Matthew 28:16-20 Go and Make Disciples

 

Gospel means ‘Good News.” It’s the beginning of a new church year and our ministries are starting up again. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sending out the personal faith plans for you to pray over as you ask God where he’s leading you to serve or grow. This makes it a good time to go back to the basics of who we are, asking the questions, “Why has God placed us here, who is God calling us to be?”

Matthew ends his story of Jesus with Jesus returning to heaven after giving his followers this last command, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” All authority has been given to Jesus because on the cross he defeated the two great enemies of sin and death, now he’s returning to heaven and he’s putting his work, his plan for eternity into our hands, “go and make disciples of all nations.” Right away we hear the echoes from Abraham and God’s promise, “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” We often connect this blessing to Jesus’ death on the cross, but I’ve always believed the blessing starts to happen right here in our day  to day lives, making the good news real; the command to go make disciples, to bring the Gospel news to the world and invite others to believe in Jesus, be baptized, and follow Jesus’ commands. These commands are summarized by Jesus, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself.”

Jesus’ command to go and make disciples of all nations flows out of these commands to love God and our neighbour. This really hit me when I was talking with a good friend of mine, I’ll call him Bob. We played ball together in the summer and enjoyed hanging out during the rest of the year too. He didn’t really believe in God, though it was always surprising how often our conversations swung around to talking about Jesus. He couldn’t understand why Jesus was so important to me. He gave me the nickname Deacon on our ball team because I wouldn’t play in tournaments on Sundays. My sister Toni played on our team too and when she died in a car accident, we had a conversation about life and death. Bob said something that hit me hard, “I’m guessing that because I don’t believe in Jesus, that when we die, you’ll see Toni again, but I’m done for?”

That’s when it struck me, if I really cared about Bob, I’ve got to keep investing in him, keep inviting him to follow Jesus, to want nothing more than to walk through life together as brothers in Christ so that we can walk together after death as well. We don’t live in the same city anymore, but he still reaches out once in a while and he still asks about Jesus. Loving our neighbour means wanting to see them accept Jesus and join us in our walk following Jesus. Loving God means that we want everyone created in his image to claim that identity and accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. To do this, we need to share the Gospel with them, the good news of Jesus.

To make disciples, we need to be disciples. To be a disciple of Jesus is more than just believing the right things, it’s much more. Ray Vanderlaan uses a Jewish expression to describe a disciple, “Walking in the dust of the rabbi.” This comes from a common Jewish saying that shows the commitment involved in being a disciple. A student would choose a rabbi to follow and then follow that rabbi everywhere, intently studying everything about the rabbi with the goal of imitating the rabbi in everything, how he talked and what he taught, what he wore and how he wore it, how he eat and what he ate, literally everything, so that when other people watched him, they would say, “We see the Rabbi when we see you.” To imitate the rabbi this deeply, you need to walk so closely behind in order to notice all these things, that you’re covered in the dust kicked up by his sandals. This helps us understand why the Apostle Paul encourages us to imitate him as he imitates Jesus, that’s what disciples do.

The difference with being a disciple of Jesus is that he calls us. Jesus starts the relationship, calling us to follow him, to obey his commands, to be his disciples and we respond. He’s our rabbi, teaching us and modelling life to us. We’re called to walk in the dust of Jesus so that we can learn, see and experience who Jesus is so we can imitate him and go make disciples for Jesus. When Jesus is getting ready to leave, Jesus tells them in John 14:12, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” Jesus sends his Spirit at Pentecost to make its home in us to guide us and remind us of everything Jesus has spoken. We have been given the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus. We’re called to learn it and to live it out in our lives. 1 Peter 3:15 tells us, “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

The reason for the hope we have is Jesus, he’s the good news, the center of the gospel. But the gospel news tells us why life is the way it is and it begins already in creation. God created everything good and very good, creating us in his own image. But humanity chose themselves over God, choosing to sin rather than obey God and now we all have a sinful nature and repeatedly sin against God and others. God is righteous and just and he must carry out the punishment set for sin, namely death. No matter how many good works we do, they can never make up for our sin. Thankfully, God is also merciful and loving and so he provides a substitute to take our punishment in our place. This is Jesus, God’s only beloved son, who is completely human and God, meaning that as a human he can take our punishment and as God he can bear the weight our sin on the cross. Now comes the amazing news, Jesus died for our sin, but he was raised from the dead to show us that he has complexly defeated sin and death, meaning we’ll also be raised from the dead.

Jesus invites us to new life through repentance and conversion, offering forgiveness and the gift of eternal life. We receive these gifts through the Holy Spirit. Our old lives are washed away and we invited to embrace our new lives focused on following Jesus and living for him. The Holy Spirit gives us the ability to do good works to show our gratitude to God and praise him with how we are living our lives. This also gives us reassurance that our faith is real by the fruit it produces. Going back to our passage this morning, we’re equipped to win others over the Jesus, to make disciples.

Getting back to my friend Bob, making a disciple is about showing how Jesus gives me peace even after my sister died. It’s about listening to his questions, learning about his dreams and hopes, along with his fears and disappointments and how Jesus offers a solid foundation for understanding the wrong and evil in the world and points a way forward to creating healthy community. It’s acknowledging that we get hurt by others and the power of forgiveness and how we can experience forgiveness from Jesus for the garbage in our own lives and hearts. Giving an answer for the hope that we have needs to be rooted in regular life and the day to day hopes and struggles we all live with and how Jesus has lived it and shows us the way forward. Our lives shape us so we can share the good news with others, so we can walk with them through their stuff and help them see Jesus’ presence.

We can choose to see the sin and evil around us or we can choose to see how Jesus is transforming us and using us to reveal his kingdom of hope. We can choose to see the sinner or we can choose to see the image of God that the person was created in. We can choose to see the need for punishment, or we can choose to see the power of grace. We can choose to focus on the hurt done to us or we can choose to focus on how Jesus can use that very hurt to make us more grace full. We can choose to see the narrative of the world or the Gospel. I choose to see the Gospel at work all around me. The Gospel helps us see our world through the eyes of Jesus and his sacrifice and this gives us the words and motive to go and make disciples, to fill our community with the hope that comes in becoming a disciple of Jesus, inviting those is our lives to join us in following Jesus.