Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Do Your Job (Matthew 28:16-20)
Date: October 8, 2023
Do you remember getting a syllabus when you were in school? In college and seminary, that document was like the Bible in all my various classes. A really well-written syllabus told you not only what to expect to learn throughout the semester, but also what the assignments were going to be. A really industrious student could technically go ahead and get all the work done for the semester in the first few weeks with that help. But there’s even more. A really, really good syllabus told you not only what the various assignments were going to be, but also what the big projects were for the semester along with the grading rubrics by which they were going to be evaluated. In other words, they laid out all the parameters for success for you right at the beginning. You had the ability to know at any given point during the year just what you were supposed to be doing along with how to do it in such a way as to meet with the teacher’s expectations for success. You knew out of the gate that if you did this much work, you’d get this many points, but if you did this much more work, you’d get this many more points. A good syllabus like this serves as a kind of set of mission parameters for the course. If you pay attention to it, you’ll always know where you stand when it comes to the line between success and failure.
For the last several weeks now we have been talking about the church and how to get it right. As the series title suggests, we have been talking about the various nuts and bolts involved in being more fully who God made us to be as a church. All of these are good and important things. As we said a few weeks ago, they are all the little things that allow for the big things to be accomplished. They are the little things that allow us to do the big thing of being the called out people of Jesus. Talking about all of these little things as we have been doing is something we need to be doing on occasion. Here at the end of our journey, though, I want to zoom back out with you for a few minutes and reflect together again on the big thing, on the main thing. What exactly is our mission as the church? The answer to that question may not be quite what you think it is.
When it comes to material we find in the Scriptures to give us some clear guidance in better understanding the church’s mission, there’s not actually as much there as you might think. Oh, there’s plenty when it comes to the mission of individual followers of Jesus—you and I on our own. But in terms of explicit instructions that the church should be doing X, Y, or Z, we don’t actually find much of that. So, does that mean we just kind of have to make it up as we go along? No, I don’t think that’s the case. There’s a fair bit that we can learn by example and observation. We know, for instance, that the church should be involved in serving the hungry because this is what the church was doing in Acts 6. We know the church should give generously to alleviate the suffering and hardships of fellow churches. Paul calls several of the churches he planted to this over the course of his second and third missionary journey in Acts, and he gives specific instructions about it in his second letter to the Corinthian church. There are numerous other examples along these lines scattered across the New Testament.
But in terms of giving us clear and direct guidance, we have to tread a bit more carefully. We have to do some theological thinking using our understanding of what the church is as our guide. And do you remember what the church is? The church is the people of Jesus called out to be His body on earth. The church is not ever composed of a single believer operating on his or her own. As we have said time and time again in this series, there is no concept in the entire New Testament of a follower of Jesus acting alone to accomplish the mission Jesus has given each of us. If someone today had a conversation with guys like Peter or Paul or John or James, and threw out the too-often repeated line that goes something like, “I have a very private faith in Jesus; I don’t need the church in order to be a Christian,” those guys would stare at you like you had an extra head growing out of your shoulders just before they denounced you as a foolish and dangerous heretic.
In light of this, what we can come to understand here is that the church’s mission is going to be connected to the mission Jesus gave us as individual disciples. If we can get that right, and if we can look at that mission carefully through the lens of what the church is, we stand a whole lot better of a chance of getting the church’s mission right. And when we understand more clearly what the church’s mission actually is, we will have a better grasp of whether or not we are getting being the church right in the first place.
If we are going to talk about our mission as individual followers of Jesus, there are really two places we can go. One is right at the beginning of Luke’s narrative about the church that we call Acts. The other is at the tail end of Matthew’s Gospel. Both of them come from the same basic time period after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but before His ascension back to the Father’s right hand. They aren’t simply two different reports of the same scene as they happened in different places. The scene Luke reports to us probably came right at the end of that forty-day period. Matthew’s probably unfolded a couple of weeks earlier. Given the similarity of what Jesus had to say in both accounts, the basic idea here is likely something He repeated to the disciples several times before He made His exit. Still, though, Luke’s scene is fairly generic in its form. So, this morning, I want to spend a few minutes reflecting with you on Matthew’s report on Jesus’ great commission.
If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to Matthew 28. That’s right at the very end of the first document in the New Testament. All four of the Gospel writers include the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and what came next. Matthew’s description of the events after Jesus’ resurrection is pretty short like Mark’s, but he includes what in my book wins the prize as the most interesting anecdote. This is when the chief priests bribed the Roman soldiers who were guarding Jesus’ tomb when the angel appeared and moved the stone to tell their superiors who would be looking into their failure to keep everyone out of the tomb that Jesus’ disciples had somehow snuck up during the night, broken into the tomb, and ran off with the body. They paid them off rather handsomely and assured them they would keep them from being executed for their failure as they all expected to be. How Matthew found out about this story will have to remain a matter of speculation, but it’s pretty wild all the same.
After this, Jesus’ appearance to the disciples on a hill in Galilee is the only thing Matthew tells us about happening after the resurrection. That’s where we find Jesus and the disciples (a group that only included eleven men at this point) in Matthew 28:16. Take a look at this with me: “The eleven disciples traveled to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them.” So, Jesus had told them to go, and they went. That’s a pretty good start to following Him well, all things considered. The next part, though, is really interesting. Stay with me in v. 17 now: “When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted.” Matthew includes several little details like that in his Gospel that are easy to miss if you aren’t paying close attention but which, when you do notice them, will make your jaw hit the ground in shock.
The disciples worshiped Jesus when they next encountered Him. That’s a pretty important note in its own right. These were men (and women too, because even though Matthew only mentions the eleven disciples who would soon be elevated to apostles, the group gathered there would have almost certainly included His other faithful followers who were not part of the core dozen which included several women) who had all grown up with one idea driven into their heads more than any other: don’t worship anything or anyone other than God. Have you ever had one of your core childhood worldview points challenged by some situation? That’s really, really hard to do. These guys were all totally convinced that worshiping anything or anyone other than God was the worst thing a person could do. It would cut you off from Him totally and possibly forever. They would have only worshiped Jesus if they were fully convinced that He was in fact God, something the resurrection cemented in their minds as true.
So, they were worshiping Him as God (which, again, was a really big deal), but not all of them. Some of them doubted, Matthew said. This is one of those throwaway lines that spawns a million questions. Who doubted? Was it one of the eleven? Did Jesus really launch His movement on the backs of a group of guys who were not uniformly sold on His identity? Did the ones who doubted worship Him with the rest of the group? What kinds of doubts were these? Were they doubts about His identity? His mission? His authority? What are we supposed to do with this other than just wonder about it helplessly? At the very least, it lets us say this: Jesus is willing to take us where we are. If someone is willing to follow Him, He’ll take them. Even if they—even if you—aren’t fully sold on every single point of theology, if you are at least willing to follow Him, He’ll let you. And He’ll use you to accomplish His purposes. The Holy Spirit’s working through the rest of the church body will gradually help shore up the places where doubts are still clinging to your heart or mind. The sheer humility of Jesus in all of this is just staggering. What other god says to his followers, “It’s okay if you don’t have everything down as long as you are following me”? None of them! They expect absolute and unquestioning loyalty and belief. But Jesus says, “Nah, come on with me anyway and we’ll figure it out together as we go.”
And after receiving their worship for a bit—in other words, after agreeing with them that, yes, He is God—look at v. 18 now: “Jesus came near and said to them, ‘All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 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 everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”
Now, my guess is that many of you have heard this before. You’ve studied it before. You’ve perhaps memorized it before. You don’t necessarily need me to take us through a detailed study of what Jesus says here. But as we’ve seen in this series, sometimes taking a fresh look at things we otherwise thought we were pretty familiar with can be a good thing. So, let’s talk through what we see here right quick, and then we’ll put it in a bigger-picture perspective in light of what we’re talking about today.
First, Jesus received their worship from apparently a distance. Once they were done in that moment, He came near. He represents both the holiness and the nearness and intimacy of God here. He is the bridge by whom we can reach the Father and bask in the glory of His presence. He is the covering that allows us to stand with confidence in the overwhelming power of His holiness. He brings the words of the Father to us so that we can have life through them if we will heed them. As much as He is the intermediary, our perfect high priest serving our needs before the Father, let us not ever forget that He is still fully God. He made it plain here: all authority has been given to me. What does “all” mean? Last time I checked, it means all. There isn’t any authority Jesus doesn’t have first. And indeed, if He has all authority, that includes the authority to tell you and me what to do with the expectation of our obedience. Not doing what He says is not a consequence-free affair. There will quite literally be Hell to pay if we take that path and stick with it. All that means is that when Jesus says something, we had better be paying attention. Indeed, the word “therefore” tucked in after the command to go assumes on this authority and roots all of what follows in it.
And so, with all of this incredible authority, what does Jesus tell us to do? The first thing He tells us in English is to go. Now, grammatically speaking, while the word “go” often appears at the beginning of our English translations because of the way English grammar works, the tense of the word in Greek conveys a sense of ongoing action. In other words, the following things are to be happening as we are going. Yes, this can absolutely mean as we are going far and abroad, as in pursuing something like an intentional, away-from-home missions venture. But it can also be referring to our going through our normal, daily life rhythms. To put that another way, as you are doing the things you normally do in a given day, here’s what you are to be doing. If I can belabor the point just a bit further, while the word “go” carries the form and weight of a command, what it does more than that is offer a context for the rest of what follows. Far from making this set of mission parameters easier by removing the pressure we often feel when someone is addressing this passage to go on a missions trip (something you should absolutely do if God calls you to it), this understanding actually elevates the challenge of what Jesus says here even further. There is no timeout period when it comes to our pursuit of the mission Jesus left for us to accomplish. There are no sidelines. There aren’t any places we can legitimately ignore that in favor of what we want to do. If we are going to follow Him, we have to follow Him all the time, not just when it is convenient.
As we are going and doing life, then, we are to be doing what? Making disciples. A disciple is simply someone who is a committed student of a teacher. In other words, our primary mission is not to get people saved, to use the language we are accustomed to hearing. We are to encourage the people around us in the direction of becoming fully committed students of Jesus. This work starts before they have even begun following Him. That kind of disciple-making work we call evangelism. But evangelism is only part of our larger mission, not the mission itself. Evangelism without discipleship is often a tragic waste of time because we invite people to follow Jesus without actually giving them the tools to do it. Without being sufficiently equipped for the task, they don’t ever complete it. That’s why things like street corner preaching are often so powerfully ineffective in growing God’s kingdom. Our call is not to get people to become Christians, but to become lifetime devotees of the teaching and example of Jesus of Nazareth. And, we are to do this with everyone around us. No one is exempt. There’s no one we can get away with ignoring. We are to make disciples of all nations. The Greek word there is ethne, and doesn’t refer to nations the way we think about them today. It’s a reference to all people groups, or, again, everybody. Jesus wants everybody to be following Him. It’s our mission to help facilitate that happening.
Jesus goes on to give us two ways we are to be making disciples, and these cover the things we’ve just been talking about. The first part of making disciples is baptizing people in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. What is that? Well, someone is baptized as a public declaration that they are following Jesus. In other words, we are to help people begin following Jesus. A disciple of Jesus is not a disinterested observer, but someone who is passionately following Him wherever He goes. We start there. If you want to think about it like this, evangelism is merely pre-discipleship. Once they have started following Jesus, the next step is for us to teach them to do everything He said. That is, once they have started following Jesus, we help them do it consistently and well. The assumption here, by the way, is that people don’t know how to do that on their own. They need help. It’s our job to help them. To put that in the context of our tough conversation last week, healthy church discipline is one of the ways we obey Jesus’ command here.
The last part of this is the reminder that we’re not doing any of it alone. Jesus doesn’t send us out with a pat on the head and a bidding of good luck. He gives us instructions, goes before us to make it possible for us to keep them in the first place, goes with us to enable us to do them in any given moment, and comes along behind us in case we miss anything. What’s more, He’s never going to stop doing that. Ever.
All of that is what Jesus had to say to us as individual disciples. That is my mission. And your mission. And your mission. And your mission, as a follower of Jesus. That’s all good. But what does any of this have to do with the church? How does this inform the church’s mission? Well, like I said a few minutes ago, if we are going to get our hearts and minds wrapped around that question, we have to think about it through the lens of what we understand the church to be. The church is the people of Jesus called out to be His body on earth. In other words, the church is a bunch of individual Jesus followers, grouped together in a larger unit than one, but in a smaller unit than all of the Jesus followers across the whole world. And together like this, we are to be doing the things Jesus would have done if He were still here on earth…which is what He told His disciples they were to be doing while standing with them on that mountain in Galilee.
So, the church’s mission is simply the same thing as the mission for individual followers of Jesus? Yes and no. Yes, we are to be working together to accomplish the mission Jesus left for us to do. That’s part of what the church is for. But only part. The church is bigger than just that. It’s more than simply a group of people we work with to do our job. The church is where we are equipped and enabled to do our job. That is what the church is for. When most churches think about their mission, they proudly declare that their mission is to make disciples and point to this very passage as clear evidence. But I submit to you that making disciples isn’t exactly the church’s mission. As we have just been reminded, that is the mission of followers of Jesus. Besides, an institution doesn’t make disciples. Individuals do. The church’s mission is to be the facilitator for the believer’s mission getting accomplished. To put that another way: the church’s mission is to empower Jesus’ followers to accomplish theirs.
That one idea should be defining everything we do as a group. It is who God made us to be for the season we are in. It’s why I say to you every single Sunday morning that we are a people with whom anyone can connect to grow in Christ and reach out for His kingdom. As individuals, our job is to be making disciples. As a group, our job is to be equipping and enabling people who are a part of this group to make disciples with always increasing intentionality and effectiveness. When one single church seems to be making lots and lots of disciples (not simply baptizing lots of people, although we definitely want to see and experience that, but walking them from that point to the point they are making disciples on their own), the reason this is happening is because as a group, they are effectively accomplishing the church’s mission. The church’s mission is to empower Jesus’ followers to accomplish theirs. If we are getting what God made us to do right, you are going to be better enabled to do what God made you to do. The church’s mission is to empower Jesus’ followers to accomplish theirs.
How do we do that? Well, by doing many of the things we are doing. We show up so that by our ministry of presence we can be an example for others. We learn in smaller groups than this one. This one is important, but the real learning happens in smaller groups than this. If you are not in a Sunday school group or here on Wednesday nights for Bible study, you are not where you need to be just yet in your engagement with this body. We serve in the ways God has called us. You have gifts from Jesus that He gave you with the explicit purpose of your helping someone else follow Him more fully. If you’re not doing that, the rest of us are weaker for us. We give. The church has been practicing sacrificial generosity together for the furtherance of God’s kingdom since the very beginning. We are entering a season in which God is preparing to use the sacrificial generosity of you and me to equip this church with the facilities we need to accomplish our mission even more effectively for generations to come. When we commit to that together, trusting in the Giver of gifts more than in the gifts themselves, there’s no limit to what He will accomplish through us. The church’s mission is to empower Jesus’ followers to accomplish theirs.
Look around for a second. If you are a follower of Jesus who is committed to pursuing Him in the context of this body of believers, the people sitting to your left and right, in front of you or behind you are the people to whom you are responsible. They are depending on you to be fully who God made you to be so that they can be more fully who God made them to be. We all need you to do what God made you to do. If you are not actively involved in doing that, you’re not where God wants you to be. My invitation to you is to come have a conversation with me about how we can address it together. Our mission is to make sure you can accomplish yours, yes, but don’t forget that you are part of that “our.” When we work together in the same direction, all empowered by God’s Spirit, not even the sky is the limit. The church’s mission is to empower Jesus’ followers to accomplish theirs. Let’s commit to doing this very thing together.