other people, but it may also be those things you do every now and then like fasting, celebration, stuff like that.

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So

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those sort of like keep your spiritual life healthy, keep you rooted in the Lord. And then also the Healthy Habits as your foundation for life. So the things that keep you healthy, and focused and able to then, you know, integrate those things that help you connect those things, whether that's your mental health or your physical health, right, you have to have all these things because your body is, is the vehicle through which God is working. And so if you're not taking care of it, you know, you might be hampering

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what God can do.

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And when you're not doing the best of your ability to take care of yourself.

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So then there's the relational rhythm,

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and that's really connecting to a community to serve to be their God. God calls you know, The local church, your community, a body, which means you rely on one another. So you not only serve, but you are served. And you experience God together in a real way, and in a way that you can't any other way, right? We have to have that relational aspect. So, these are your friendships, these are your church communities. These are some of maybe the relationships you have that are outside of your, you know, spiritual core group of people. These are your mentorships, right? Like, these are the relationships we build that help to help us grow from those routes that we have. The next rhythm is intellectual, which is really encompasses like all the things that you could learn so learning about your faith, learning about the world, learning about other faiths learning about culture, right, like learning how to interact with art, being aware of news and, and and filtering that through a lens Learning how to think and see, right? Because God is everywhere when you look for him, and if you're not looking for him or if you don't know how to do that, you can't see him and then you can't point other people to him. So this is sort of a more practical way of like learning to think about the world around you. And and thinking critically and taking in information so that you are, you know, culturally competent with all of that. The next rhythm is mental. And this is really about finding your competence. Intellectual is about, I'm sorry about your confidence if the intellectual is about your competence. This is about your competence. And this is really this sort of goes hand in hand with that personal rhythm being rooted in Christ. This is finding your competence and your identity and the courage to act because of it. So it is knowing how God sees you. It is knowing what God says about you. It is knowing Who you are in Jesus. And then being able to use that as your source of faith and confidence. You know, Hebrew says that Jesus is the author and perfecter of our faith. It doesn't even have to originate from us, right? We don't have the faith that we have, isn't even us. It's a gift, right? And so if we can lean into that and realize that, maybe we'll be scared,

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but it doesn't mean that we're not

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capable. Because,

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Jesus, that's where our identity is. And the Holy Spirit is empowering us. That's where we get some of that competence to you. So that really helps with the competence area.

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And then the last rhythm is missional.

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And so this goes beyond say like, your your community service, which I feel like when I say community, I mean like your local body of believers, your church. Whatever That looks like for you. That's the relational the missional is where you're taking it outside, you're taking like the next step to serve others, outside your, you know, believing community, necessarily. So this is like your neighbors who may be living in your apartment complex, or down the street from you or that grocery clerk that I talked about before. And then being able to have spiritual conversations with joy, but also serving people, practically with compassion. And even having spiritual conversations with compassion, building relationships, that lead to, to those things, so that you can listen and have empathy. And it not be like a forceful thing, right? So when you put all these five areas together, it's really about depth and practicality. It's about making sure that you're healthy in as many areas of your life as possible, that you're rooted in your faith. And that is, what is pushing out the action that you that you Do right whether that's at work, or even at home or in conversation or the way that you physically take care of your body.

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All of that comes

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you know, with special,

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special. I can't think of the word off the top of my head, but you know, direction, essentially because of the way the Holy Spirit lives through us. And it's those Jesus goggles, right like, because we can see through the lens of our faith, it changes how we do what we do, it changes why we do what we do, and oftentimes it changes what we do, right. So with those Jesus goggles on, you can take care of yourself as a whole person, because you are a whole person. And this way you don't miss a moment to see God or share God with others. But you know, in like a joyful non self judgmental way. Okay. This is not a rubric for you to live up to, to check off the boxes. That's not what it's for. It's more of like an assessment, like, how can I get these things to live in harmony for me, so I can be the healthiest version of myself, which therefore creates a life that serves other people that loves God loves my neighbors, because I'm a healthy version of myself, right? And it takes all these layers, you know, it's why when people do like life assessments, they have you run through more than just your work, and what you do or your family life, like it encompasses all these things. And so these are the layers that make you more than a spiritually healthy person, a healthy person, but that keep that take that spirituality that you have and push it out into the rest of your life. And so that's what I want to equip you with through happy and holy. That's what I want to help you discover. We're in Scripture, and discovering the practices and rhythms that we create. And so I'm honestly so excited, and I can't wait to see where God takes us all in this journey together. So I just want to say thank you again, for showing up for being here for listening. And I'm, I can't wait to see where God takes us as we seek out, you know, making our entire lives a product of our spiritual lives. So thank you and have a great day.