Discipleship As The Way of Knowing Jesus

On John 14:9, 7:17, 8:31–32, and Philippians 3:12

When Jesus says, “Whoever sees me sees the Father” (John 14:9), such “seeing” cannot occur in mortal life except through an ever-deepening and progressively closer following of Christ, expressed in obedient imitation of who Jesus is as the Son. Only the one who “does” the truth can recognize whether Jesus is the truth (John 7:17; 8:31–32). On the journey toward truth, we cannot presume to have “already attained it,” yet we can say with Paul that we have nevertheless “already been attained by it” (Phil. 3:12–13).

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Meaning of Christ’s Saying, “I Am The Truth”

When Jesus tells his disciples that whoever has seen him has seen the Father, he makes a claim that most of us overlook too quickly. We assume that “seeing” here means intellectual recognition, a moment of insight where the identity of Christ becomes clear to our minds. However, the seeing Jesus describes in John 14:9 is far more demanding and intriguing. It is a seeing that only becomes accessible to a person through the arduous and unassuming journey of following Christ more closely. In this process, obedience itself becomes the very instrument through which perception occurs. This concept is worth contemplating because it challenges our conventional understanding of how faith is formed. We often assume that understanding arrives first, as a kind of intellectual clarity, followed by obedient practice. However, the Gospel of John presents a different perspective. Once we recognize this, we begin to notice it throughout the text.

Consider John 7:17, where Jesus teaches that those who do the will of God will recognize whether his teaching comes from God. Here, doing and knowing are intimately connected. Obedience does not earn revelation, nor does it produce truth; rather, in faithful practice, God enables the person to recognize the truth already present in Jesus’ teaching. The doing becomes the place in which seeing is clarified and discernment becomes possible.

This is deeply Johannine. Throughout John, seeing, doing, knowing, and truth belong together. Jesus does not present truth as something that can be fully grasped from a safe distance, as though the knower could remain outside the reality being revealed. His teaching calls the hearer into a way of life, and it is within that lived response that its truth becomes recognizable. In this sense, obedience is a mode of perception: doing opens the eyes to see what could not be fully seen beforehand, and seeing leads into a deeper knowing.

This does not mean that truth is created by our practice or that theological reflection and doctrinal precision are secondary. Rather, some truths make claims upon the whole person and therefore require the whole person for their recognition. The truth Jesus embodies and teaches is of this kind. It can be examined from the outside, but its deepest reality becomes knowable through participation. Love, forgiveness, self-giving, and the surrender of ambition for another’s flourishing illustrate the same principle: we may observe and describe these things from a distance, yet we come to know their truth most deeply by entering into them and discovering what they do to us.

This has real consequences for how we think about forming disciples, particularly in seasons or movements marked by rapid growth and multiplication, where the temptation is always to front-load information and delay the actual practice of following until people feel sufficiently equipped. The pattern within the Gospel itself suggests something closer to the opposite: people are drawn into practices of following — leaving nets, sharing bread, forgiving debts, loving enemies, entering suffering rather than avoiding it — well before they possess anything like a settled theological account of what they are doing, and it is precisely inside that practiced following that understanding begins to form and deepen. Obedience, on this reading, functions less as the fruit of prior conviction and more as the soil in which conviction is planted and allowed to grow roots. One learns to see reality truly through a life of obedient participation in the truth.

There is also a particular shape to time within this kind of discipleship, one that Paul names in Philippians 3:12, where he says that he “presses on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus first took hold of him.” Notice the double movement suggested in that sentence. Paul is genuinely advancing; the pressing on is real exertion, real growth, real ground covered over years of a life given to following Christ. And at the very same time, the reason Paul can press on at all is that he had already been grasped, already laid hold of, even before his own pursuit began, so that every subsequent step forward is best understood as a response to a prior movement of Christ toward him. This has a way of relieving discipleship of that anxious, ladder-climbing quality it can take on when we imagine spiritual maturity as something earned incrementally through our own effort, because the ground beneath every step was secured before the walking began.

John 8:31–32 draws these threads together in a single compact promise. Jesus tells those who have believed him that if they are his disciples, if they hold to his teaching, abiding in it over time rather than merely assenting to it in a moment, only then will they will come to know the truth, and that knowledge of the truth will set them free. The sequence matters here as much as it did in John 7:17. Abiding comes first, a word that carries connotations of dwelling, remaining, staying put through seasons when the teaching is difficult or unfashionable or costly, and only from within that sustained abiding does the knowledge of truth become available, with freedom following as its fruit rather than its precondition.

This is a freedom that could not have been granted upfront, prior to the abiding, because the illusions and self-protective structures it dismantles are themselves the sort of thing that only becomes visible, and only loses its grip, through the slow discipline of staying inside the teaching long enough to be reshaped by it. Freedom, in other words, is not the starting point from which discipleship becomes possible; it is what discipleship produces in a person who has remained faithful to it over time. We come to know differently because we become differently oriented toward reality.

Taken together, these texts describe a single movement in which the disciple, through the practice of obedient following, becomes something like a living interpretation of Christ, so that the distinction between the one who follows and the truth being followed begins to narrow, and a life gradually takes on a form legible to others as a genuine, if always partial and ongoing, disclosure of the One it follows. This is what it might mean to say that seeing the Father in Christ is not a discrete cognitive event available to the detached observer, but an achievement — always incomplete, always underway — of a life increasingly conformed through obedience to the shape of the Son.