Pastor Tim wraps up our series Go looking at the crucial promise of the Great Commission: Jesus goes with us.
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.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I’m so glad to be with you on this Monday before Thanksgiving as we wrap up our series Go. We’ve been thinking over the last three weeks about the Great Commission, what Jesus left his disciples with, what he told them to go and do. But it’s easy to tell someone to do something. It’s entirely different to enable them to do something, to give them the ability to do it. And as we wrap up the series tonight, we’re going to think about how Jesus did that for the disciples and how he does it for us. So let’s go ahead and come before our God in prayer, and then we will jump right in. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for being with us, even when things feel uncertain. Even when we think about what you’ve called us to do and we don’t know how to do it, we feel like we fall short. We feel like we don’t measure up. We feel like we can’t overcome circumstances. Lord, we know that you don’t simply tell us to go, but you go with us. Lord, would you help us to be reminded of that tonight? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Preparing for tonight’s message, I was thinking back to a time my family had to travel out of state for a funeral a number of years ago, and it happened to be on a holiday weekend. As we were coming back from that funeral, we left midday, right after the funeral; we had to get back for some other obligations, and we had to get back in the middle of holiday traffic.
More complicated than that, though, there was also a bunch of road construction, so we’d heard as we were preparing to leave that the way that we would obviously go to get back to town, to our hometown, wasn’t going to work. We needed to go a different route, and me being the supreme navigator that I am, I took us on a ride that went through all kinds of country roads, and little gravel roads, and roads that you actually had to ford rivers, and I’m really not exaggerating at all here. I had us out in the middle of nowhere, but we were trying to avoid this impossible traffic. So here we were, out in the middle of nowhere, in places we’d never been before, and it was starting to get dark, it was starting to get stormy, we hadn’t had dinner, and it just felt like we were really uncertain of our situation. It felt a little like we were alone, and you don’t necessarily want to be alone in the middle of nowhere, in a place you’ve never been before when you’re trying to get home.
And then, as we’re starving and we’re driving through these fields, we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, we saw the golden arches of McDonald’s, and it was so amazing in that moment because suddenly there was something reliable and stable that we could count on. I took this picture that you can see here of that moment when those arches came into view. It was a glorious thing because we knew that we could eat. Incidentally, the McDonald’s was right by the highway, so we knew we could get home too. It was a wonderful thing.
Now, maybe you love McDonald’s, maybe you don’t love McDonald’s so much, but in a moment like that, one of the things that makes it so wonderful is you know exactly what it is. We had driven by, I think, a place or two that looked like it was collapsing, that was some little local diner, and I like little hole-in-the-wall diners, but it went way past that. It just didn’t look safe to eat at, but you pull into McDonald’s, and you know that the burgers are going to be McDonald’s burgers. They’re going to nourish you. You’re not going to get food poisoning from them. You’re going to eat some french fries that are wonderful, at least if they’re hot. They’re marvelous, and then we were able to go on our way, and it made us feel like something we could count on was there.
I think so often in life, certainly this year for most of us, I would imagine, we sort of feel like we’re out in that rural drive as the night approaches. And we don’t know exactly what to do. We read God’s Word, and we hear about his wonderful and mighty acts, and yet we lose perspective that God is actually there with us.
As we’ve been thinking about the Great Commission, it’s so important to note the fullness of what Jesus says as he commissions his disciples, and as that commission is passed down to us. And so I want us to go back and look at the whole passage one more time tonight. Let’s go ahead and turn to Matthew 28, starting with verse 18.
It says, “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.”
You see, as Jesus sends his disciples out, he does more than say, “Now here’s a checklist of things you need to do. Here are my orders. Go and do them.” He does more. He reminds them of who he is. Because if he was just a human teacher, even a human teacher that was being lifted up into heaven as Elijah had been lifted up so many years before, it still would leave us wondering, well, but how do we go about the work?
But there are two critical things Jesus talks about. In verse 18, he talks about how all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. So as he sends his disciples and his church out to do this work, he’s not sending them out to do work in a realm that is out of his control. Rather, he’s sending us out to go and serve his kingdom that he is the king of, that he is in full possession of.
Better yet, because we can think back to stories of medieval kings to go and send their knights out and the knights go and they die, Jesus sends his disciples out and goes with them. That’s what we see in verse 20, that Jesus isn’t just the one who has the authority. Jesus isn’t just the king. He is with them. And in saying that, he reminds the disciples and he reminds us that he isn’t limited to one spot, one location. We can only be in one place at one time.
Sometimes we wish we could be in more. Sometimes we feel like we’re in multiple places at the same time because we’re running so quickly. But we’re always in one spot. Even the most helpful, wonderful people we will ever know can only be in one place at one time. Except for Jesus. Because Jesus isn’t just another human being. Jesus is also God. And as he talks about that authority given to him and his presence with them, he is declaring to them, “I am with you, I care about you, and I am God. I am able to do what I’m telling you I’m going to do.”
You see, the disciples would have heard this and they would have known that Jesus was saying something that no faithful Jewish person would have ever said about himself if he was just a good teacher.
Take a look at Jeremiah 23:23, where we hear about the only one who can say what Jesus said. Jeremiah provides this word from the Lord. He says, “Am I a God at hand,” declares the Lord, “and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him,” declares the Lord? “Do I not fill heaven and earth,” declares the Lord. You see, the only one that can say that is the Lord. But the Lord can say that.
And so as the disciples heard these words, they’d know that this was an affirmation of what they were slowly learning, which was that Jesus was not just their friend. Jesus was not just a wonderful human teacher. He was those things. But he was also God. And so when he promised them things, when he sent them to do things, he could make sure it actually could happen.
When he told them that they would never be without him, that he would be with them to the end of the age, he actually had the authority to do that because it wasn’t just mere words being uttered to them. It wasn’t mere words that we read on the page. They are words that he can do, that he is doing right now.
But that’s really hard for us to get our minds around. And it’s been that way for all of history, that people will try to follow the Lord, and yet the temptation is to start to put him into a box, to think he’s only in certain places, he’s only there at certain times. Throughout the ancient world, there were lots of people worshiping lots of different gods, and they believed that those gods were gods over certain cities or certain countries, that you could go into a land and you had to make sure to pay homage to the god that happened to be in that place.
A famous Assyrian king who went to conquer the Israelites, or rather particularly the Jews down in Judah, Sennacherib, felt exactly this way when he arrived. He had his emissary go and shout to the people, “You need to surrender to me because I’ve gone through all these lands and I haven’t had to bow to their gods, I’ve wiped out the peoples from all these different lands, and their gods have not been able to stand up for them.” And there were two things he was missing there.
First, those gods didn’t exist. They were false gods. The people were worshiping parts of creation rather than the God who created the world. But there’s something else that he was missing, which is that when you’re dealing with the Creator God, the God who has made everything that exists, that God isn’t contained to a little square of land known as Israel or Judah. He isn’t constrained to anything anywhere.
But here’s what he said, Isaiah 36:18. Sennacherib, through his messenger, said, “Beware lest Hezekiah mislead you by saying the Lord will deliver us. Has any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria?” That was what he thought. And it would ultimately lead to his doom. Because the God of the universe is not mocked, and he’s not ignored, and he isn’t limited to the boxes we put him in.
Now sometimes that’s because we’re opposing God, and certainly Sennacherib was, but we fall into the same traps even as we’re trying to follow the Lord. Because we think, well, I need to be in God’s presence. But maybe right now you’re sheltering at home, and you’re not going into a church building, and you think, well, God’s in that church building, and I’ve been shut out from God’s presence. Or I know certain people that I haven’t been able to see for months now, and those people, they always have God’s presence around them, and I’ve been shut out from them, so I don’t have God’s presence.
Even if you’ve been out and about with everyone wearing masks so you can’t necessarily see their expressions, and we have to distance, and so on, it can feel so isolating. And part of that ends up leading to where we even feel isolated from God. Because we as God’s people remind each other of God’s presence. And if we have that isolation, that separation, we start to think, well, maybe God is in a box.
But God wasn’t in a box in Sennacherib’s day. He wasn’t in a box in the disciples’ day when Jesus said that he would go with them everywhere they went. He’s not in a box today. That’s the mistake that Satan loves to tell us to make us think, well, I need to go to this place to be with God, and I’m not there, so I’m not with God. But God is with you right now. And it’s not to say that we shouldn’t be with other people. It’s not to say we shouldn’t be in church buildings. It’s not to say any of that stuff. Those are good things. But we shouldn’t constrain our understanding of where God is to those places. God is everywhere. He’s with you. He’s with me right now.
You see, this comes back to the beginning, the promise that we hear at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Let’s turn to chapter 1, verse 22.
Matthew writes, “All this took place, the coming of Jesus, his birth, to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel,” which means God with us.
I think we need to hear that more this year than any year. We need to hear that every year. We go through those sorts of passages every Christmas time, and it’s important for us to hear it, but we need to hear it desperately this year.
As we go into Thanksgiving week, if you’re not going to be with your family this week, or at least a portion of your family, if you’re not going to be at church over this Christmas season as the pandemic seems to worsen again, if you’re going to find some of that isolation creeping into a time of year where we desperately yearn not to be isolated, we need to be reminded of why we even celebrate Christmas. Why do we do it? We do it because of the God who is with us, Emmanuel. And that’s true right now. It’s not just true in the past, it’s true right now.
Now the question may be, okay, he’s with us, but what does that really mean? How much is he with us? Because sometimes things are supposed to be, and they don’t really work out how we think they should. For example, you go to the grocery store, and you think, well, I’d like to eat something healthy. I’d like to have something that’s nourishing. And so you go through the aisle, and maybe you decide instead of buying another bottle of soda, you’re going to buy this carbonated juice. And it’s going to be really good because it says it’s flavored with natural flavors. And you think, aha, this is great. These natural flavors are with me.
And so you turn to the back of the bottle, and you start reading over it, and it has water and sugar, maybe some corn syrup and some dyes that you’re not quite sure what they are, but you see them on different things. And you get to the very bottom, and it says, “and natural flavors.” And you think, where’s the raspberry that’s on the label? I guess it’s under natural flavors. And then you look up natural flavors, and you realize it might not even be raspberry. It’s just something that wasn’t artificially made, at least entirely.
And so often, that’s how we think of a lot of things. We think, well, you say that these natural flavors are with me, but they’re not really. And you say that God is with me, but what does that really mean? Does that mean that he checks in on me once a day? That when I’m doing things that are pleasing to him, when I’m getting everything right, he’s with me? That if I measure up to a certain level, that then suddenly I experience God with me?
That’s not what Jesus says to his disciples. That’s not what he says to us. What it really means is that he is with us every single moment of every single day.
Our common English translations of this last verse don’t capture the power of what Jesus says. This phrase is so amazing as we get to that word always here. It’s actually several words in Greek, and these words are essentially something along the lines of, “I am with you the whole of the day, every day, all of the day, every single moment of the day I’m with you.” That’s what Jesus is saying. And yes, that’s what always means, but I think because we’re so conditioned to be used to those things that sound good but aren’t quite, we start to think there’s exceptions.
But no, Jesus is with us always, the whole of every moment of the day. That’s how our God comes to us. And so as he calls us to go out and make disciples, to see people be baptized, to see people learn who he is, to have this all brought together as more people come into his kingdom, that’s what he sent us to go and do. He does so with the whole of the day, every day that we live as we’re doing this, as we’re going about our lives and seeking to be faithful to him, with him with us as our God. That’s what God with us really means, the God who is genuinely, utterly with us.
And this promise is for us as individuals. It’s also for us as the church. For example, consider Matthew 18 verse 20. Jesus says,
“When two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
When he gathers us together as the church, and the reason that we eagerly anticipate the day when we can go back to completely normal church fellowship and we don’t have to worry about social distancing and masks and all these different things anymore is because there’s a beauty as God assembles his body together in person. But whether we’re together electronically as we are now, as if we’re simply alone with our Bible, Jesus is with us the whole of every moment of the day. He doesn’t say he’s only with us when we gather together. Rather, he gathers his body together because he’s our God who is with us. And so we see the beauty of that in these different experiences of his presence.
And he does that for a purpose. He gathers his church together. He gathers us and he leads us to be those who are both learners and those who are learning, as we’ve been talking about the last few weeks, that we together might testify to who he is. We might declare his kingdom. He sends us for a mission.
Here’s something really interesting when you think about the end of the Gospel of Matthew. We end here with this commission. And of course, we can go through the rest of scripture and see that commission starting to be fulfilled. But if we just stop at Matthew and if you think about the first people reading it, they would have not had yet the rest of the New Testament. They may very well have just been reading Matthew. It was sent to certain people and they may have had some of Paul’s letters already at that time. But they’re reading this and this is speaking to them, just like it’s speaking to us.
And the story isn’t complete because Jesus hasn’t returned yet. And that can be scary, but it’s a wonderful thing. Listen here. I love what D.A. Carson says about this passage. He says, “The final chapter is being written in the mission and teaching of Jesus’ disciples. That includes us, too. We are living in the final chapter of the story, the chapter that God allows us to actually be a part of, to see come forth.”
And again, if we’re thinking in terms of us being out there trying to simply faithfully do things without God’s presence, that can be an incredibly scary, intimidating thing. But when we recognize that instead we’re going with Jesus there at our side every single moment, every time that we feel completely alone and we feel like Jesus isn’t with us and we wonder and we cry out, God, are you with me? The answer is yes. We’re just there as he’s authoring a part of that final chapter with us.
We already know where the story ultimately ends. It’s more like the second to last chapter, because we know what the last chapter is. We know about God’s victory. But in God’s creativity and his love for us, he allows us to actually experience a part of that story being fulfilled. And as we do that, we can have confidence that where we are situated in that chapter is a part of the story that leads to that last chapter of God’s victory.
Because anyone who confesses that Jesus is Lord and he’s been raised from the dead and confesses his sins or her sins can know that God will not stop with what he has started. Listen to these words from Romans 8:38-39. Paul writes,
“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That’s the confidence we go with. And so with that confidence, we can ask this question: How can I go and help my friends and family experience the God who is here this season? How do I help them? Whether I’m in person at Thanksgiving or I’m on a Zoom call or FaceTime, how do I help share that hope and that love?
He goes with us to give us the confidence to do it, and he goes with us so that when we’re saying to those around us things about the truth of scripture that we’re not just rattling off facts, but we’re rattling off important truth about the one who is with us every single moment of the day.
Why does this season seem challenging to us this year or any year? Lots of years people talk about if they’ve lost a loved one over the year or they have to be away to go do something and they’re going to be away from their family and friends, that the holiday season is hard. Why is that? Think about some of our favorite Christmas movies. It’s coming up to the 30th anniversary of Home Alone and there are lots of wonderful moments in that movie.
If you’ve seen it probably many times, I can always watch it again. The burglars, of course, being faced with all of Kevin’s crazy contraptions is wonderful. But there’s also this heartwarming other storyline going through it of Kevin’s mom desperately trying to get home so that Kevin can know that he’s not alone at Christmas.
The thing that we don’t necessarily know until we get through the story—and I hope I’m not spoiling this for anyone—but we don’t know if she’s going to get there or not, and there are probably times that some of you have even experienced that someone wanted to get there and didn’t.
When it happens, when it works out, we feel joy whether it’s in a movie or it’s in real life because wow it actually worked out, it happened, and we’re together.
Here’s the thing that every single one of us needs to know in this moment: that no matter how bad the pandemic gets, no matter how bad other situations get in our individual lives that might keep us apart, even when we face death of loved ones where we can’t have the whole family together like we once did, there’s someone who is with us. Emmanuel.
And Emmanuel, God with us, doesn’t have to try to find a band in a rented U-Haul that’s going to come racing back to our hometown so that he can get there in time. He doesn’t have to try to argue at an airline ticket desk to get a ticket to fly back from a foreign country. He doesn’t have to even try to deal with buffering issues and video conferencing software so that we can have communication with him. The God who is with us is with us right now.
Those times that we don’t feel like he’s with us, that’s because we’re focused on other things and oftentimes we’re believing the lies of the evil one trying to convince us that God isn’t really with us, that he doesn’t really notice what we’re facing. But there’s one that we can trust, one who will never be held up by travel or disease or any other circumstance who is with us. And that’s the same one who sent these disciples out on that wonderful mission and told them to go 2,000 years ago.
And as we think about how we are also called to go, and even with this question I just asked about how can we go and share this hope with our family and friends, we’re not waiting on God to show up. We’re not hoping he’ll show up to enable us to do this. He has shown up.
All we need to do is come before him and rejoice in the presence of the God who loves us this day and every day. Would you join me as we pray right now?
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for going with us wherever we go, that we never have to worry if you’ll show up, that we don’t have to hit a certain measure of goodness to get you to show up, that we don’t have to worry about whether disease or busy circumstances or other duties at work or at home or anything else will keep us away from being in your presence this day or throughout the Christmas season or Thanksgiving or any other time of the year.
As you said to the disciples, “I’m with you every moment of the day.” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we praise you that you are the God who is with us, that we have the Spirit in us, that our Savior has gone and run the race before us. And as we contemplate what you have called us to do, Lord, would you give us the confidence to do it, knowing that you are there with us? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I do thank you for joining me for this series Go. It’s been a joy thinking about these three verses and how much has been packed into them. I hope it’s been helpful to you. If it’s been encouraging, please give it a like or a share. Help others to hear about the God who is with them. Even this week, I think this week, all of us really need to hear that. The God who is there, Emmanuel, is with us.
Emmanuel isn’t just a concept we sing in a few Christmas carols, but it’s the truth. He is the true creator of the universe who loves you and who loves me.
We’re going to be celebrating that all Christmas season as we have our first Christmas at Little Hills. I shared last night this week at Little Hills a lot about what we’re doing. I hope you’ll check out littlehills.church/christmas because it’s packed with stuff coming up.
And I just want to bring up a few of the things that I don’t want you to miss that are coming up right away, which is that our first Advent wreath lighting is going to be on Sunday. Each week over Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, we’re going to be meditating on some of the promises of scripture that will help prepare our hearts for Christmas Day. And I hope as we do that, that you would consider just taking some candles or actually getting an Advent wreath and participating along. But even if you don’t have that, I hope that you’ll tune in every Sunday night for that. We’ll have someone different from the community sharing in those readings and lighting the candle each week. It’s going to be a wonderful time.
Next Monday night at 7 p.m. we’ll continue Steadfast. We’ll pick up with what we heard on Sunday night and look at those promises of God in a brand new series called The Weary World Rejoices. I feel like that is going to be so helpful to us in this year that weary really seems like it describes, I believe, most of us pretty well. But God has the hope that we need, and he offers his love and his strength to those of us who are weary.
So please do join me again at 7 p.m. next Monday night. We have lots more. Again, littlehills.church/christmas—so much coming up in the next few weeks. I do hope you’ll join us for that.
In the meantime, if I can be praying for you in any way this week, please do not hesitate to shoot me an email. We’ll leave a prayer request in the comments so others can pray as well. It’s always wonderful to hear from you.
If you have any questions about the upcoming events at Little Hills, also you can shoot me that email. I’d love to hear from you. I pray that this week is a blessed week for you as we go into Thanksgiving, that each of us can take a moment and simply recognize the goodness of what God has done for us. I would love to be an encouragement to you if there’s any discouragement going into that time.
I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, that you stay safe, and I look forward to seeing you again here next Monday evening. Have a blessed week.