The Great Commission? Maybe Later....

Go into the entire world and preach the Gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. You see, it was necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. You will be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

How do we view those words? Are they advice for Christian living? Are they merely suggestions of something to do if we get bored in life? Are they only for those who struggle to fit into society? Are they a last resort for those who can’t seem to do anything else? Should those words be accepted and believed at all?

Unfortunately, many Christians really don’t believe those words. Think about your own life? Do you really believe those words? Do they motivate you? Are they the driving force for how you live your life? Do we in the American church as some of the wealthiest Christians in the world really believe those words? Those are the words of Christ and they are found in Mark 16:14-18, Luke 24:44-49, Matthew 28:16-20, and Acts 1:4-8.

The main verb in the Great Commission is “Make Disciples”. Everything else flows from that command. Christians are to make disciples of Jesus Christ. What does that mean? It means we seek to see people, not only come to believe in Christ, but seek to see people continue to grow and mature in Christ. It means we focus less on programs and activities and more on discipleship. This is how Jesus ministered. He took twelve men and had them walk with Him for over three years. He both formally and informally taught them. Perhaps Paul best summed up making disciples when he said in I Corinthians 11:1, “Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ.”

We need to focus on making disciples because it is a command of Christ and therefore should be one of the driving purposes of our lives. Unfortunately, we often settle for less. We take the Great Commission and reinterpret it to mean “Go into all the world and get conversions. Then turn them into church members.” We in the American church want results. Therefore, we want conversions. Making disciples is too slow and time consuming. We’d rather have big evangelical events and be able to claim 300 people came to Christ, regardless of whether or not they really did. It has been said that there have been more recorded “conversions” recently in one island nation than there are people that live there! Perhaps we need to celebrate disciples instead of conversions.

We need to make disciples. Yet, once we get conversions, our focus then becomes making them church members. We want to get them plugged in. We want them to be in the Adult Sunday school class, serve as an usher, a parking attendant, etc. We fill their schedules full of church programs. But, we fail to disciple them. We fail to say, “Come walk with me and imitate me as I also imitate Christ.” Is it hard, time consuming, and slow? Absolutely. Is it biblical and effective? Absolutely.

Go into the entire world and preach the Gospel. We usually take the command of Jesus for missions and separate it into two categories: Going and Sending. There are some who are called to go and some who are called to stay. Praise the Lord for those who truly go and those who truly send. But, I would submit that more of us should go then do and if we aren’t going, we must be sending. John Piper has stated that if one isn’t going or sending, they are disobedient. I believe he is correct. More of us must take the command of Christ and go. Those of us who stay must take sending seriously.

I would submit that this is severely lacking in the American church. As I reflect back on my own life, it has been severely lacking in my own life. Sure, we’ll send a missionary a hundred dollars if they come to our church and give a presentation. We’ll tithe a small portion of our money to the church and hope it goes to missions. But most of us do not truly sacrifice to send. Think about the sacrifice one makes to leave all that is comfortable here in America and go to another culture to make disciples! They make drastic sacrifices to do so. It should follow by necessity that we would make drastic sacrifices to send them. But no, we focus on improving our standard of living, our material wealth, and our happiness. We have lost the perspective the early church had as they labored and sacrificed, even to the point of death, not just for making disciples in their own community, but in making disciples around the world.

The question we must ask is this: Do we really long for the Kingdom of God? This is the driving force behind the Great Commission command. Jesus taught us to pray, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” We partly experience God’s Kingdom in the here and now, but when Jesus Christ returns and Satan is defeated, we will fully experience God’s Kingdom. We read in Revelation (5:9-10; 7:9-17; 13:7; 14:6; 21:12) that God’s Kingdom will be full of people from tribes and nations from all over the world. God’s Kingdom will not fully come until all of these people hear the Gospel. Matthew 24:14 states, “And this Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” (See also II Peter 3.) If we long for the Kingdom of God, we will be active in missions. We must pray for God’s Kingdom to come and we must labor for the Kingdom of God. Seeing the Kingdom of God come must be what drives us to be actively involved in the Great Commission.

May we be obedient in fulfilling the Great Commission and honestly examine our own lives to accurately determine if we are being faithful in making disciples, both here and abroad!

“When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever” –John Piper