Acts 11:
Strong's Greek: 3101. μαθητής (mathétés) — 263 Occurrences
Can someone be a Christian who does not consider themselves a disciple?
Not in Paul's time, disciples and Christians were synonyms.
What are the actions/attitudes that you would expect from a disciple?
John 14:
A disciple follows Jesus and does what he did. Interestingly the word "disciple" is rarely used by anyone except by Jesus and Luke in the NT. Paul never used the word. The word μαθητής is not in LXX at all.
To be clear, the Disciples were those Jesus specially called to follow him and to be trained by him to found the Church and transmit the pure words of Jesus to others. And so, we would indeed expect the word "disciple" to be used primarily in the accounts of Jesus' earthly ministry, when he called those disciples. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts all have references to them.
But your point is well taken, and in particular the reference you chose to use--John 14. To be a true Christian one must do as the apostles did, yielding up their own autonomy for a partnership with Jesus in which he is absolute Lord over our lives. The reason is that he came to show us that nothing we do without him has value. If we wish to be saved we must be saved only by putting on his life in place of our own autonomous life.
Religious people copy Jesus. Spiritual people obey Jesus by letting him rule in their lives, replacing their own autonomous life for his own spiritual life. We must show Jesus in our lives, and not merely copy him. Copying him lacks the substance of Christ and his righteousness. To pretend love has no love at all.
