Obedience is better than sacrifice - a view of my current discipleship journey

'Obedience is better than sacrifice' - Children of Kabwe chanting this as a theme for our time here.

My words, body, finances, health, time, sleep, family and loved ones are not mine anymore, they have been given back to God that He may have His way through in and through me.

After two and a half months on the Trek I can finally put into words what God is busy with within us. The Trek calls it Discipleship and Missions training on the move.

I would like to explain this mission in a personal way:

Discipleship seems like the process of coming to know your own character in a facilitated but practical way and finding that it is not Christlike. To then go through the process of submitting one by one the aspects of your character to God, and all the rights you claim for yourself. Through the process of humbly selflessly serving others with the example and mission of Jesus as our guide, to then be right-sized before God. Within the safe and vulnerable environment of a family of believers all being purified alongside you, to continue to develop at the mercy of the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit. Through all this, in prayer and thanksgiving worship God for changing our willing hearts, minds, and souls to faithfully follow Jesus.

Discipleship seems to me to be the willing process of laying down my rights to self, and willingly taking up my cross, to follow Jesus in the way He modelled what being human looks like.

Luke 14:26-33 NET
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, wanting to build a tower, doesn’t sit down first and compute the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish the tower, all who see it will begin to make fun of him. They will say, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish!’ Or what king, going out to confront another king in battle, will not sit down first and determine whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot succeed, he will send a representative while the other is still a long way off and ask for terms of peace. In the same way therefore not one of you can be my disciple if he does not renounce all his own possessions.