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No matter how you slice the verb, Randy, the tenor upon Christ's command is that being marked out as His in this world means you are under the visible discipleship of His Church. A person is not already a disciple before they are in the process of being discipled.
I certainly hope that, as an introductory announcement of what it is to be a Christian, you are not telling men that they may well be Christians apart from the Church of Jesus Christ. This, after all, is the nature of the post itself.
I'm not at all confusing categories by insisting that the visible Covenant must mark a man out from among the world before the world knows he's marked out regardless of what might have happened by the work of the Spirit. You are holding out the false notion that the invisible and visible can, in fact, be visibly separated from one another. It is one thing to distinguish between the invisible and visible but quite another to separated them.
If a man walks up to me and asks me how to be a Christian, I'm not going to reply: "Well, you might already be a Christian because you could have been elected from the foundation of the world...." That hidden decree belongs to God. The revealed things belong to me: "Believe and be baptized...."
I don't know where you believe you find the Scriptural warrant to keep insisting upon this notion of extra-Church discipleship. Again, I note that it was the disciples who were called Christians and not some theoretical, invisible group that the world would never be able to identify.
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