We’ve just come through the season of Lent, the season of preparation, preparation largely for Holy Week, with the high point being Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is a process, a journey that the Church of Jesus Christ has gone through for the better part of 2000 years.
I think the point of that preparation is to get us ready to more deeply and more fully appreciate and maybe even in a sense experience the suffering and death, and then the glorious resurrection of Jesus. For many of us, it does just that. Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, does just that.
But now we’re here. One week after the high point. And we can be left with some questions, if we’re the questioning type. Was that it? Is the point of Lent and Holy Week and Good Friday and Easter Sunday all about stirring up in us greater faith? Greater devotion to Christ? Greater love for God?
If that were the sole point, that would be good enough, I think for many of us. It is good to have our faith strengthened.
It is good to let in (gesture) at a heart level the profound and incomparable love that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. It is good to appreciate even more of the details surrounding Jesus’ decision to go to His death, to understand that as much as Jesus did what He did because God loves the whole world, He also did it, He suffered and died and rose triumphantly, for each of us personally.
So emotionally and intellectually, corporately and individually, we can benefit a lot from paying attention to the Passion of Jesus.
But, I still have to ask, is that it? Does God just want us to have greater faith, greater passion for Him, or is there more? Were the gospel accounts of Jesus Passion solely to strengthen my, our, faith, so that we can live our lives in greater confidence of God’s love? Is that God’s bigger purpose?
I think the gospel of John is helpful here. Immediately after his account of the crucifixion and resurrection, without missing a beat, John takes us to the post-resurrection continuation of the story.
We have the discovery of the empty tomb, the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, who mistook Him at first as the gardener, and then we have Jesus’ appearance to the disciples in a house.
Reader:
John 20:19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. 21 Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”
Now there’s more that goes on here, including Thomas’ difficulty accepting the news of Jesus’ resurrection, and his eventual joy at seeing the risen Christ himself and his immediate choice to bow down and worship Him, admittedly another good sermon topic. But for now I’d like us to focus on 10 words that belong to Jesus:
“As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” I want to focus on this, because it is the real answer to the question: “What next?” that quite naturally follows the high point of the Resurrection.
And it’s actually the answer to most any question that might arise for us, including questions we might have about our own personal readiness to live as witness for Jesus and even fitness to obey God in some of the basics, which we can all struggle with at times.
Even more basically, it might be the answer to questions like: ‘Why am I here, really?’
“As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” Jesus said that here, and then, as Matthew recorded in chapter 28 of his gospel, we hear this:
Matthew 28:16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
So after the resurrection, what we don’t hear from Jesus is: “Everything is ok now. If you believe in me, you are saved, and that’s what matters”. We don’t hear Jesus saying: “Your personal wellness is what matters, and it’s why I went to the cross”.
If you listen some TV preachers, you might think this is what Jesus meant. But it’s not. There’s so much more. We don’t hear Jesus saying: ‘Now you are free to pursue the spiritual life’, or ‘you’re free to live without addictions’ or ‘Now you know that you are loved to the maximum’.
Those are all ‘half-way-there’ statements, partial truths that if we make the mistake of taking as the WHOLE truth, we’ll completely miss the point of why Jesus came in the first place, and, frankly, we’ll short-change ourselves on the kind of true joy that Jesus wants to inhabit our lives, personally and collectively.
Jesus said: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”
As a young Christian I was pretty much taken up with a lot of the half-way-there statements I just referred to. I figured I was free to live as the beloved of God, that since Jesus died for my sins, I was free – free to serve Him, free to live for Him. And that was true, of course.
Truth be told, I had never known the kind of joy I felt both when I heard and then responded to the gospel. That didn’t wain over time.
The gospel excited me like nothing else. I had received an odd gift from God…a deep sense of calling to music, before I was at all serious about music. So I decided I would be a Christian musician.
This was all long before I’d met Barbara, the woman who would become my wife. I went to Humber College to study music, particularly jazz, which I felt would equip me to handle most other kinds of music I’d want to play.
But despite being immersed in music, even with a goal of being a Christian musician/singer/songwriter, that wasn’t enough to keep me truly focussed. I started to drift spiritually.
I spent the next year, still working on music at Humber but with less energy and enthusiasm.
Then I happened to read an article entitled “Music or missions” by a Christian musician I had come to appreciate, although he had died a few years earlier. His name was Keith Green. The core challenge was to look at the gospel from God’s perspective.
My perspective was that through the gospel God had saved me, He had rescued me from darkness, He had forgiven all my sins. He wanted others to be saved to, for sure. But if I’m honest it was mostly about me.
God’s perspective, I discovered as I read and reflected on the Bible and particularly on the passages we’ve been looking at today, is that the gospel is the key to real life for everybody.
Before the crucifixion, Jesus had a lot to say. A lot of Jesus’ teachings were conveyed on the Sermon on the Mount.
Barb and I have been looking at those lately and we’ve been impressed again how much love and justice and self-sacrifice and community are so incredibly important to Jesus there.
How Jesus turns the world’s values on their heads and calls the least the greatest and the greatest the least.
But, you know, Jesus had one key concern AFTER His resurrection, after salvation had been won, after Satan’s death grip on humanity had been broken by Jesus paying the price for sin on the cross.
He expressed it through the Great Commission (show Great Commission slide) and He expressed it here: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”
In a nutshell, Jesus wants His current disciples to be disciple-makers.
This is challenging, I know. But Jesus’ mission on earth was ultimately to create the church, to create disciples. And His mission, He said, is now OUR mission. “As the Father sent me, I am sending you”. Do we believe this?
Now there are friends and foes of the Great Commission, and they might surprise you.
Quickly, let’s look at the friends and foes of the Great Commission.
Friend
Personal faith in Jesus. This is critical, of course. Knowing Jesus personally, having a relationship with Jesus where we’re clear that He is Lord, He is God and we are not.
There is something about having a genuine relationship with Jesus that almost organically pushes us toward sharing what we have in Jesus.
There might be all kinds of barriers and fears that can get in the way, but being a disciple is, of course, critical if we’re going to respond to Jesus command to make disciples.
Personal faith in Jesus is the friend of the Great Commission because we come to know the depths of the beauty of living our lives in the light of God’s grace and in His presence, and we simply want to share this highest good.
Foe
Personalized faith in Jesus. This is a problem, especially in western culture, where everything is about the advancement and benefit of the individual instead of what’s for the best for the community. The problem is the notion of ‘me and Jesus’.
I spoke with someone this week, asking them if they’d enjoyed Easter services at their church. They said they don’t like to go because, essentially, they think that most other Christians have a shallow, Easter Bunny idea of what Easter is all about.
Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but this person is convinced that they alone most deeply grasp all that there is to know of Jesus. Scary, but true.
Such viewpoints support an isolationist viewpoint of faith in Jesus. It’s alomost: I don’t want to associate with lesser Christians so I don’t get compromised. Yech.
It’s extremely dangerous, and wildly anti-Biblical. We’re meant to be together as the church, to work out all that we need to work out among our brothers and sisters in Christ.
A ‘personalized’ faith in Jesus is the enemy of the Great Commission because all it can want to share, if it ever did want to share anything, is to pass on a similarly ‘personalized’ or ‘designer’ faith in Jesus.
God save us from being elitist. God save us from any notion that we can live our lives as Christians apart from the body of Christ.
Friend:
A strong theology of the Cross. We need to understand the life of Jesus on the Bible’s terms, accepting what the Word of God says about the teachings of Jesus, the sacrifice of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, the death of Jesus and His glorious resurrection.
A strong theology of the cross simply affirms all of the above. It affirms it as central to the life of the Christian community.
It affirms it as the testimony of why we have hope. It brings honour to Jesus Christ as Lord and honour to God the Father and the Holy Spirit. It’s the friend of the Great Commission because it is the very heart of the Great Commission, it is why there is a Great Commission in the first place.
Foe:
A weak theology of the cross is an enemy to the command to go and make disciples. If we don’t trust in the saving work of Jesus, if we try any blend of good works or merit plus the cross, we dilute the power of the cross and, actually, we can make it null and void in our lives.
If we argue that Jesus didn’t need to die as a sacrifice for our sins, if we think that the blood of Jesus is somehow unimportant, we detract from the cross and develop a dodgy understanding of all that God has done through Jesus.
I’ve seen people do this. It never ends well. May we always affirm and celebrate the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, not just at Easter, but at all times.
Friend:
An accurate theology of hell. I don’t actually talk a lot about hell, or even heaven for that matter. Not sure why that is, except that I know there’s a whole lot that really matters about how we live here and now. An accurate understanding of the reality that all those who don’t receive Jesus in this life face a Christless eternity – that’s really, really important. The Biblical descriptions of hell are vivid and massively unpleasant.
There are two Biblical pictures of the afterlife: eternity with God and eternity without God. It’s like there are only two possible eternal destinations. The one that’s without God is unspeakably horrible.
The one that is with God is unspeakable beautiful. When we understand this, we will have a real, abiding concern for the eternal welfare of everyone we know, and hopefully, for the whole world.
Foe:
A weak theology of hell, one that minimizes it’s unpleasantness or even that suggests that people just disappear after they die – they are annihiliated – is an enemy of the Great Commission.
When we don’t understand what it is we are saved from by Jesus, when we accept parts and reject other parts of Biblical revelation about the reality of heaven and of hell, we remove incentive to share Christ.
I often say that we want people to come to know Jesus because that is the best possible way to live, to live in communion and peace with God and to live knowing His beauty and love.
The other side of the coin is that knowing Jesus is the best possible way to die as well, because, as followers of Jesus we have a profound assurance of salvation – from sin, from ourselves, and from hell itself.
Friend:
Understanding the Holiness of God. This one puts everything else into perspective. The holiness of God explains the need for the Cross.
A sinful humanity, a sinful me, could not live in relationship to a perfect and holy God. Something had to be done in order to enable you and me to dwell in God’s presence.
I think that if we get any part of God’s holiness, we kinda understand this at a gut level.
Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, taking upon Himself the sin of the world is what accomplishes this, removes the barrier that sin creates between us and God.
God’s wrath toward sin is satisfied as Jesus, the perfect, spotless Lamb, takes on every sin upon Himself.
When we understand that God dwells in the beauty of holiness, that His very nature and all His acts, all His thoughts, are holy, then we understand how stunning and beautifu and amazing it is that He wants us to be with Him, and that He has made a way for you and for me and for every human being to come to Him, through Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone.
The Great Commandment, if you notice, is preceeded by a Great Announcement: Jesus said “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”.
It’s from that reality, from that authority, that Jesus speaks to you and to me, and He calls us as His disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations”.
He speaks these words upon His resurrection, after triumphing over the grave. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus expands even further and tells us: Revelation 1:17-18 – 17 “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. 18 I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades”
When Barb asked me what I was speaking about today I mentioned the theme and she said: “Oh. The Seven Deadlies”. And yes, those are also enemies of the Great Commission. Anyone know what those are?
They’re a list of personal sins:
Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride. These are what I call personal impediments to the Great Commission.
Scripture has a lot to say about each of these areas of sin, and everywhere they show up in the Bible, they are identified as a problem, a real problem. They are a problem in and of themselves, for sure.
But the even bigger problem is that when I indulge in these and other sins, when I assert my independence from God as say, or act, like I am my own god, obeying the appetites of my flesh, I am taking myself out of the game, so to speak.
Army servicemen who fear for their lives or are paralysed by fear in any battle in any war, have at times shot themselves in the hand, in the foot, in the arm…you name it…anything to disqualify themselves from the battle.
Indulging in sin…the real problem with not living a disciplined life, the life of a disciple is that it takes us out of the battle. Instead of living for God, obeying the Great Commission, with all the joy and purpose that comes along with that, we live for momentary gratification.
We live to try to meet our own emotional and physical needs, instead of submitting every area of our lives to God, trusting Him to fulfill, in His time those needs.
When we live with regular indulgence in sin, in some ways we’re out for the count. God’s grace is always present, and He still uses us, but we know when it’s not real. We know when we’re faking it.
I don’t know about you, but I want to be part of what God is doing in these days. I want to be engage in loving the world to Jesus, one life at a time. I want my life to count. I want to live 100% of the time 100% for Him.
May we, as His church, simply obey His command to make disciples. May we, if we need to first, may we become true disciples of Jesus, living under His Lordship, under His authority.
And may the Great Commission be fulfilled through us, His people, who are called by His name.
