Following Jesus means becoming like him, and that change starts with what you love, not with a longer list of things to do. Yolanda Solomon, the discipleship director at Epiphany Church in Brooklyn, puts the order plainly: the heart changes first, behavior follows, and the whole process happens inside the ordinary life you already have. If you keep failing at a checklist, the problem may not be your discipline. You may be starting at the wrong end.
That is a big claim, and it is easy to misunderstand. It can sound like permission to stop trying, or like a nice idea for people with spare time. Solomon means neither.
What is a disciple, before anything else?
Start with the word itself. Solomon admits “discipleship” sounds churchy, so she strips it down. “A disciple is a follower, an apprentice.” People follow musicians, brands and public figures. A disciple of Jesus is someone who follows him.
That definition already tells you something. An apprentice does not mainly collect information about a master. An apprentice watches how the master works and slowly learns to work the same way. Solomon applies this directly to Jesus. Many Christians think of discipleship through the command to take up a cross. She points out that before Jesus went to the cross, he lived a life, and that life was the lesson.
The clearest scene is the night Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. After he finished, he told them, “For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15). The word “example” matters. Jesus was not only giving his followers a rule to obey. He was giving them a pattern to copy. Solomon names that pattern as self-sacrificial love, and she describes Jesus as saying, in effect, “I’m a show and tell Savior, and I want show and tell disciples.” Her question for every follower is “how do we follow that Jesus in what we actually do, not just in what we believe.”
The apprentice picture is useful, but it has a limit worth naming now. A human apprentice usually earns a place by performing well. Following Jesus does not work that way, and that difference turns out to be the key to the rest of this article. Keep the picture of someone learning by watching. Drop the idea of someone working to be accepted.
Why doesn’t the checklist work?
Here is the common mistake. Solomon says many Christians, and people near the faith, “think that discipleship is behavior modification.” In her experience, the conversation almost always sounds the same. I don’t read my Bible enough. I don’t pray enough. I’m not disciplined enough. The assumption underneath is simple: if I can change what I do, I will become a better Christian.
Her answer is that this approach skips a step. “I think that bypasses the heart of discipleship, because at the heart of discipleship is becoming more and more like Jesus.” Behavior is part of becoming like Jesus, but it is not where the change comes from. As she puts it, “Jesus knows that true change comes from the heart and heart change is a miracle.”
Notice what that does to the checklist. If the deepest change is a miracle, then you cannot produce it by effort alone. Solomon says it bluntly: she cannot make your heart change, and “Only the Holy Ghost can do that.” A plan built only on willpower is aimed at something willpower cannot reach. That is why so many sincere people try hard for a few weeks and then give up. They are pulling hard on the wrong lever.
There is a second, quieter problem with the checklist. Solomon observes that “a lot of us see discipleship as a means to fixing ourselves up so God will actually care about us.” When that is the motive, every missed prayer time feels like proof that God is disappointed. Her response is direct: “the gag is that God already loves you.” Paul says the same about salvation itself: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). Paul goes on in the next verse to say believers were created for good works. The works come after the gift and grow out of it. A checklist run in order to win God’s love has the order backwards.
Doesn’t Scripture demand obedience?
It does, and this is the strongest objection to Solomon’s emphasis. Jesus gives hard commands. The letters of the New Testament warn believers against sin in sharp terms. A reader might fairly ask whether “love first” quietly softens all of that.
Look at how Jesus himself links the two: “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). The commands are not cancelled. They are placed. Love is the root, and keeping the commands is what that love does. Solomon’s order fits this reading. She never tells people to stop obeying; she tells them obedience lasts when it flows from a changed heart, the way the rich man’s obedience would have had to flow from loving Jesus more than his wealth. Her interview focuses on everyday formation, so it does not work through the New Testament’s warning passages one by one. A reader wrestling with those texts will need to read them in context. What her account rules out is treating the commands as a ladder you climb to reach God’s love.
Where does the change actually begin?
If behavior is not the starting point, what is? Solomon’s answer is love, meaning the things your heart is drawn to. So she asks people a different question. Instead of pressing them on why they don’t read their Bible, she asks, “What do you actually do that nobody has to encourage you to do?” People answer honestly. Basketball. Shopping. Scrolling. Happy hour.
The question is a diagnosis. It shows where a person’s desires already are, which is where Solomon says Jesus himself started with people. Her example is the rich man who asked Jesus what he must do (Mark 10:17-22). The man claimed he had kept the commandments since his youth. Jesus did not hand him another rule. He told him to sell what he had, give to the poor and follow him. Jesus aimed at the one thing the man loved more than God. “And Jesus always gets to the heart,” Solomon says.
Read that passage carefully and you see her point. The man’s outward record was strong. His problem was what he treasured. More rules would not have touched it. Only a change in what he loved could have freed him to follow.
So how do loves change? Solomon describes it as encounter. People come to see Jesus, and his way of life, as beautiful. Over time, what they love shifts toward what he loves, and Solomon says what Jesus loved was people. Once that shift begins, priorities move, and behavior moves with them. The order is: encounter, then changed loves, then changed actions.
If only God changes a heart, what am I supposed to do?
A second worry follows. If heart change is a miracle, should I just wait for it? Isn’t this a polite way of saying effort doesn’t matter?
Solomon does not say that. She keeps the practices. She simply puts them in their proper place. Prayer is how you talk with the one you want to follow. “We read the gospels to learn about the counter-cultural life of the one who we wanna follow.” Worship, community, stillness and silence all belong in a disciple’s life. But she adds a careful line: “Those things are good, but those things aren’t the thing they’re a means to the one.”
That distinction answers the worry. You still pray and read. The difference is what you are aiming at. On the checklist model, the practice is the goal, and success means checking the box. On Solomon’s model, the practice is a way to meet Jesus, and the goal is knowing and loving him. A missed morning is simply a day you can turn back toward someone who is not angry with you.
The other part of the answer is time. Solomon stresses that people want to change overnight, but “heart change takes time.” Lisa Fields made the same point from the other side of the conversation: “change is a process, but loving people well is a process too.” If change is slow and real, then patience belongs to the process itself.
So the honest answer to “what do I do?” is this. Keep putting yourself where you can meet Jesus, through Scripture, prayer and the people of God. Expect the change to be gradual. Trust that the deepest work belongs to the Holy Spirit. That is effort pointed at the right target.
What if my life has almost no margin?
Many people picture discipleship as a weekly coffee-shop Bible study and an unhurried hour of devotions. Lisa Fields raised this directly: new believers who are married, raising kids and working often do not have that kind of time, and some fall away when the model they learned no longer fits.
Solomon’s first move is to name the season. She recalls talking with a father of a nine-month-old who felt like a spiritual failure because he was doing most of the caretaking. Her response began with grace. He was raising a human being, and that is a season, much like college is a season. Then she added something important: “But here’s the thing, you do have margins.” The margins are thin, but they are real.
Her practical suggestions are small on purpose. Play an audio Bible while you vacuum, cook or play with the baby. If you only catch a little, “maybe you get two verses in, but meditate on those two verses,” and let that be enough for the day. Listen to worship music on a stroller walk. Text another parent who is also awake at two in the morning, so you are not alone. On some Sundays you will be walking the hallway with a child instead of hearing the sermon, and she says that is okay. Behind all of this is one conviction: “discipleship is a lifelong process.” A thin season is one chapter of a long life.
The deeper answer, though, is a different view of what counts. Solomon points to how Jesus described his own mission: “For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). In older English, to be “ministered unto” means to be served, and to “minister” means to serve. Jesus defined his greatness by serving.
From there Solomon draws a conclusion that changes how a tired parent can see an ordinary evening. “You serving your children is ministry. You serving your wife is leadership,” she says, and “for Jesus, leading and serving are synonymous.” Washing the dishes while your children watch, speaking gently to your spouse, staying patient when a child talks back, offering to do bath time so someone else can rest: Solomon calls this discipleship. Children, she notes, often care less about a devotional than about whether their parents are kind and patient with each other.
One caution keeps this from being misread. Solomon is not saying that serving replaces Scripture and prayer. She keeps both in the picture, even if they come in two-verse pieces. Her claim is that service flowing from love is itself following Jesus.
Why does the order matter so much?
The order changes three things.
First, it changes how you treat yourself. Lisa Fields observed that “often we don’t have grace for others because we don’t have grace for ourselves.” Solomon agreed and connected it to discipleship. When she admits to someone that she, too, sometimes would rather do anything but pray, she can offer more than religious clichés. She can show how she turned back to God knowing he was not angry. A person who follows Jesus to earn love will be harsh with every failure. A person who follows because they are already loved can be honest and keep going.
Second, it changes how you treat others. Solomon notes that Jesus was an attentive listener who asked real questions and showed up for rich and poor, men and women, Samaritans and Jews. She also recalls the time his disciples wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village that rejected him, and Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:51-56). Her diagnosis is that “sometimes we have enemies and we try to make our enemies Jesus enemy.” The disciples had walked with Jesus and been given real authority, yet their loves still ran along the old lines of who deserved judgment. Their access to power had outrun the change in their hearts, which is exactly the gap a checklist cannot close.
Third, it changes how others see Jesus. Lisa Fields pointed to 1 Peter 3, where Peter’s call to be ready to give a reason for your hope comes after instructions about how believers treat spouses, difficult people and those who wrong them. Her conclusion: “our behavior should lead to questions.” Solomon extended the thought. If Christ is the head of the church, people will find it hard to believe in the head if they cannot see the body working. Arguments still have a place. A life shaped by love is often what makes anyone want to hear them.
That brings the crowded life back into view. The apprentice learns at the master’s bench, and the bench Jesus chose was service: a towel, a basin, a meal for hungry people. For the parent at two in the morning or the worker coming home empty, the dishes, the bath and the patient answer to a child are that same work. A crowded life is where the apprenticeship takes place.
