What’s the mission of Jesus’s church? What’s His mission for each of us? That’s what we are considering on tonight’s Steadfast.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening, and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be here with you tonight as we begin a brand new series entitled Go. We’ve had a lot pulling at us saying it’s important over the last few months, haven’t we? We’ve had so much in the news, so many things that say they are of ultimate importance, that life and death are at stake, that everything depends on certain decisions and choices. It feels like we’re being pulled in a million different directions.
But when Jesus was getting ready to depart from his disciples, he didn’t give them a million different things to do. He gave them just a few simple instructions on what they were to go and do, and those instructions are still there for us today. And so that’s why I’m excited about this series. We feel all these different ways that life is pulling us to focus on this or that, feeling like we’re tossed to and fro. And we can come back to this and be reminded in Matthew chapter 28 of what God has said is our purpose, is our mission. We can be rooted in that.
So let’s go ahead and come before our God in prayer, and then we’ll dig right in. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your love. Thank you for caring enough about us that you haven’t left us here to figure out what we’re supposed to do, but rather you’ve guided us. You guide us every day with your Spirit, and you guide us with your word. As we turn now to Matthew 28, and we think of what our Savior has told us to do, Lord, would you apply that truth to our hearts and help us to see what you’ve called your church to be, and not just the organization, but each and every one of us as those whom you call. We pray in the precious name of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.
So we’re going to go back 2,000 years, go all the way back to the Great Commission as Jesus prepares to ascend into heaven. But before we do that, I want us to go back just about 150 or so years to the founding of the YMCA. Now if I say the YMCA or the Y, I think most of us think of essentially a community gymnasium and swimming pool, or maybe we think of something a little more musical. It’s great to stay at the YMCA, right? But what we don’t necessarily think of, I think for most of us at least, is its original mission. It was founded as a Christian missionary organization whose purpose was to help young men get off the streets and have a safe place to stay where, yes, they’d have opportunities to play athletics, to have a safe place to sleep at night, but more importantly, that in the midst of all that, they would have Bible studies and prayer groups with the focus that the organization would be a light that would help them to focus on Jesus, to focus on the gospel.
It was originally founded in England, and then a missionary who was traveling across the globe had been sailing and seen some of the dangers of being a sailor, not just the dangers on sea, but the dangers when you landed, that the cities that you’d arrive at would beckon the sailors to do all sorts of things that were sinful and wrong. He founded the first YMCA in the United States specifically to provide a safe haven, a place where people would go, where young men could go, and hear about Jesus and his love. And through that, the hope was society would be transformed.
But what’s happened over the last 150 years, that aspect of how they wanted to attract young men into the facility with gymnasiums and so on, became instead the whole purpose of the organization. If you go to, for example, the national YMCA website, you have to really dig to find anything that even seems to reference the idea of being a Christian organization, of seeking to proclaim the gospel. I bring that up not to criticize the YMCA, and it still provides value in our communities, but to speak to what happens in all of our lives that we often set out to go and proclaim the gospel, to be faithful to Jesus, and we see a means to do it. And the next thing you know, we’re so focused on that means, we’ve forgotten why we’re doing it.
I think that’s why Jesus leaves his disciples with these words, because they were going to face the same thing. It says in Matthew chapter 28, verses 18 to 20, that 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.”
In some sense, this is what we might think of as Jesus’s equivalent of a speech at a commencement ceremony. He’s giving the words, the parting words, as the disciples graduate from having served under him as their teacher, and now they’re going to go out and they’re going to proclaim who it is that they follow. But when we think of commencement speeches, they’re often a bunch of vague platitudes, things that sound really good, things that will make nice little quotes nowadays on social media. But when you actually would ask someone who is graduating now, what are you going to do based on what you heard at the commencement address, most people would probably struggle to come up with anything.
Jesus’s instructions, though, are nothing like that. Jesus says very clearly, here’s what you’re supposed to do. Here’s the centerpiece of what I’m leaving you to do. I haven’t just made you disciples so you can carry a disciple card and say, “Hey, I’m one of Jesus’s disciples.” I’ve made you disciples, so you can go and make more disciples, more people who will know who I am, will know my love for them, will know what I’ve done to take on the sin of the world, so that the kingdom of God will expand. That’s why I’ve made you disciples. And not just for a little segment of people, but everyone, everywhere.
And that’s what we see. Let’s take a look just at one part of that passage we just read, verse 19, the very beginning of it. Notice what Jesus says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” The Christian’s job and its root is to see that more people know Jesus. God is restoring this world, restoring all of creation, and he has called us to be his instruments that more people would enjoy that restoration. More people would know him. More people would get to dwell in his presence. And that’s for all nations.
God’s kingdom isn’t just our church. God’s kingdom isn’t our nation. God’s kingdom isn’t anything less than the entire universe. Wherever there will be people that can hear his gospel, that’s where God’s kingdom goes. God’s kingdom goes to the International Space Station, and God’s kingdom goes to the most remote parts of the most remote lands on our globe. Someday if we arrive at Mars, God’s kingdom will go there. God’s kingdom goes everywhere. And anytime we start to box it in and focus on some little segment of that, we’re missing out on the breadth of God’s kingdom.
That was the problem that Israel struggled with for most of its existence, and Jesus is very clear here, I believe, to make sure that the disciples would not fall into the same trap. Way back in Genesis chapter 12, verse 3, God said this to Abraham. He said, “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Abraham’s told that God is going to take his descendants, and he’s going to build a nation, and that nation isn’t just for themselves, and it isn’t just for their immediate neighbors. They’re going to be this little bitty spot on the map, but they’re going to bless the entire world.
And yet, time after time during the history of Israel, they forgot that and became focused on themselves, focused on the little political intrigues of their immediate surrounding region, and forgot that they were there to bless the world. We do the same thing, and Jesus here, as he sends out his disciples, saying that they’re going to go and proclaim and make disciples in all nations, is giving us that instruction that that we wouldn’t do that. That whatever boundaries we put on God’s kingdom, we’d realize they’re bigger. Any place that we can go, the gospel should go, so that more people would know Jesus.
What’s the first sign of the church at work when we’re doing that? We’re going into our communities, into our nation, into our world, and we’re seeing people who don’t already know Jesus come to know him. In other words, we’re baptizing people, and that’s what we see as Jesus goes on in verse 19. He tells them that they should not only just make disciples, but they should be baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
And this tells us two things. And the first one, before we think about what we do for others, is a good opportunity to think about ourselves. Because this call for baptism is a call for everyone who claims the name of Jesus to commit. It’s entering into Jesus’s authority. It’s not just simply some water that’s a symbol. It symbolizes so much, but it’s more than that. It’s a commitment to be in covenant relationship, to be under Jesus’s authority, to proclaim Jesus not just in some vague language, but as our King, the one whom we serve.
You see, the disciples knew about baptism. There were baptisms in Judaism for converts that they could repent of their sin and be baptized. We know this very well from John the Baptist, who was calling people to come down to the river Jordan and be baptized to renounce their sin and turn towards God. But Jesus doesn’t say go and simply have people repent and be baptized in that sense. He says something more. It’s critical that he says, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The way that’s phrased is a portrayal of authority, that the Christian life is not merely marked with some kind of repentance from past sin and then going on and trying to live in our own little bubble faithfully, but rather from going from sin to an allegiance, to a commitment beyond all else, to Jesus as Lord.
All of us are going to struggle with this at times, where we find other things that want to have our allegiance and other things that we want to give our allegiance to. But the first thing that Jesus says about being a disciple here is that the disciples are going to be baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Just name there, referencing the idea that there is only one God, in allegiance to God, so that before we go any further, what we know is that we have committed to living in God’s kingdom, to serving the one true King above all else.
Where are we failing in that? Do we live as those whose primary allegiance is to Jesus, or do we live as those whose primary allegiances are torn by all the different cares and concerns of the world? Well, I think the answer that we will find is oftentimes we’re going to go back and forth at different times and based on what we’re fearful about or focused on at the moment.
But one way I think we can check our own hearts in this is to ask ourselves, how do we determine if someone else is a believer? And if we say, well, if that person’s a good person, clearly our allegiance is to a certain set of laws. If we say, well, clearly someone is a believer if they act a certain way, or do certain things, or speak a certain way, or have certain political allegiances, or this or that or the other thing, we can group a whole bunch of different things. And probably all of us hear these sorts of things.
If the answer is anything other than they proclaim that Jesus is Lord and follow him as their King, then we’re probably in our own hearts at this moment struggling with our allegiances. Because our allegiances are saying there’s something more important, or at least as equally as important, as proclaiming that Jesus is Lord. But what makes a disciple?
A disciple is someone who follows Jesus. And so the starting point as we think about making more disciples is simply to ask, am I in that place right now? Am I a disciple of Jesus? Am I committed and aligned with him? And if you’ve never been, this is a great time to do so. Simply come to him in prayer, and give your allegiance to him.
And for all of us who are, it’s a good chance to simply ask, where have I drifted from that? Where am I, like the example of the YMCA I talked about, moving away from it? Moving away from that allegiance? Because here, listen to what Paul says in Romans 10, 9, reflecting on what makes a Christian. He says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” That’s where we’re all called to come back to time and again, to focus on that gospel truth, that if we are confessing Jesus as our Lord and Savior, then we’re one of his disciples.
And we may be doing a better job of that at times, or a worse job, but that’s what matters. That’s the starting point. If we have that right, then everything else will flow from that. If we have that wrong, then everything else is going to come crashing down.
I saw a statement over the weekend from a major denomination. I won’t mention which one, but it was talking about healing our nation and bringing people together, and it said this about the mission of the church. It said, “Our mission is to love all, welcome all, and seek justice for all.” There’s some good things about what they’re saying there, but notably, as they summed up the mission of the church, the one thing they didn’t say is that we should, A, be disciples of Jesus, and seek to see everyone else become disciples of Jesus.
These vague ideas of loving each other, and welcoming each other, and seeking justice, these are good things, but if we don’t ground it in the idea that Jesus is king, and that all of us need to be aligned to him as king, then what does it really mean? And more importantly, how will it ever last if we don’t have the one who is loving, the one who is just, the one who welcomes us as our king, and we’re not seeking others to come into that kingdom and experience that love, and we’re simply trying to create a human love and a human sense of justice? It’s going to disappoint, and it’s probably going to outright fail, even in the short term. It’s missing the critical part.
You see, the mission of the church is to see people come to believe, and that’s the second thing we learn from this reference to baptism. If we’re called to have allegiance to Jesus, and that’s the starting point, well, what else does baptism tell us? As I mentioned, it’s that we’re going to proclaim Jesus to others, that our call is one of evangelism, and that’s the purpose of the church, to proclaim God’s kingdom, to follow him in helping others come into that kingdom. That’s why he has us here, is to be his instruments to communicate that to the world.
Paul goes on in Romans chapter 10 and says this in verse 14, “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” In other words, we can talk about welcoming people and loving people, but if people haven’t heard who Jesus really is, if they aren’t being given every opportunity to come into allegiance to him, to be baptized, to become actual disciples, then how are they ever going to actually participate in God’s kingdom? The answer is, they’re not going to.
Now, God can work in miraculous ways. We hear examples on the mission field of God working through dreams and all kinds of other amazing circumstances, but the simple truth is this, that in the normal, ordinary course of God’s work, he uses us communicating his truth, his love, his good news. In other words, evangelizing that people would know him.
And if we ever sum up the mission of the church, and that’s not smack dab in the middle of it, that we would follow Jesus and help others to follow Jesus, then we’re not summing up the mission of the church. We’re summing up a nice social organization. But that’s not what we’re called to be. Justice and love, they’ll come, but they come because of Jesus, never in spite of Jesus, and never without Jesus.
When we talk about trying to achieve those things on this earth without bringing people into the kingdom of God that is restoring this earth, what are we doing? We’re playing in that old cliche of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. That is a bleh kind of thing, right? It’s awful because what’s that picture really getting to the point of? If the ship is sinking and this world, we don’t have to look very hard to feel like it’s sinking, to feel like things are broken. If all we’re doing is moving the deck chairs as the ship’s going down, we’re going to drown. The others are going to drown, and that’s not what we’re called to do.
We’re called to help people into the kingdom, the ship that isn’t sinking.
And to do that, to focus on what Jesus tells his disciples to do, to go and make disciples and to baptize them, to see people actually committing to Jesus for the first time, so that God’s kingdom isn’t merely trying to grab some people from one church and move them over to another church. It’s not simply taking some people who are sad and broken-hearted and providing them comfort. Great thing. But seeing them go to the only place to be in the presence of the only one who will truly give them comfort, will truly give us comfort.
Now, I’m probably not saying anything that anyone watching tonight has never heard before. So why even talk about it? Well, it’s because of that example I mentioned at the beginning, where we drift from it. And I think that that denomination I mentioned, that issue, that statement, is a perfect picture of that, where it’s gone from focusing on proclaiming who Jesus is to trying to do all these things that sound worthy, but minus that emphasis on seeing people actually go from not knowing Jesus to knowing Jesus.
And we do that, we do the same thing time and again, and it often seems very noble in the moment. We can say we’re doing lots of noble things, and yet realize that we’re not. I’ve seen so many churches over the years try to formulate mission statements, and maybe you’ve had a great experience with mission statements and writing them, but something that bothers me with mission statements is so often, as we try to make all this lofty language, it ends up being terribly vague. And either we’re so focused on trying to give ourselves some kind of distinctive, some kind of edge, that it ends up missing out on what we’re simply called to do, to proclaim the gospel and to see people become disciples.
Or on the other hand, it goes off in the other direction. It’s so general, it doesn’t seem to do anything either. And we’ve spent a ton of time writing a mission statement, and you know what we haven’t done? We’ve not spent time actually doing the mission that Jesus has given us.
In our lives, have we written a mission statement? Have we come up with things that we’re headed towards, that we’re doing, that sound really impressive, but we’re not actually forming as disciples of Jesus and helping others become disciples of Jesus? I don’t say that to criticize anyone, because I’m guilty of that too. There are so many times I get wrapped up in something that I think is really important, and I realize afterwards, well, what was the reason I felt that was so important? Or I’ve wasted too much time on this or that.
Simply to say, we all need to come back to what Jesus commissions the church to do, what he told the disciples. Then we need to go do it.
We need to ask ourselves the question, how do I see my role in the expansion of God’s kingdom? And if the things I’m doing right now, I think about that question, and I can’t insert any kind of answer into that question, it doesn’t mean everything that I’m doing is wrong. It means that maybe I just need to refine it and think about how it fits into that mission of seeing God’s kingdom proclaimed and expanded. But perhaps it also is a time to correct and say, wait a second, maybe what I’m doing isn’t what God’s called me to do.
You see, the kingdom of God isn’t about circling the wagons and having our nice little kingdom. The kingdom of God is about breaching the walls of sin in the world that turn people away from God and using all the resources, all the gifts that he’s given each and every one of us to do that, that when God restores everything and there’s that great banquet in his presence someday, we’ll look around and rejoice because so many more people are there than we ever imagined.
One of the critical points that Satan loves to undermine us on with this is to say, well, that sounds really good, but that’s for other people. All I, all you can do, all I can do is just this little thing. And it really is basically just shuffling those deck chairs, but we might as well just keep shuffling them because there’s nothing I can do to expand God’s kingdom.
But Jesus doesn’t send some of his people to go do ministry. Jesus sends every person to go do his work. And you may not be called to a foreign land. I may not be called to a foreign land. Neither of us may be called to some really exotic, exciting-sounding ministry. But when we look at our own community, when we look at our own workplaces, when we look at our friends and family, when we look at every place that God places us, the question we should have is, how do I see my role in the expansion of God’s kingdom specifically in those contexts?
Because those are the ones that God has given us. For some of us, that might be going off someplace far away. But for most of us, it’s simply going to be being intentional, making sure that instead of writing vague mission statements, or none at all, that we’re on mission, that we’re recognizing that Jesus has sent you and has sent me. And whether we’re starting that journey and the first step is to simply find that allegiance to begin with, to be baptized, to follow Jesus, or this is a moment to correct course where we failed to be focused on what the mission is.
Would that be our prayer tonight? That Jesus would chip away at all the things that are misdirecting us from his mission. And instead, as we look at these words, that we’d understand specifically how God has given them for us to carry. Would you join me in prayer?
Lord, we thank you for your mission that you enable us to be a part of. Lord, whether we’re coming before you for the very first time tonight, and we need to start with that first point of simply having our own allegiance be to you. Or we’ve come to you time and again, and yet we realize as we ask this question of what’s my own mission? Where am I acting to expand your kingdom? We realize the answer is we’ve gotten off track. We’re doing maybe some really great things, but we’re not focused any longer on expanding your kingdom. Lord, would you pull us back? Would you equip us in all those places where we fall short? And then in the places where we are expanding your kingdom, where we are doing the work that you’ve called us to do, would you encourage us? Would you strengthen us to stand firm? Would you help us to see the opportunities you’ve given us? And in all these things, Lord, would you help us to do it to your glory and to yours alone? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, I hope that you’ll join us next week as we continue this series and we think about how we go from this first point of proclaiming the gospel and having people come to faith to that next critical point, which is that we don’t just see conversions, but we see true discipleship. We see people go from knowing who Jesus is and wanting to follow him to learning fully what that looks like.
One of the ways we do that is through Bible studies, and we have our Men’s Bible Study. I’d invite you to shoot me an email or leave a comment in the comments below the video if you’d like to find out how to get involved in that on Thursday nights. There are other opportunities. Certainly one of them is to be praying for each other. I’d love to be praying for you, and you can also shoot me an email and ask for prayer if there’s different ways you’re trying to discern what God’s doing in your own life. I’d love to pray for you.
And you can help us simply by being involved on Monday nights and spreading the word about Steadfast so that more people would hear the gospel and hear about what Jesus is guiding us to know through his word. I thank you for joining me tonight. I’ll look forward to seeing you next week. I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week.