Mission and Purpose

I'm thinking of an event in my mind this morning. Words that were spoken that turned a group of young, nervous men into a force that would forever be marked by purpose, passion, and perseverance. In the parting words of their leader, this group of ragtag individuals were given a singular mission to do. And that mission so consumed their lives that they sacrificed everything they had to accomplish it. Their leader was Jesus, and the group was to become the apostles.

And his parting words was the Great Commission. What were these words that we know as the Great Commission that so moved these people, that so inspired them towards passion and perseverance and purpose? What command was given to them to fill them with these things? Well, we find it in Matthew 28, verse 16. Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.

When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age." In the wake of the resurrection, Jesus meets his disciples and reveals his true nature to them.

This was forty days after the resurrection according to the Bible account, and we see that in Matthew and in the other gospel accounts, Jesus had been restored to power and authority that he had before he came to earth. This was the vindicated Son of God with full authority. And through his suffering and death on the cross, the gospel says that Jesus had conquered the power of sin and Satan who had threatened God's rule. But in the resurrection, we see the crowning of Jesus Christ as king. Before the resurrection, even in his death, people had thought he had failed.

People thought he was a great man, a great leader, a great rabbi and teacher, but in his resurrection, he was crowned as king and Lord, and people knew that this one was the Son of God. The war had been won, and now the king would take his seat. And Jesus, after these forty days, comes to his disciples, and he shows himself to them. And in his parting words, his very last commands, his very last teaching, his parting words to them, he begins with this: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me."

How does the God of the Bible, how does Jesus Christ, the Lord and the King over all creation, interact now as this crowned King in human affairs? The question I particularly want to ask is how, in light of this mission that he sends his disciples on, how do these words play in or interact with this? Some people say that there exists some sort of Christians who believe in Jesus Christ's divine sovereignty over all aspects of life, while there may be some Christians who don't, that believe that God isn't completely in control of these areas. But that's not true. That's not true.

People see that there's a dichotomy here, but there isn't. I believe that all Christians believe in divine sovereignty. I believe that all Christians believe that Jesus Christ is in control of every aspect of human existence, but that we aren't all aware that we believe that. Why do I believe that all Christians believe in God's sovereignty in all areas, including saving faith? For two reasons.

And they're very practical reasons, and I'll ask you them. Firstly, I want you to reflect on your own personal journey of faith. You know, this is sort of the interplay: can God really draw people to himself solely and completely, or does he require human intervention? Reflect on your personal journey of faith. In that process, coming to faith, do you give God thanks for your conversion?

Do you give God thanks for your conversion, or do you give yourself thanks? I believe every Christian deep down is aware that they do not save themselves. They do not save themselves. Your thanksgiving to God for your salvation is itself an acknowledgment that your conversion wasn't your own work. You don't put it down to chance or to accident that a particular Christian friend came into your life.

You don't put it to chance that you walked into a church meeting that particular morning and heard a message that so struck you and moved you that you thought it was preached directly for you, an audience of one. You don't attribute your repenting, your turning away from your life before, and your believing even to your own wisdom or your good judgment. You would never dare to say that. Perhaps at one point you were searching, that's true. Perhaps you did a lot of deep thinking, perhaps you did a lot of reading, but none of that actually, you believe even, made you convert your life and made that your own work.

In fact, when you look back, you blame yourself rather for your past blindness and your indifference and your evasiveness despite the gospel message. You would never dream of dividing the credit for your salvation between yourself and God. You give God all the glory, don't you, for all that your salvation involved? And you know that it would be unthinkable to think and to refuse to give God thanks for bringing you to faith.

And the second thing is a little like this, but I want to ask you: how do you pray for the conversion of your friends or your family members? We all pray for the conversion of others, don't we? Do you limit your praying to only ask that God will bring them to a point where they can save themselves independently of him? Or do you ask God to work everything in them that is necessary for their salvation? Do you ask God to work in their conviction of bringing them to the understanding of their sin?

Do you ask God to bring them to belief? Do you ask God to bring them to repentance? I believe every Christian, whatever your label is, whether you call yourself an Arminian or a Calvinist or whatever, every Christian prays that God will simply and categorically save their loved ones. And so through that prayer, your prayer on behalf of others, we actually all, all Christians, confess and acknowledge the sovereignty of God's grace. Jesus Christ said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me."

And I would say that all Christians everywhere believe this and live according to this because the Spirit inside us prompts us to believe that. So then why wouldn't we say that sometimes Jesus is sovereign and sometimes he isn't? Sometimes he isn't in control of these things. Why would we say he has ninety-nine percent authority and not one hundred percent? Well, I believe there are a few causes to this.

Sometimes it's our need to maintain absolutes. In our minds, it's very difficult to maintain two things at the same time. When we talk about the Trinity, how hard is it to imagine a God who is three in one that we just professed before? Three in one at the same time, completely different, unique identities, and yet the same being.

It's hard to maintain absolutes. It's hard not to maintain absolutes. People see that the Bible teaches man's responsibility for his actions, and we see that in Matthew twenty-eight. Jesus says, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. I can control human interactions and decisions, and yet I send you to go into the world to make disciples."

We see that interplay. We see in many other places biblical truth where we see that the Bible teaches man's responsibility for his actions, but then we find it difficult to see how this is consistent with the sovereign lordship of Christ over these actions. So in order to maintain biblical truth of human responsibility, we are tempted to reject the equal biblical and doctrinal truth of the divine sovereignty of Jesus Christ and of God. And so we have to be careful we don't fall into the same traps as many people do by oversimplifying very real, very weighty biblical texts by cutting out the mystery altogether and letting our minds run with one truth at the expense of the other.

The Bible doesn't give us that option. We maintain the two in this tension: full human responsibility. We love Jesus Christ by obeying His commands, and yet He is involved in making us love Him. Friends, we serve a God who is more powerful than we can imagine, even begin to imagine.

We serve a King who said, "No one takes my life from me." You think that He said this in John. He says, "You will see that this will happen and you will believe that people have killed me, but no one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord and I have the power to take it up again." Abraham Kuyper, the great theologian and pastor of the early twentieth century, wrote this:

He said, "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence in which Christ does not cry 'mine.'" There is not a square inch of this world that Jesus doesn't say that is mine. That is mine. That is mine. Everything.

Every single thing has come under the kingship of Christ because of the cross, but more importantly, of the resurrection, which has crowned Him and vindicated Him as the Son of God, God incarnate. The resurrection showed that He truly did have the right to claim supreme authority. And before He left, He told this ragtag bunch of individuals, "All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. In light of this, Jesus said, 'Therefore, therefore,' very important to recognise that word, because of authority given to me, 'go and make disciples of all nations.'"

It is only in light of Jesus' absolute authority we have to remember that Jesus commissions his people to be testimony bearers, witnesses to Him, to the ends of the earth. It's very important to remember that Jesus' last words were before He ascended into heaven. His very last words were not options. His very last words were not fluffy goodbyes or anything like that. His last words were commandments, directions, a mission statement: to go.

Emile Brunner, another theologian of the twentieth century, famously said that the church exists by mission as fire exists by burning. The church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning. In other words, you can't have a fire without burning, and you can't have a church without mission. According to the Bible, worship is mission. Mission is worship.

You can't separate the two. The church, in other words, truly glorifies God by making Him known to the world. First Peter two, verse nine says that the church is a royal priesthood, a chosen nation, a people that belongs to God, declaring the praises of Him who called them out of darkness into His wonderful light. That is who the church is, a royal priesthood. And you read these verbs in this statement: to declare, to pronounce, to preach, to share, to explain the praises of God.

And to whom? Presumably to everyone who has an ear to hear, everyone who is willing to listen. That is the purpose of the church. Mission and evangelism defines, or should define, our nature as Christians.

Mission and evangelism should define this church. It's not one activity that we can designate to a committee or a team to be involved with or organise. Evangelism is the heart of the church. It can't sit on an agenda alongside another list of items vying for attention. The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.

And I believe that God is in the process of shaking the church out of its complacency, the Western church out of its complacency of this very thing. As the Australian church senses more and more the alienation we have from the standards and the norms of society around us, as I sit and counsel young people wrestling with the idea of why Christians hold to its views on homosexuality and marriage, we sense that more and more we hold on to a truth that doesn't coincide with the values around us, and we become less and less comfortable with this. It does something to us.

But that also means we become more and more active because we have to start doing some real work. We have to really think deeply about these things. We have to know why we stand on these things. And so we pray more. We have to be on our knees more.

And in this discussion with other people, we will naturally almost evangelise more. Because the cornerstone for what we believe in is Jesus Christ. Nothing else we stand by or hold to makes sense without Him. And Jesus said, "Go," to disciples who lived in a world very similar to ours. And it's interesting in the structure of that long sentence we find in verses eighteen to twenty, the word or the verb to go is the leading verb.

It defines grammatically everything else that follows it. It is the headline verb or word here: go. And as a leading verb, it determines everything that follows it. The making of disciples, the teaching of these disciples, the obeying of these disciples, a whole lot. If the disciples didn't go, then the rest wouldn't happen.

If the disciples didn't go, then we wouldn't be here. What does this command to go then mean for us? It may require many different things actually for us. It may require that some of us will go physically. We will go to Papua New Guinea.

We will go to the Solomon Islands. We will go to Africa. Some of us will do this. We shouldn't be surprised if we have missionaries in our church. But it may also mean that some of us stay here.

But regardless of all of this, this is what that verb really means. It means dynamic action. It means dynamic action. It requires movement. It requires innovation.

It requires energy to be spent. Wherever we find ourselves, whatever location, whatever church community, you may not stay here forever. Our very existence as a church of God should drive us intentionally to evangelise in our workplaces, in our university groups, in our schools, to bring others into a living relationship with Jesus Christ. And how that looks may differ. It may require, for some of us, to carefully plan great events where we can host small groups or big groups or evangelistic outreaches, but it may also require us to have a robust relationship with a friend, intentionally, to talk about, to debate.

It can happen while giving professional advice. It can happen in a counselling session to a client. It can happen lying under a car working with a mate to fix a leak. Because all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus, He says go. And I know what I'm going to say next is controversial, but your workplace does not have more authority over you and your witness than Jesus does.

If they say don't proselytise or don't evangelise, as far as possible, be respectful of that, but it doesn't prevent you. It doesn't harness you. It doesn't command you more than Jesus does. The connection, friends, we have to remember, the connection between all authority has been given and the command to go is so important. If Jesus really is King of the entire universe, then we have nothing to worry about in going to all nations.

We have nothing to worry about in sharing the gospel. Why? Because we trust that He is in control over whether we lose our jobs for talking to people about Jesus or inviting them to church. He is in control whether we win the favour of our boss or friends. And since He is sovereign King, whatever people think of us anyway should always come second to what Jesus Christ thinks of us.

Jesus says go, and so we must go. The second clause that Jesus mentions here is baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Why baptism? Why does Jesus say this? Why baptise?

Well, baptism in the New Testament was the initiation into the kingdom or the people of God. It meant an incorporation into the church. It's a right of entry into the people of God. But Jesus, notice, doesn't say anything about the church. Jesus says we baptise people into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And what does He mean by that? Well, Christianity is the only faith that understands and believes in a triune God, like I mentioned before. Again, the statement we sang together this morning, the doctrine of the Trinity is that God is one being who eternally exists in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What this means in essence is that God is relational.

God is relational. He continually interacts within Himself, within these three persons, loving each other, serving each other, and we see glimpses of that in the Bible, how the Son serves the Father, how the Holy Spirit serves the Son. The Bible says that the Son serves Him, serves the Father, and the Spirit serves the Son, and the Father serves the Son. And so the inner life of this triune God, we see, again, glimpses into a mirror, darkly shining.

We see glimpses of this where there is a self-giving, a mutual self-giving within the Godhead. Tim Keller, in talking about the Trinity, says that in life, thinking about our own relationships, when we've truly loved someone, we enter into a dynamic orbit around them. And else, our interests and their interests become our orbit. But this is what the Bible shows of God too. Each of the divine persons of the Trinity centres upon the other.

Each person in the Trinity voluntarily serves the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration onto them. And this creates a dynamic interplay within the two that C.S. Lewis would eventually call the dance of God. The dance of God. The astonishing concept of the Trinity is, although very philosophical, actually has a lot of very practical implications for us as Christians. When Jesus commissions his followers to baptise others into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, what He is saying is He's inviting us to bring people into the family.

He's saying bring them into this Godhead who existed before eternity, in eternity, and invite them into this dance. Bring them into this self-giving relationship. Christianity, He says, is not simply about having sins forgiven in order to go to heaven one day. The purpose of Jesus Christ coming to Earth, the purpose of Christianity is to proclaim a world that is going to be right again, a purpose where He is redeeming, where God is redeeming creation.

By commanding us to baptise people into the Trinity, Jesus says, "Bring them to know us. Bring them to know us. Show them the pulsating, joyful, delightful, self-giving nature of who I am." Jesus says, "Make disciples by baptising them into the name, initiating them into this relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." And so it means for us that we invite people into a family.

But then after this, Jesus goes on, and the question we ask is: how do we, after joining with this dance of God, how do we actually dance? Once we've been invited into this relationship, how do we dance? How do we maintain and grow in this relationship with God? This is where Jesus' last phrase of the Great Commission comes in. He says, "Teach them everything I have commanded you."

You will know this, mums and dads, more than I do. When a baby is born and brought into a family, you never leave the baby there. You never take them up to their room and put them in the cot and say, "Now baby, here's your bottle. Feed yourself three times a day. You know, there's plenty of milk in the fridge, plenty of formula in the cupboard.

Help yourself. Here's wet wipes to clean your bum." We don't do that. Babies aren't brought into families and then left there, nor does God invite us into His family and leave us to our own devices. In a healthy family, babies are nurtured and prepared for adulthood.

Again, Jesus didn't come simply to set sinners free from their past, but to set sinners free from a future problem too. He comes to correct our lives. He comes to correct our thinking. And we find that in His teaching. Jesus spent three years with his disciples teaching them.

Three years. But the ministry school that Jesus put His disciples through would become our ministry school. The Bible college and the seminary that Jesus imparted on His disciples would become our college and our seminary. When Jesus taught His disciples and what He taught them, we need to know as well to be considered Christians. And so we evangelise in order for others to know this as well.

If you are worried about how to evangelise very practically, if you are worried about how to evangelise, the first thing you need to do is to bring them to the gospel. Bring them to Matthew or Mark or Luke or John and read that with him. Let Jesus' teaching teach these people. Take them to Jesus first. To teach others what Jesus commanded is pointing to what we have in God's word.

We believe God's word is what Jesus commanded us as well. But also, I want us to say that Jesus' teaching, not simply the content thereof, but how Jesus taught should inspire us as well. It should motivate us as well in how we go about doing this. Jesus was constantly teaching, but He was always doing this in some sort of relational way. It was always a dialogue, not a monologue.

It was questions and answers. It was never one-way talk, and He did it everywhere. He was doing it when He was eating. He was doing it when He was attending with the sick. He was doing it when He was walking along the road.

We should take the opportunities as God gives them to us: while we're driving and in our car with a mate, when we're walking, you know, doing our morning walk, or whether we are washing dishes next to someone. It means we invite people into our small groups, into our home groups as they meet. And in that, we welcome debate. It should never be, "Listen, I'm going to tell you from go to woe the story. And then whatever you do with that, that's your problem."

We engage. We welcome debate. We seek opportunities to engage and to teach and to listen. But what Jesus commanded us, I'm also challenged this morning. What Jesus commanded us, He also says here, He has taught us to do first.

People should learn the truth about forgiveness, but not simply from a brilliant sermon on Romans five. Jesus would have us teach forgiveness by resting in His finished work instead of anxiously trying to justify ourselves. Our lives reflect that. They should understand the nature of Christian hope not only as they listen to a Bible study in Romans eight, but as they see us groaning in the face of suffering while praying for God to mould us according to His purpose. Jesus says, "Teach others to obey everything I have commanded you.

You first." And so we share God's word while at the same time we apply it very carefully to our own lives as well. Jesus said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And then He says, 'And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.'"

That is the greatest way to end this sermon. With the empowering of Jesus Christ, the King of the universe, He sends us out to move with dynamic action, to spend our energy with ever watchful eyes to incorporate people into the family of God, nurturing them and pleading with them and teaching them so that they may become disciple-making disciples in turn. But even in this, we know and we have the assurance that He is with us. That He doesn't leave us to this device, that He doesn't depart from us with His last will and testament. He is with us forever until the very end of the age, until, as the Psalm says, until the sea dries up or the mountains turn to dust. God is with us.

And He is our comfort and our support even in this till the very end of the age. This is a promise to us. This is our challenge as a church, that this is our mission statement. This is our purpose: to go into the world and make disciples of the nations. Let's not forget it.

Let's be moved by this, and we need to hear this again this morning. Let me pray for us. Oh heavenly Father, there are people on our hearts that weigh on our souls, that weigh on our minds, Lord, that come up so often in our quiet times. God, we need those people to be saved by You. Lord, we implore You.

We plead with You, God, that You will move in their lives. We ask, Lord, that You will convict their hearts, that You will open their eyes and ears. We ask, Lord, simply that You will save them. But in this, Father, we also say: use us, send us, give us opportunities to witness, to be like that image in First Peter of a chosen priesthood declaring the praises of the one who has saved us. Father, may we, as we exist and reside in this ever darkening world, may we speak boldly, winsomely, patiently, compassionately with friends and relatives, extended family, Lord, who need to know You, who need to bow their knee to You.

Father God, thank You, lastly, that You have not left us to do this in our own strength, that You are with us always until the end of the age. Father, we pray that as we are commissioned again by these words, as we are challenged again by these words, as we reflect again on our evangelism and our witness of the glory and the salvation You have poured into our lives, Lord, that we will not move here, go here, leave here unchanged. And we pray, Lord, that You will give us the necessary words to say.

We thank You that that is also a promise in Your word, that You will guide us when we need to say those things. Help us to know Your word better. Help us to be better ambassadors of You as well. We ask by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.