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And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, 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. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." -Matthew 28:18-20
In our discussion of discipleship last week, we briefly covered what discipleship is from an etymological perspective. In case you were in need of a reminder, I’ll share once more the brief definitions:
A Disciple is a person whose way of thinking is being shaped by and conformed to the pattern of their teacher. Discipleship is the process of imbuing a person with the thought pattern of their teacher.
As per our text here, we can see that Christian Discipleship is the process of teaching people to internalize and adopt the teachings of Jesus, even as our Lord Himself has commissioned us. This commission is, to put it lightly, what we as Christians would call “a big deal.” As such, it’s important to understand what exactly this “big deal” entails, and that is what I’m here to help us do tonight. I’d submit that the biggest three things to take away from this daunting task are as follows:
The why of the Commission
The what of the Commission
The how of the Commission
For the next three weeks, I’ll go through each of these facets. In this post, we will explore why we disciple and what the great commission has to teach us in that regard.
The Why of the Commission
Alright: so why disciple? Well, at the end of the day it really all boils down to the plain and simple fact that Jesus told us to. He has said so, and so we must obey. Any reasoning that seeks to minimize this supremely important aspect of the Great Commission in order to lessen our obligation to respond or give us some easy out is to be treated as suspect and disregarded. While there can be more reasons for us to engage in discipleship, there most certainly cannot be less: the bottom line is obedience.
Moving beyond that and pressing further in, we can see that we are told to disciple the nations because Jesus has all the authority in the cosmos: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore.” We go out to teach people in every remote corner of the world the ways of Jesus because those remote corners belong to Him. See Psalm 2: The Father there says to the Son “Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance, And the ends of the earth as Your possession” (v. 8). The nations are Christ’s by right, and what He is essentially doing by sending us out is fulfilling His claim to those places and taking what is already His.
What’s more, we actually couldn’t go out as messengers of the Gospel unless Jesus was ruling and reigning. If the nations did not currently belong to Christ, we would have nothing to say to them. The fact that Jesus Christ is Lord is central to every engagement with the unbelieving world that the people of God will ever have.
We are charged not only with going and proclaiming the fact that Jesus is king and has all authority (which is, I think, an appropriate way of describing evangelism) but also with helping people to live like everything I just said about Jesus having rule and dominion over all the earth is actually true. If this world is indeed ruled by King Jesus, the implications for our life, doctrine, and worship are huge, and we need help navigating them. This is why, as we discussed last week, we submit ourselves to God’s word and seek to help bring others into submission.
So, in short, we go to the nations because they are already Christ’s; He already has been given them and we are just breaking the news to everyone. Once this news has been broken, the way we live our lives and think our thoughts have to radically change, and that is what discipleship is meant to address.
As you go out this week, applying what you’ve learned, consider the implications of Jesus’ rule and authority in both your walk with the Lord and your efforts to disciple others, whether it’s your children or younger believers that you are looking to build up and exhort. Operate from a framework of teaching them to live like Jesus is king. Next week, we’ll take a bit more time to focus on what that entails as we examine the “what” of the Great Commission.
This post was originally given as a devotion at a Wednesday night prayer meeting at Christ the King Church in Belfast, Maine.
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