Discipleship Rant

I am learning more and more that discipleship is far deeper than I could ever have imagined. Upon the discovery of that I have decided that I feel robbed of all the good that the search for true discipleship has provided me. Robbed not in the sense that it is unattainable, but in the sense that it was never shown to me or taught to me earlier in life. We were always taught that the basis of a significant discipleship relationship with God was based in scripture reading and prayer. If that was all that it took for a person to be a disciple of Christ then there are more disciples of Christ than we know. But that is not it. Simply reading scripture cant get me any closer to being a disciple of Christ than reading a history text book. We have all these daily reading plans that help us read the bible through completely in a given amount of time, and they do really nothing for us spiritually. We may earn a gold star from ourselves and be able to say in conversation that we have read the entire Bible x amount of times, but how much closer to Christ and the way of life He taught His original disciples did we become in the process. I think a person would be better off spending time reading a verse of scripture and meditating on it for a long period time, committing it to memory and then finding ways to apply it to their life and actually becoming the living version of that scripture. Could you imagine what our homes, churches, and world would look like if we had people that truly embodied passages of scripture like the Beatitudes? How amazing would that be? I am not saying the scripture reading is pointless, because we need to be filled with the Word all time; I just believe that we should be looking for quality and not quantity. We should be looking to have a means of calling scripture to our minds at any given instant so we can keep the word of God constantly at the forefront of our minds. If I read the bible through in an entire year what have I retained as compared to me picking a passage of scripture to memorize and meditate on for a week or a month? How likely am I to be able to apply a scripture to my life and become a living embodiment of it if I read it once in a period of a year. I would definitely argue that the discipleship process is a process that requires discipline, but I would also argue that those disciplines that we have been taught in terms of discipleship need to be reevaluated in terms of the benefit they are providing to the disciple and the actual success they have had in terms of helping a person reach a closer relationship with Christ.