All authority is given to Jesus. This gives Him the right to command whatever He likes.
• He could have pronounced final judgment on the earth right then.
• He could have called down those 12 legions of angels to enact vengeance on a fallen and
rebellious humanity.
• He could have disestablished the Roman Empire and established the Empire of the Son.
Instead, He issued a commandment-a simple, lowly commandment with an intimate, human touch.
The only command is to “make disciples.” (all of the other elements of the commission are present, active, participles-not commands). Going, Baptizing, Teaching, make disciples. As we go, as we teach, as we baptize, we are making disciples, and that is what the commandment is.
The Great Commission is to make disciples.
1. Going
Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” John 20:21.
Jesus is sending His disciples. As Jesus left the throne of glory to live among us, He has sent us to go—to be His apostles, His ‘sent ones’. But as He left heaven to descend to our hell, He has called us to move from this hell we’ve made of earth to His heaven.
We must move out of the shacks of introversion and protectionism into the mansions of generosity and communion with our fellow humanity.
Obedience to the Great Commission means we can no longer live lives of comfort and ease.
We must become uncomfortable and uneasy, moving wherever God calls us.
Keith Green said “Unless God calls you to stay, He’s already called you to go.”
2. Baptizing
Baptism is identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. It is a complete transformation. It is, yes, conversion, but not in so puny and limited a sense as a mere transfer from one creed to another.
It is a complete rework.
• A movement from the darkness of ignorance to light of knowledge,
• From the wilderness of selfishness to the promised land of service,
• From the death of consuming pleasure to a life of consummated spirit.
• From groans of grief to songs of joy.
• From chants to a deaf, dumb and mute idol, to songs of praise to the eternal God.
We are to be going and baptizing, and that baptism means we are to bring people from death to life. We are also to teach.
3. Teaching
Teaching means passing on to others what you have learned. Any teacher must first be a student. In fact, the word “disciple” actually means student. If you are going to “make disciples” you have to make students.
You cannot teach others to do “all that Jesus commanded” unless you, yourself, are obedient to “all Jesus commanded.”
It brings us to the point of this message: the title “Make Disciples of all nations” is based on the only command of the Great Commission.
So, first, what the Great Commission is NOT about:
• It is NOT a command to evangelize the world. Making disciples involves more than telling
people the good news.
• It is NOT a command to build radio & television stations, and satellite networks.
• It is NOT a command to have crusades or other large outreach meetings.
So what is the Command of the Great Commission?
The rest of this message will be an attempt to answer that question.
To make disciples of Jesus, you must first be a disciple of Jesus. . . so, what are the elements that make a person a disciple of Jesus?
1. Intimate knowledge of Jesus
2. Calling by Jesus
3. Obedience to Jesus
4. Love from Jesus
5. Universal approach of Jesus
1. Intimate knowledge of Jesus
Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. John 10:14-15
One of the disciples mentioned, “Show us the Father and that would suffice us.” Jesus said, “Have I been so long with you and you do not know Me? He who has seen Me, has seen the Father.” Jesus and the Father are one. There are three Persons – Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, and they is God. To know One is to know the other, and so to see Jesus is to see the Father.
Have we become so intimate with Jesus that when someone looks at us, they feel that they have seen Jesus? Have you become intimate in your knowledge of Him? If not, you cannot claim to be a disciple of Jesus, and you cannot then make disciples.
Paul said in Ephesians, “That you might be filled with the knowledge of God.”
Paul also said in Philippians, “I want to know Him . . .”
2. Calling by Jesus
If you are a follower of Jesus, you are called. There is a profound calling in your life.
The word Church means “A gathering of those who are called out.” We are the Gathering of the Called.
Paul said in Rom.8:28:
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
He also said there was only one thing he was interested in doing:
I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
As a result of his testimony, many were brought to faith and became disciples.
We read in Matthew 4
As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” - Matthew 4:18-20
There is a clear calling on their lives; they were called to work on the lives of people – to stop catching stinky fish and start catching people.
So the disciples of Jesus are called - and they know their calling.
3. Obedience to Jesus
Jesus also said in John 8: 31: To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you obey (keep) my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:31-32
Jesus said, if you obey Me, then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Obedience to Jesus is central to discipleship!
In John 15,
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. John 15:9-14
One of the tragedies to see is a believer who’s been a believer for 20, 30 or 40 years, and yet spiritually they are infants. We see this often in the churches – people who have been spiritually alive for decades yet they have never moved into maturity.
The difference between a mature believer and an immature believer is that an immature believer will make a decision without any concern about what the Bible teaches. A mature believer will desire and seek and pray in a way to bring their lives into submission to the teachings of Christ. They are always considering, what does the Bible teach? We have seen the wrist bands that say, “WWJD?” What would Jesus do?
There are believers who might be with us in heaven, yet they have never moved in their intimacy with God where they are obedient to Him in their lowest level of their behavior to the highest level of their decisions.
Obedience to the Father is the hallmark of Jesus’ life and ministry. Obedience to Jesus is the hallmark of His disciples.
We cannot make disciples unless we, ourselves, learn humility through obedience to the Word of Jesus, to the teachings of the Bible.
ILLUSTRATION:
When D.L. Moody was a child, he went to a meeting. There was a preacher who said, “The world is yet to see the power of a life completely submitted to God’s will.” D.L. Moody said, “I want to be that person in this generation.” And he prayed, “Lord, give me the strength to be a man who is obedient to You in all things.” God used Moody to literally bring 100s of 1000s of people to Christ! I believe this was in direct relation to the prayer he made as a teenager.
4. Love from Jesus
By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:35
In the Greek language, there are four words for love.
• Phileo
• Eros
• Storge
• Agape
Read I John 4:7-12
If this world is to see God, it has to see God through our love.
Read I Timothy 3:1-5
We are not commanded to love ourselves, we already do that. We feed ourselves, wash ourselves, and take care of ourselves. Then surely love for others should have that kind of care.
The affection that you have for a child, that family love, people have lost that kind of affection because they want to pursue their careers.
We need to avoid that kind of crudeness that comes from involving ourselves in the flesh and the world. In the films the people who are glorified are crude and it is one of the signs of the last days. And many people are imitating that kind of behavior. We need to be totally different from that. We need to love each other!
5. No Prejudice – Having the universality of Jesus
God so loved the world…Jesus is the Lord of all nations. That means people from every nation should be thought of as our brothers and sisters.
ILLUSTRATION:
150 years ago this week Abraham Lincoln issued the first draft of Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln felt that the ideal of the Emancipation of all slaves could not have been accepted by the citizens of the United States before blacks were inducted into the Union army (by the end of the war more than 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union army-and the Union victory would have been impossible without their sacrifices). And that the induction of blacks into the Union army would never have been accepted before the horror of the bloodiest war in US history, and the very real possibility of the defeat of the Union army.
Charles Wills, who enlisted as a private with the 8th Illinois and rose to be a lieutenant colonel with the 103rd Illinois, marveled at his own transformation. In summer 1863, Wills confessed, “I never thought I would, but I am getting strongly in favor of arming them [blacks], and am becoming so blind that I can’t see why they will not make soldiers. How queer. A year ago last January I didn’t like to hear anything of emancipation. Last fall accepted confiscation of rebel’s negroes quietly. In January took to emancipation readily, and now believe in arming the negroes.”
(From Liberty is Slow Fruit By Louis P. Masur
http://theamericanscholar.org/liberty-is-a-slow-fruit/?utm_source=email )
For Abraham Lincoln, and soldiers like Wills, as well as the majority of the citizens of the United States, it took war to change their hearts and minds to the point that they were willing to embrace freedom for all slaves.
Application:
• Will it take another war for us to embrace the freedom of all people from all backgrounds?
• What will it take for us to realize that our Pakistani and Chinese neighbors are made in the image of God?
• That the untouchable Hindu and the prosperous Muslim are both our brothers and sisters—called by God to repentance and life in Christ Jesus.
When will Martin Luther King’s dream be fulfilled “that day when all of God's children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics - will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last!” Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
In the Kingdom of God there is no space for prejudice. We are called by God to love all people. We are to offer the Good News of the love of Jesus to all people, intentionally blind and deaf to color of skin and nuance of language, willfully ignorant of contrasts of color and creed and nation of citizenship.
A true Christian is color blind and does not recognize that the other is from another race, because it just does not matter.
We are to make disciples “of all nations” (all means all and that’s all “all” means).
All human beings are made in the image of God, in fact, in a profound, biological sense, we are all brothers and sisters- we are really twins - 99%+ genetically identical. With all of the differences in shape and size and strength and color of any two men on the planet, they are still the same beneath the skin.
When we get to heaven we will all praise God together. We may as well get used to praising Him together here on earth.
This is the end of the Gospel of Matthew.
The First Commandment and the Last Commandment:
First commandment - “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth” Genesis 1.
Last commandment - “Make Disciples (be fruitful and multiply) of all nations (and fill the earth)”.
The First Adam was given a commandment to create life. The Second Adam has given us the commandment to create eternal life in the hearts of all those around us.
To “make disciples” you have to make people like you.
ILLUSTRATION:
Billy Graham describes an experience he had walking down a street, and a drunk man recognized him, and accosted him, stinking of liquor, claiming “I became a disciple at one of your meetings”. Billy Graham said “he must have been one of my disciples. He certainly wasn’t a disciple of Jesus”.
(I don’t remember the book in which I read this account)
What kind of disciples are we going to make? We need to be Jesus’ disciples, so that we can make disciples.
Are you a disciple of Jesus? If you are not, you cannot obey His Great Commandment.
If you are one of those disciples, Go, Make more Disciples.
