Learning how to follow Jesus in public life is what we're all about. Here's one scholar's understanding of discipleship that lights our fire...

Kingdom Discipleship:

Following Jesus In The Power Of The Spirit. "As the Father sent me, so I send you; receive the Holy Spirit; forgive sins and they are forgiven, retain them and they are retained." [John 20:22-23] That last double command belongs exactly at this point. We are to go out into the world with the divine authority to forgive and retain sins. When Jesus forgave sins, they said he was blaspheming; how then can we imagine such a thing for ourselves? Answer: because of the gift of the Holy Spirit. God intends to do through us for the wider world that for which the foundation was laid in Jesus. We are to live and tell the story of the prodigal and the older brother; to announce God’s glad, exuberant, richly healing welcome for sinners, and at the same time God’s sorrowful but implacable opposition to those who persist in arrogance, oppression and greed. Following Christ in the power of the Spirit means bringing to our world the shape of the gospel: forgiveness, the best news that anyone can ever hear, for all who yearn for it, and judgment for all who insist on dehumanizing themselves and others by theft, continuing pride, injustice and greed.

See how this works out as we think very briefly through Jesus’ mission to Israel, his kingdom-proclamation about which I spoke in the early chapters. Jesus announced that the moment had come, that God was at last becoming King in the way he had always intended. This was the end of exile, the defeat of evil, the return of YHWH to Zion. Very well; the first thing to say is that this happened in Jesus. God did indeed accomplish it. The foundation has been laid. The garden has been planted. The musical score is written. The principalities and powers that kept us in exile have been defeated; they need reminding of this, and we need reminding of it too, but it is a fact—if it isn’t, the cross was a failure. Our task is now to build the house, to tend the garden, to play the score. The human race has been in exile; exiled from the garden, shut out of the house, bombarded with noise instead of music. Our task is to announce in deed and word that the exile is over, to enact the symbols that speak of healing and forgiveness, to act boldly in God’s world in the power of the Spirit.

- N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is

(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999): 184-85.