What Should We Do?

How many of you like being told what to do? No one likes being told what to do. We like to make our own plans and do what we want to do/what makes the most sense to us. Have you ever been to the grocery store and had your mind set on a specific flavor of ice cream only to find out that the flavor that you wanted was out of stock? During COVID we’ve experienced this on a regular basis as stores have been out of common things often. If you go to the store for ice cream, is there just 1 option in the freezer section? No - there are dozens and dozens of options! Yet, if you only want 1 selection and they don’t have it, you’re likely upset because your options have been reduced. Your choses have been restricted. Humans don’t like having our choices being restricted, do we? There have been numerous stories in recent months about people rebelling against rules and regulations simply because someone else has tried to tell them what to do. Why do people not like being told what to do?

Psychology calls this response: Psychological reactance. If you’re told to stop doing something, your brain might tell you to do that thing even more. Let’s try this out this morning: Don’t think about an Elephant riding on a unicycle… What did your brain just do? You thought of an elephant riding on a unicycle. Why? Because our brains like to rebel against what we’re told.

What about whenever we’re told to do something? Say your mom tells you to go and clean your room. What is your brain’s first response? To literally do anything else! Say your boss tells you to get something done ASAP, what happens? Your brain goes into overdrive on everything not named that assignment. We’re wired to rebel. This makes following others difficult at times - and sadly this spills into our relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus tells us what we’re supposed to do as Christians. We’re supposed to obey Him. To trust in Him. To follow Him where He leads. Yet, this can be incredibly challenging at times.

Because following Jesus can be challenging, we need to be reminded often of our purpose. Last week we studied that our purpose in life is to glorify God in everything that we do. This week we’re going to look at a familiar text of Scripture in order to remind ourselves of what Jesus wants us to do. He gives us a command. Our natural instinct is to disobey, though. As a result, we must listen to Jesus’ last words and pray that the Holy Spirit would assist us as we seek to obey our Savior. Let’s read the Great Commission this morning out of Matthew 28 as we find this:

Matthew 28:16–20 CSB

16 The eleven disciples traveled to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted. 18 Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 19 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, 20 teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

We Must Make Disciples

This is a popular passage of Scripture and we find in it Jesus’ last words to His disciples before He ascended back to glory. In our world first and last words are important. As a new parent, I’ll always remember that Gabriel’s first word was “dada”! On the same line of thought, we know that last words are important too. If you’ve ever been with a loved one whenever they’ve passed away, you always remember the last thing/s that they say. These are Jesus’ last words. They’re important. The Great Commission is an important text and it’s an active command for all of us today - just as it was a command for Jesus’ followers 2000 years ago!

What does Jesus say? He says that all authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth. What does this mean? We read in the Old Testament book of Daniel about a vision that Daniel has about the coming “Son of Man” and Daniel writes

Daniel 7:14 CSB

14 He was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, so that those of every people, nation, and language should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will not be destroyed.

We love having authority in our lives. We love being in control. We like having the last word, if you will. What we’re reminded of in the Bible, though, is that Jesus is the One with all the authority. Jesus is the One who is in control! Jesus is the Lord of Lords and King of Kings. If you’re not a Christian this morning, I pray that you would begin to understand who Jesus is. He is the only One who can save. He has all the authority. What does He have authority over? Matthew 28:18 tells us that He has authority over everything. We read in Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus has authority over nature - He makes the storms cease. He has authority over diseases - He heals the lame and the leper. He has authority over sin - He forgives sin. He has authority over death - He raises from the dead. He has authority over our lives. Look at what Jesus says in Matthew 16:24-25

Matthew 16:24–25 CSB

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will find it.

If you want to follow Jesus, you have to die. Why? Because Jesus must come first. Hear me, you and I don’t make Jesus Lord - He’s already the Lord of Lords. You and I must submit to His Lordship, repent of our sins, and confess Him as Lord of our lives. Because Jesus has all authority, we are called to obey Him.

Because all authority has been given to Jesus, He commands His followers to go and make disciples. How many of you have ever been on a mission trip? Mission trips are incredible as the Gospel is proclaimed, the love of Christ is on full display, and disciples are made. Whenever we think of mission trips and sharing the Gospel, we often think of people coming forward to “pray the prayer” or something along those lines. Conversion is vital - we are called in Acts 2 to repent and be baptized - but Jesus doesn’t tell us in the Great Commission to go and make converts. He doesn’t tell us to go and have people raise their hand and say some words. He says to go and make disciples. At this point we have to ask what is a disciple?

We know that Jesus had 12 of them. Are they the only disciples out there? No. How many of you have ever job shadowed someone before? You come into work and you watch what they do and, in time, you begin to do what they do. This is a picture of discipleship as someone who is a mature Christian takes a younger Christian and disciples them. What is a disciple? Someone who is growing to be more like someone else. In Christian Discipleship, the goal is that we all grow to be more like Jesus Christ! This also means that regardless of how long you’ve been a Christian, you still have room to grow because no one has arrived at knowing everything.

In Matthew 28:18-20 there are many verbs but there is only 1 command. The command from Jesus is exactly this: Make disciples! Why does Jesus take the time to say this? Why emphasize this action on the part of His followers? Because this is important. There is a fundamental problem facing many churches around the globe and it stems from a lack of discipleship. How many of you are baseball fans or at least know the overall concept of baseball? Your goal as a batter is to get a hit or walk so that you get on base. The next person’s goal is to get you closer to home. Before you know it, you move from first base to second base to third base and eventually you run home and score a run for your team. Think of the Christian life as the bases. You repent of your sins and trust in Jesus as Lord - you get to first base. This is cause for celebration but your work isn’t over, they’ve really just begun! How do you and I keep advancing along the bases? This is where discipleship kicks in. Jesus tells us to abide in Him and to bear fruit in John 15. We have to move from being a convert to being a servant. We have to move from first to second base. We have an active role to play in Kingdom work but second base isn’t the end goal. We have more work to do. Jesus calls for us to be “disciple-making-disciples” - what does this mean? This means that you and I not only are Christians, you and I not only share our testimony and proclaim the Gospel, this means that you and I are devoted to making disciples - helping other people grow in their walk with the Lord. This is what it’s all about in the Christian life!

How can we do this? How can we make disciples? There are thousands and thousands of books about discipleship and disciple-making. One of the best resources I’ve come across contrasted two traditional methods of making disciples: addition and multiplication. Imagine for a moment that you’re a Christian who wants to evangelize other people and your goal is to witness to as many people each day until one of them repents and accepts Christ as Lord. This is hard work and if you faithfully do this there would be 365 new believers after a year of this. Addition is good… Multiplication is better. Let’s say that you take 2 people who are new Christians and you decide that you want to disciple them and help them grow in their understanding of Scripture. You meet with these 2 people on a regular basis and you grow together in the process. At the end of year 1, you’ve made 2 disciples. It looks as though addition is the way to go because it’s 365 converts to 2 disciples. Yet, you made disciples who are going to go out and make more disciples. Suppose that the 2 people you’ve discipled go out and take 2 other people to disciple. Then the people they disciple go out and disciple 2 others and so on and so forth. Before you know it, you’ve reached a lot of people. But is multiplication better than addition?

Let’s look at the graph above to see how this changes over time. Let’s carry these numbers out to 33 years. The evangelist who has 1 new convert every day would have 12,045 new believers. This is good news to celebrate! Yet, the disciple-making-disciple would end up with over 8.5 billion disciples. How can this happen? Exponential growth. 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, 8 -16, 16-32, 32-64, 64-128, 128-256, 256-512, 512-1024, 1024-2048, 2048-4096, 4096-8192, 8192-16384. You get the idea! The population of the earth as of November 16th was 7.9 billion people. If we could all adopt this disciple-making approach, we could reach the entire globe by 2054.

Friends, it’s all about making disciples who go out and make more disciples. This is what we should do as Christians! This is also incredibly hard work. This requires us to put aside our egos, to try something new at times, and to use the gifts that Christ has given to us. We can’t just make converts - we must make disciples. This is Jesus’ command!

We Must Share the Gospel

As we think about the process of making disciples, we have to remember how to start. In Matthew’s Gospel, we see that Jesus’ command has always been to impact people with the good news. He calls His followers in Matthew 4 and says

Matthew 4:19 ESV

19 And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Why are we fishers of men? Because people matter to Jesus. Jesus’ call in Matthew 28 isn’t easy - it’s a costly command - yet, this has always been His plan. Jesus wants each one of us to go and share the truth of the Gospel. Did you know that of the 7.9 billion people in the world, 3.3 billion people are considered “unreached” with the Gospel? We know that there are lots of people who reject the Gospel, but over 40% of the world hasn’t even heard of the Gospel message of Jesus Christ! And there are people in the Bible Belt who fall into this category of never hearing the Gospel truth. Church, this ought to break our heart and stir us to fulfill the other verbs in the Great Commission. We see that we must make disciples, yes, but we also see that we are called to “Go, baptize, and teach.” We are called to go, proclaim the Gospel, and call people to respond.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs His disciples to be salt and light. How many of you like going out to eat at a Mexican restaurant? Lindsey and I have been to Aranda’s 5 times in the few days that we’ve been here in Salem - we love Mexican food! Whenever you go to a Mexican place they often bring out chips and salsa. Now, if you’re anything like Lindsey, you immediately get out the salt shaker and pour about a third of it onto the chips. Why do you do this? Because the chips need a little spark/taste. What good would it be for you to have salt and eat stale, tasteless chips? That wouldn’t be very smart. Therefore, you put some salt on them. Likewise, Jesus calls for us to be light in a dark world. Have you ever flown on an airplane overnight? One of the coolest things that you can experience is to watch the sunset from an airplane and to be surrounded by darkness. A couple years ago I had the opportunity to go to Puebla Mexico on a mission trip and Puebla is about an hour southeast of Mexico City. We were flying over Mexico in the pitch black when suddenly you began to see some lights a long ways ahead. Fast forward 15-20 minutes and those lights filled the entire window of the plane and you could suddenly see relatively clearly. We were above a city of over 20 million inhabitants! We think that St. Louis and Kansas City are big cities, Mexico City is a big city! The light from this city pierced through the darkness from hundreds of miles away.

Why does Jesus call us to be salt and light? Because our world is dark and tasteless. How can we be the light that we are called to be? There are 4 specific ways that we can be the light: We can give, go, pray, and train people who go. As Southern Baptists we have an offering at Christmas called the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. This offering is remarkable because every penny given goes directly to help our missionaries overseas share the Gospel! You can be salt and light by giving financially to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering or by giving to our church as a portion of your tithes and offerings go to the Southern Baptist Cooperative Program and a portion of those funds to go help missionaries share the Gospel. As you read the Great Commission, though, you also see Jesus say that we are called to “go” - this means to physically go somewhere and share the Gospel. Where are we supposed to go and share the Gospel? Acts 1:8 gives us a helpful breakdown

Acts 1:8 CSB

8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Ask yourself, when was the last time that you shared the Gospel with someone else? When was the last time that you told someone else about your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord? Contrary to what some might think, you don’t have to be 18 years old to share the Gospel. You don’t have to be a Sunday school teacher to share the Gospel. All Christians are called to be witnesses for Jesus and follow through with this command. Whenever I was in Junior High, I went on a mission trip through an organization called Leaders in Training and there were 5th-8th graders leading, not assisting, Vacation Bible Schools throughout Dallas, Texas and they were sharing the Gospel with complete strangers. Do you know what happened that week? Hundreds of kids in Dallas, Texas came to know Christ as Lord. How’d that happen? The power of the Holy Spirit, yes, but 5th-8th graders were obedient to the Great Commission and took seriously the call to share the good news of Jesus. Children, understand that you are called by God to proclaim the name of Jesus! Don’t wait until you’re 16, 17 or 18! Start doing that today.

We start sharing the Gospel in our homes, we continue to share the Gospel in our places of employment and in our region, and we also share the Gospel throughout the world. You fulfill the Great Commission by giving, going, and also through praying for missionaries on the front lines. We are so blessed in the United States. We are so blessed, in fact, that many international missionaries who are being persecuted today don’t pray for their persecution to cease, rather, they pray that we in the United States would experience some persecution to wake us up. Friends, complacency and comfort run hand in hand. When the early church in Acts was exploding like wildfire, do you think they were sitting back and enjoying their freedom to worship and gather? No! They were being thrown into prison and even killed. Yet, as the church father Tertullian declared, “The seed of the church is the blood of martyrs.” What does this mean? It means that you can persecute Christians but you can’t stop the growth of the Church! As a result, we pray for God’s will to be done and for His kingdom to be advanced in our community and around the world.

Finally, we can train others who go. As we make disciples and share the Gospel, our prayer should be that the nations are reached just as our community is reached.

We Must Remember Our Purpose

As we studied last week, our purpose is to glorify God in everything that we do. As we go about fulfilling the Great Commission, we have to remember that it’s not about us. It’s not about numbers. It’s not about our personal kingdom. It’s all about His Kingdom and His glory. We are responsible to go and share the Gospel and make disciples. We are responsible to teach people the truth of Scripture. We are also called by Jesus to “baptize” those who respond in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If our purpose is to glorify Jesus, do you think that we glorify Jesus whenever we obey Him? Yes! There are differing views regarding baptism. Some say that baptism doesn’t matter at all and others say that you can’t be a Christian until you’re baptized. As Baptists, we have strong feelings about baptism. While baptism doesn’t save us - we know that being baptized does matter! Baptism shows those around us that we belong to Jesus Christ and identify with Him! In many countries where Christians are persecuted, being baptized is essentially a death sentence because you are publicly declaring your allegiance to Jesus Christ.

To some, the cost of following Jesus Christ is too high. Following Jesus Christ will cost you something. It might cost you a friendship, a relationship, an activity, or something else - but, friend, following Jesus Christ is always worth it. Your purpose is to bring Him glory. Your purpose is to follow Him. Your purpose is to share the Gospel and make disciples of all nations!

Are you willing to put it all on the line for Jesus Christ? Are you willing to fulfill your responsibilities and carry out the Great Commission?

Conclusion

If you’re ready to step up to the plate and fulfill these responsibilities, be comforted and challenged with these 3 things:

You will be persecuted. The enemy can’t snatch you from Jesus, but he sure can try to hinder your witness. If you’re sold out for Jesus, expect him to attack you and try to stop you from sharing the Gospel.

Jesus wants your all. Look in these verses, we see that the word all appears throughout the text. Jesus has all authority. We are to makes disciples of all nations. We teach people to obey all things that Jesus has commanded. We live in a world where people are content with doing the bare minimum to get by. A world where we very rarely give our all. Jesus doesn’t request our all… He demands it. He’s not interested in half-hearted followers. He demands disciples who make disciples. Jesus wants your all. He wants you to give Him your life as a blank check and let Him fill it out as He see’s fit.

You are not alone. Some people say that Christianity is an outdated message and that it is irrelevant to the 21st century. Jesus shares in verse 20 that we are to teach what He has commanded and there’s not an expiration date attached to this text. Jesus doesn’t say the Gospel is only to be taught to people 30 or older. He doesn’t say it’s to be taught to those born before the 21st century. No. The message of the Gospel will never change! The message that Jesus Christ saves sinners will be our anthem until Christ returns! The methods we use to share that message can and will change, but the message must not change. Why can we not change the message? Because Jesus promises to be with us. We have no reason to fear or water down our message. Jesus promises to be with us always. Friend, wherever you are today, if you have repented of your sins and trusted in Christ as Lord of all, know that you are not alone. He is with you on the mountain top and He is with you in the valley low. He has saved you and He wants you to step up and share the Gospel with those around you. He wants you to make disciples. He wants you and I to be His witnesses to the end of the earth.

We have a purpose in life. We are to worship Jesus. To live a life that brings Him glory. We obey His commands as we make disciples and share the Gospel message. If you’re here this morning and you’ve never understood your purpose or you’ve never heard about what Jesus Christ has done for sinners like you and I, I’d love to talk with you and encourage you to repent of your sins and to trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior. There’s no one too far gone for the grace of Jesus Christ - let’s pray!

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