· Christianity has been led to think that many good things that we can end up doing while we are on our mission, are actually the mission itself.
· Many Christians have become so enamored with the path that we are on, that we forget that we are supposed to go somewhere.
· The church at times has gotten sidetracked into focusing on good things, like enhancing the culture around us, as the primary mission, while forgetting the mission itself.
· This does not mean that Christians are called to practice asceticism. We don’t advocate leaving the culture behind and not being a part of it either – to do that would be to disobey the directive to be “in the world but not of it”.
· Instead of either bowing to the culture or being completely outside of the culture around us, Scripture calls us to be in the culture and to pursue and use our gifts in the context of the earthly kingdom that we live in, but not lose sight of the fact that we are called to be emissaries or ambassadors - representatives of the kingdom of Christ our Savior.
· We are not to be confused with the culture around us though. In fact, Scripture refers to us as strangers and aliens, who are not of this world.
· At the same time, we are called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
· We are also called to preach the gospel:
Romans 10:14-15 “But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!"
· We are called to be in the world but to be salt – to have a distinct taste and not to lose the distinctness of who we are as disciples of Jesus.
· We are called to live in this dark world – but to be light and not to hide our light, but instead let it shine and preach the good news, so that people might know the truth of the gospel.· We are called to be disciples of Jesus in all that we do and then to live out our lives, abiding in Jesus and growing in Him, trusting in His authority and dominion, and then sharing Jesus and living like Him; with our mouths actually talking and teaching about Jesus; all the while relying on Jesus to do the work and be with us wherever we go.
· Our mission as a church is that we are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ, who are Growing in Christ and Making Disciples of Jesus Christ.
· The main idea we are going to apply from Matthew 28:18-20 is that: Jesus calls us and enables us to follow Him in the mission of making disciples
· The first part we are going to see is that our mission to make disciples does not begin with us.
1. The mission is grounded in His completed Mission
“And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
· Jesus is saying that He has all the authority of heaven. He has the authority of God Almighty. He has the authority of the Creator of the entire universe and all existence.
· Jesus is absolutely Sovereign over all of heaven – the entire spiritual realm and Jesus has been given all authority over everything to do with the earth as well.
· He has been given power and dominion over the physical earth: over the land and sea, over mountains and tsunamis, over earthquakes and floods, over crops and seasons, over plants and trees, over all the creatures in the sea and on the land.
· Jesus has authority over powers and principalities and evil. Jesus has all authority over people of every walk of life. Jesus is not limited in any way – He has all authority.
· Jesus has all authority and every right and He gives Christians our commission.
· No matter what threats come against us and no matter what harassment and opposition we face, Jesus has all authority over it and He is the One who has given us our commission.
· Jesus’ mission was to come to redeem a people to Himself ultimately, and he fully completed His mission here on earth.
· The entire account of Jesus – His birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension prove that He completed His mission and He earned the right to be given all authority over heaven and earth
· And the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ. That Jesus is God the Son, who became flesh and was born to a virgin, then lived a perfect life, completely fulfilling the law and keeping the covenant that Israel could never keep.
· Jesus was the first man to ever obey God completely in everything – in thought and word and deed. Where Adam and every man after him has failed, Jesus did not fail.
· He was tempted in every way as man can be and yet He was without sin.
· Jesus proved He has power over temptation and sin and He resisted every temptation that Satan threw at Him.
· While Jesus walked on earth, He proved He has authority over matter. (He created bread to feed five thousand from only a few loaves)
· He proved He has authority over nature and spoke to a storm, saying only “peace, be still” and the winds stopped and the sea was immediately as still as glass.
· Jesus proved He has authority over the spiritual realm countless times, by casting out demons with just a word
· Jesus proved He has power over humanity to heal and create, and made the lame to walk, the blind to see, the deaf to hear and made new flesh where it had been eaten away with leprosy.
· And then Jesus kept the covenant in our place and suffered the punishment of breaking the covenant (although He had not) and died for us and in our place. He took all of the righteous wrath of God in our place
· Jesus rose again victorious, He has defeated Satan, the ruler of this world, He has broken the bonds of death and hell and the grave
· Jesus Christ now reigns victorious and He has inaugurated His kingdom and He is in the process of bringing all things into subjection to Himself until all things will one day be made new.
· When we proclaim the gospel, we proclaim the kingdom of God
· And the mission He gives us is to go and make disciples of all nations.
2. The mission is to go and make disciples of all nations
19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, (no slide)· This command to “go” is not to try to bring the kingdom of heaven about through the earthly powers and means, as Jesus disciples mistakenly thought to begin with.
· It is not trying to bring His rule and reign through the government and schools and social structures.
· Instead perhaps we are called to do as Jesus said and render to Caesar the things that are Caesar and participate in this earthly realm as light and salt but not confuse this earthly realm with our true home.
· We are to “go therefore” amidst our neighbors who are atheist, catholic, Muslim, Hindu and culturally Christian in name but not in life.
· Although cultural transformation is good, this command to “go” is not cultural transformation through the arts, through random acts of kindness – through just being nice and good and doing good deeds.
· What about our friends and coworkers and classmates who say that they have their own way to heaven? How do Jesus’ words in John 14:6 apply, when He said “John 14:6 “Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”?
Matthew 10:34-38 Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
· The early church knew what this scripture meant, when one family member was turned into the government and betrayed to death for believing in Jesus. It meant that believers had had to choose between staying with their family and loving them, or loving Jesus and being put to death.
· Countless martyrs, whose blood cries out to God, understood the call to sacrifice; the call to stand out. The call to Go meant to get out of themselves and be different, be distinct, be loving and humble but be real and risk the consequences of sharing the gospel personally.
· In this going – what can we expect to encounter? We can expect that the gospel is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes.
· Being mission-driven means being gospel-driven.
· We are not called to save anyone. Only God can save and yet God uses our feeble gospel-telling to powerfully save and rescue people.
· As we Go, we are going in His power with His authority to compel people to repent and turn to Jesus
· But making disciples doesn’t stop at sharing the gospel.
· We aren’t called to help rescue orphans only to leave them hungry and unprotected, not knowing how to fend for themselves and grow up in Christ.
· Making disciples means making fellow learners – it means telling people about Jesus and then helping them see Jesus and know how to follow Him themselves.
· For some, to make disciples of all nations might look like relocating, but for most of us, we are already living in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, post-Christian nation. We are already living in the midst of a people whose hearts are far from God.
· We are living in a pagan land, that is desperately in need of a Savior – and our salvation is not to be found in politics or in us redeeming the culture, but in Jesus redeeming and rescuing people from their sins.
· All around us, people are hurting and trapped in sin. They are hating God and dying and going to hell to live in eternal torment and they don’t even know it.
· But we have the call, the privilege and the commission to go to them and preach of Christ’s rescue mission to them.
· For those of us with children, the first place we need to go is to our own children.
· For all of us, we are called to go to our friends, our relatives our co-workers, our classmates, our neighbors, who are happily headed to hell oblivious of the eternal punishment they face.
· And we are called to carry the message of the good news of Jesus Christ to them in His authority.
3. Jesus gave us the Strategic Plan for the mission
· With this Great Commission we have, Jesus didn’t just give us a commandment to go and make disciples and then leave us alone to ourselves to figure out how in the world we are going to make that happen.
· Now, He didn’t detail what it looks like specifically in each of our lives – but Jesus does give us a strategic plan to carry out our mission of making disciples
· The strategic plan that Jesus has given us is in verses 19 and 20: “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
· This is the strategic plan that our Lord and Master has given to us in how to carry out our mission
· At times though, we can try to come up with our own plans for making disciples. We can come up with our own means and pretty soon, we can get off-mission.
· The problem with most of the church is not so much that we are lazy or hypocritical, (although I am sure that to some degree we are lazy and hypocritical). The primary problem is that there are a whole lot of us who are very engaged and industrious with all sorts of activity and busyness in our life (like Martha?).
· Christians have all sorts of outreach programs and social programs and the problem is not a lack of activity but that we have become distracted from what we’ve been called to do and distracted from the strategic plant that Jesus gave us to carry it out.
· We can bury the message of Jesus deep inside of programs and strategies of our own making.
· Christians are to participate in the World as salt and light and seek to honor God in all that we do, no matter what our employment.
· And Christians are absolutely called to active love their neighbors but this is different than the Great Commission that we have been given.
· What will truly transform the lives of those who are lost in the world is the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is why the Apostle Paul said he was eager to come and preach the gospel and he wasn’t ashamed of the gospel in Romans 1:16 – because he knew that “the gospel alone is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes”
· The Great Commission requires that we speak and baptize and tell others and teach others about Jesus.
· You see, the plan is not easy but it is simple. The plan is here, it is:
· baptizing them in1 the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
· This strategic plan also implies the context of a local church. It implies the context of a local church body because gospel proclamation, baptism and teaching are aspects of the local church in the New Testament.
· In the book of Acts, they devoted themselves to gathering together for teaching and teaching, fellowship, the Lord’s Supper and prayer
· And it tells us in Acts 2:47 that the Lord added daily to their number – to the church – those who were being saved.
In Acts 16:5, it says “So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily.”
· Michael Horton summarizes it this way in his excellent book titled, the Gospel Commission:
“Preaching the gospel, baptizing, and teaching everything – the appointed tools for making disciples – are not just things we do as the entrance to the Christian life. They’re not necessary merely for conversion or planting a church. They are the perpetual means through which disciples – and disciple-makers – are made over the long haul. This is the ministry that Christ has appointed for our home church as well as for our missionaries in a foreign field."
· A personal relationship with Jesus and church membership where you are joined to other believers, and can learn to be a disciple in the ups and downs of life go hand in hand.
· Baptism in the New Testament and in the early church was identifying yourself publicly as a Christian and doing so in the context of a local body of believers.
· This doesn’t mean you can’t be baptized outside of a church but the normative means for baptism is within the local body of Christ.
· Teaching is explicitly a charge of the local church as well.
· But in addition to the church we are all called to teach in some respect.
· Our homes are our closest mission fields for many of us
· Parents are directly called to teach our children – we have a commission to teach our children all about Jesus and to teach them all that Jesus has commanded us.
· We are called to teach those in the church who are new to the faith.
· We are called together as a community to disciple those within the church but we are also to share the gospel and then make disciples of those who are currently outside of the church.
· If I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, I am meant to be an ambassador.
"Ambassadors do not create their own policies, usurping the role of their head of state. They do not negotiate the terms of the peace treaty, but communicate them. They are under orders. Ambassadors aren’t merely private individuals who share their personal beliefs and experiences with others. They do not send themselves, but are officially commissioned and sent... Christ still sends His ambassadors out on His mission, proclaiming the Good News, baptizing and teaching everything that Christ commanded." - Michael Horton
· Each and every one of us – no matter what walk of life or season of life we find ourselves in, are called to be ambassadors for Jesus Christ who are making disciples.
· This going actually requires some effort though. It does mean work on our part, even though we trust that God alone can and will work in people’s hearts and we know we can’t convert anyone, we must obey our mandate to faithfully share the gospel and make disciples.
· We can also take heart and have boldness because Jesus didn’t leave us alone on this mission. In the last phrase in Matthew, Jesus says And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
4. Jesus Promised to be with us on the mission
· We are going with His authority and He is on the mission with us.
· Since Jesus is with us, we have no reason to fear any person, or even fear what might happen to us.
· We might lose our jobs, we might lose our reputation, we might face persecution and we might be ridiculed – but we don’t need to fear man because He has promised to be with us to the end of the age.
· He has said he will never leave us or forsake us and that nothing will separate us from His love.
· In the Old Testament book of Lamentations, the prophet Jeremiah weeps over the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem around 600 BC. By King Nebuchadnezzar
· The hope of God’s people had been crushed.
· The temple, the place where God’s presence dwelt and the place they were to encounter God, to worship Him and have their sins atoned for was destroyed
· At the end of Lamentations, the author prays to God and asks the Lord to remember them in the midst of their suffering. He said,
Lamentations 5:1-22 Remember, O LORD, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace! 2 Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners. 3 We have become orphans, fatherless; our mothers are like widows. 4 We must pay for the water we drink… 5 Our pursuers are at our necks;1 we are weary; we are given no rest... 7 Our fathers sinned, and are no more; and we bear their iniquities. 8 Slaves rule over us; there is none to deliver us from their hand...21 Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old - 22 unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us.
· Lamentations ends with an open ended wondering of whether God had utterly rejected them and remained exceedingly angry with them.
· At times it may seem as if God has forgotten and it may be hard to see how God is at work in the world and in your life.
· The people of old were left to wonder for a long time and really had no hope under the covenant, because they had been unfaithful to the covenant and failed time after time and now, they only deserved the punishment of God promised in the covenant.
· They couldn’t even make sacrifices in the temple to appease God’s wrath because the temple was destroyed and they were carried away into Exile.
· But the prophet in Lamentations appealed to the mercy of God and asked to be restored and renewed.
· 600 years later, (about 40 years before the destruction of the temple again by the Romans), Jesus told His disciples that He was now the dwelling place of God with men. Jesus was Himself the fulfillment of the temple. He is God with us – Emmanuel.
· Unlike the Jews in the Old Testament, His disciples were not left to wonder if God would restore their inheritance or leave them as orphans, utterly reject them and be exceedingly angry forever with them.
· Instead, in John 14:16 Jesus made them a promise, He said
John 14:16-20 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. 18 "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
· Not only has Jesus promised to be with us and for His Spirit to dwell with us and in us, He has promised us that He will answer the prayers of His people completely one day.
· Not only is Jesus the way to the Father and not only is He with us even to the end of the age, He has promised us in Revelation 21 that he will answer the prayers like those in Lamentations, that plead with God for restoration and renewal.
Revelation 21:1-7 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place1 of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people,2 and God himself will be with them as their God.3 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." 5 And he who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true." 6 And he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. 7 The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.
· What a glorious privilege we have been given.
· Jesus, who has all authority, has given us a mission and a strategy to carry out the mission and He has promised to be with us on the mission until He makes all things new again and when all of His sons and daughters will be with Him face-to-face.
Potential Application Questions:
1. Our mission is to be disciples of Jesus Christ, who are Growing in Christ and Making Disciples of Jesus Christ
2. How does it encourage you to know that we have a clear mission as Christians and as a local church body?
3. How has your understanding of your identity as a disciple helped change the way you view yourself and others?
4. How have you been inspired by God’s Word to grow as a disciple of Jesus Christ?
5. How have you been inspired by God’s Word to go and make disciples of Jesus Christ?
6. How does knowing that Jesus has all authority give you confidence for the commission He has given to you to make disciples? How has this affected your trust in Jesus?
7. Where do you believe God is specifically and personally calling you to go and make disciples? (in the church? Outside of the church?)
8. How if God calling you to change as His Ambassador? (any sin to repent of, promises to believe, etc.?)
9. How does knowing we have a strategic plan help keep us on track in our pursuit of making disciples?
10. How is your faith built by Jesus’ promise to be with us on the mission?
11. Who is one person that you believe you should pray for and share the gospel with this year?
2. How does it encourage you to know that we have a clear mission as Christians and as a local church body?
3. How has your understanding of your identity as a disciple helped change the way you view yourself and others?
4. How have you been inspired by God’s Word to grow as a disciple of Jesus Christ?
5. How have you been inspired by God’s Word to go and make disciples of Jesus Christ?
6. How does knowing that Jesus has all authority give you confidence for the commission He has given to you to make disciples? How has this affected your trust in Jesus?
7. Where do you believe God is specifically and personally calling you to go and make disciples? (in the church? Outside of the church?)
8. How if God calling you to change as His Ambassador? (any sin to repent of, promises to believe, etc.?)
9. How does knowing we have a strategic plan help keep us on track in our pursuit of making disciples?
10. How is your faith built by Jesus’ promise to be with us on the mission?
11. Who is one person that you believe you should pray for and share the gospel with this year?
