The Great Commission

Jason Armold

The Commission, Our Mission • Sermon • Submitted 7 months ago • Presented 7 months ago

Jesus gives the great commission

0 ratings

· 2 views

Notes

Transcript

What is a Missionary?

What do you think of when you hear the word missionary? I’ll give you a moment—picture in your mind the very model of a missionary. [pause] Ok, now that you have your idea, let’s figure this out together. I’ll bet that when many of you pictured a missionary, you pictured someone who occasionally comes to the United States asking people to send them money but who most of the time spends their life in some far-flung country in which people don’t speak our language or look like us.

And for much of the last few hundred years this has been a pretty fair picture of missionary activity in the world. Ever since the days of exploration following the sailing of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the term “Missionary” has almost exclusively been reserved for people who go into a foreign country to spread the Gospel message abroad.

But there is a problem with our understanding of missionary. To put it bluntly, we’ve narrowed down the focus of the term to the point that the only people who can qualify to be missionaries are those that dedicate the entirety of their lives to leaving home, learning a new language, a new culture, and sacrificing all to bring the Gospel message to people very different from themselves.

The issue at the center of this restriction of the definition of the term “missionary” is the simple fact that it isn’t biblical. Nowhere in the Bible do we find a definition of “missionary” that fits our modern understanding of the term. In fact, the term “missionary” is found nowhere in the Bible. Now, what I’m not saying is that that there is no warrant for evangelizing people that are different from us. But what I am saying is that we have restricted our call to preach the Gospel to all nations to mean “preach the Gospel to OTHER nations.”

And, like I said, the term “missionary” isn’t found in the Bible at all. The terms that come closest to our modern concept of missionary would be the terms “Apostle” and “Evangelist.” And each of these deserves a word of definition because there is a great deal of overlap between them.

First, like we learned a few weeks ago, the term “Apostle” comes from the Greek word apostolos and means “someone who is sent.” Now, this is very similar to the word “missionary.” In Latin, the word “Missio” means “to send” and thus a missionary is also one who is sent. So here we have some parallels, right? And now to the word “Evangelist.” The word evangelist comes from the same root in Greek as we get the term “Gospel” which is “euongelion.” The verb form of this noun is “euongelizomai” which if you stretch your ears a little bit sounds quite like Evangelist. An evangelist is a person who is tasked specifically, gifted by the Holy Spirit, with a special gift of preaching the Gospel. The difference between the two terms comes down to founding churches. An evangelist is not really concerned with founding churches but with preaching the Gospel while an Apostle is tasked with both. So, you could say that all Apostles are Evangelists but not all Evangelists are Apostles, if that makes sense.

So, let’s come back to the term missionary. Today, we would say that most missionaries are something of an Apostle. Many go and found churches where they are sent and preach the Gospel winning new converts in the process who make up the core of their new church.

God, the Great Missionary

And what I’m not saying is that this approach is necessarily wrong. It has worked wonders in growing the number of Christians around the world. It is especially been effective in places like South America and Africa where Christian churches are growing like wildfire. But what I am saying is that this is not necessarily the Bible’s only way of conduction mission.

And now we need to step back a little bit and come at this another way. So, today we are discussion missionaries. Right off the bat you can hear in that word missionary the word “Mission,” right? Mission—we use this term in military contexts don’t we? We use this word to mean a certain task or set of tasks we need to accomplish. If we complete the task list that we have been given by our superior, we have completed the mission objectives.

Or think of it this way, many organizations have something they call a “Mission Statement,” right? That mission statement is a statement of purpose for why the organization exists. Some organizations really live into their mission statements. And these are usually what we term successful businesses. Think of a company like Southwest airlines. Their mission statement is basically to be “the world’s most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline.” And, at least until COVID, they were doing quite well. They had a reputation for being cheap, yes, but people were willing to have less comfort to save money. And how about my favorite grocery store, Aldi? There purpose statement is “to deliver great quality food at the lowest prices.” They seem to do that.

So, in other words, the mission statement drives the mission. The mission statement is the North Star around which a company or organization plans all their other operations. It serves as the goal for the entire organization.

And now we need to ask a question. Does God have a mission statement for the church? Is there something as crystal clear and easy to remember as those of Aldi or Southwest Airlines?

The answer is Yes and Yes. There are in fact two mission statements in the Bible. There is one mission statement for the Church and there is one mission statement for the whole of humanity as well. We’ll cover them in turn.

The first statement is our last Scripture for the morning. This passage from Matthew 28 is usually called “The Great Commission” and most of your Bibles will have something akin to that in the headings. The core of this passage reads:

Matthew 28:18–20 NASB 2020

And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Over the next few weeks in our new sermon series, we will cover this statement in detail. You see here that Jesus first grounds the commission in the authority that he has. Then he tells the church to do three things that make up their mission statement. They are to make disciples of all nations, baptize them in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, and teach the new disciples to obey everything that Jesus commanded. Over the next three weeks we’ll cover each of these in turn.

Now, I said there are two mission statements for humanity in the Bible, didn’t I? And we’ve seen the first one which applies specifically to the church. Now let’s turn to the one that is for humanity as a whole. It is found right at the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis 1:26-30.

Genesis 1:26–30 NASB 2020

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every animal of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so.

I hope this passage is familiar. This is the creation story of the first human beings on day six of the seven days of creation from Genesis 1. And in this passage we find that God created humanity in the image of God. And when humans were created in God’s image, they were given a mission: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

God has given humanity as a whole a mission: the mission to be co-rulers of this beautiful world that God has created and to tame the wildness from it and preserve its beauty. We are called to be stewards of the resources of the world, sharing the abundance of the natural world and protecting it just like we would take care of our own property. God has given us the task…and that makes God the Great Missionary.

You see, God is the sender of not only Jesus Christ....God sent his son to the world. That’s true. But God has also sent each and every one of us too. God has sent us to this world to take care of it. To steward it.

And, God has sent the church too. From John 20, we find these words that Jesus gives to the disciples “As the father sent me, so send I you.”

The church, thusly, is a missionary people. We have been sent into the world with the task of preaching the Good news.

But on what authority can we claim this mission? Well, we could just say “God said so,” I suppose, and that’s true. But right in our Great Commission passage we have something more specific. You see, Jesus is not just the Son of God, he is the Son of Man that the psalmist and Daniel speak about. As Colossians 1:15 tells us, Jesus IS the image of God. Jesus shows us what it is to be truly human, to be a true Child of God.

And it is Jesus who shows us how to fulfill the original mission statement. Jesus came into the world, became human, to show us how to be a human being fully alive; to be what were were always meant to be.

We’re All Missionaries

Siblings in Christ, we are all missionaries. If God is the great sender and he sent all humanity in Genesis 1, then God is the Great missionary and we are all on mission with God. And even moreso as we are part of the church tasked with going into ALL the world and preaching the good news.

Friends, “missions” isn’t just about foreign countries. We can be on mission for God right in our own homes as we raise our kids and grandchildren. We can be missionaries at work to all we meet, giving them the reason for the hope that is within us with gentleness and respect. And we can be missionaries anywhere we go.