I began this series of blog posts yesterday with a look at the first part of the Great Commission. From the command to “go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we discerned two great expectations for GCF.
The first: expect God to use GCF to challenge people to a real conversion that leads to a life of passionately loving him. The second: expect God to challenge you to a radical commitment to God’s people: the church.
Today, I want to pick up on the second part of the Great Commission: “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
We’ll break the discussion of this portion of the commandment into three parts.
First, there is the content of Jesus’ teaching. When the disciples first heard this command, their minds must have sifted back through all the times they had spent listening to Jesus teach them and teach the crowds. Passages like the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), Jesus’ ministry instructions to his disciples (Matthew 10) and Jesus’ parables (scattered throughout Matthew 18-26) would certainly have come to mind.
We also know that the content of Jesus’ teaching, along with his teaching style, were extraordinary. Having grown quite tired of the lofty and oppressive platitudes of the religious leaders, the crowds are so refreshed by Jesus’ teaching that Matthew tells us “the crowds were astonished at his teaching for he was teaching as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7.28-29). “Ouch” for the their teachers.
If you read Jesus’ teachings in Matthew closely and specifically in the Sermon on the Mount, you will notice that Jesus had a vast knowledge of the Old Testament; the Bible of his day. Jesus even tells us, in the Sermon on the Mount, that he has come not to abolish God’s law (being the Old Testament) but to fulfill it.
Observing that which Jesus commanded us to do means observing all that we have been taught in scripture. Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, is the content of Jesus’ teaching.
As we think about scripture as the content of Jesus’ teaching we must be careful to avoid what Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, calls our culture’s almost automatic disassociation of Jesus from anything that could be considered, or even construed as either brilliant or intellectual. Willard goes on to add, “If this is how he seems to you, are you going to be inclined to become his student? Of course not.”
Observing all that Jesus commanded to his disciples means that we must become not only a student of scripture, but a student of the Bible under Jesus’ tutelage and guidance. If we think Jesus to be a no-nothing bumpkin who roamed around a third-class country some 2000 years ago then we will have little incentive to be his students. On the other hand, if we recognize him to be who he is: the exceptionally brilliant Son of the Most High God, then we will come to understand that being a student of the content of his teaching and his exposition of that teaching is a privilege that only an idiot would pass up.
Secondly, we are suffering from the collapse of the Christian Catechesis. Big words, huh? Let me explain it. Catechesis is a Latin word that means “to sound down”. Christian catechesis, then, is the teaching of Scripture and doctrine not only to children and youth, but to all of Jesus’ followers; no matter how old or young they are.
In their book Resurrecting Excellence L. Gregory Jones and Kevin Armstrong note that one of the biggest difficulties facing Bible Colleges, Christian colleges, seminaries and other institutions of ministry training is the fact that God is calling his followers into ministry but they are arriving at their institutions of ministry training without even a basic, rudimentary knowledge of the Bible or Christian doctrine.
This is, as Jones and Armstrong point out, a huge failure on the part of the church and it means that the full-time Christian servants that are returned to the church or the mission field out of those institutions are not as well-prepared as they should be to lead others in observing all that Jesus commanded.
There is only one solution. The church must recover catechesis. We must be serious about the training of our children, our youth, new converts and even seasoned followers in the ever-deeper ways of the faith. About three months ago, we started a new team at GCF, the Discipleship Team, to help us begin focusing on this area of the life of our body.
We must be well-trained in scripture if we are to observe all that Jesus commanded us to observe and that will take more than an hour and a half on Sunday mornings. It is a process that requires broad planning across the life of our church to give Biblical, doctrinal and spiritual instruction in our Community Groups, Study Groups and even in the midst of our personal times of prayer and reflection with the Lord.
Tullian Tchvidjian, grandson of Billy Graham, founder of New City Church and now the Senior Pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church writes this in his book Unfashionable: “Nowhere does the Bible say the Christian faith is private, partial, and compartmentalized. On the contrary, the Christian faith is public, pervasive and complete.” God wants GCF unified together in a process of learning to observe all that he has commanded us.
Finally, we must heed the call of Christ to live Biblically. Jesus calls us to be salt and light in the world. Salt is a preservative and light dispels darkness. Our role in the world is to preserve it; to be a voice calling people to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. Our role in the world is to call out the darkness where it exists by shining the light of Jesus Christ onto the darkness. We cannot do this without observing all that Jesus has commanded us to do.
Another quote from Tchividjian’s book Unfashionable:
This epidemic of professing Christians ignoring the Bible has led theologian Michael Horton to ask if churches are guilty of secularizing America. Christians are quick, he notes, to “launch public protests against ’secular humanists’ for diminishing the role of God in American society’, yet ‘the more likely source of secularization is the church itself.’ Our first concern should not be that God is treated so flippantly in American culture but that he is not taken seriously in our own churches. As Pogo famously said, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’”
We have seen the impact of a Biblically ignorant (for we have far exceeded Biblical illiteracy) on our greater culture. A Biblically ignorant church is an impotent church. Now it is time to witness the impact of a Biblically intelligent church upon the greater culture. A Biblically intelligent church is a church that is filled with God’s power as it observes all that Jesus commanded.
Great expectation # 3 for GCF (or any other church, for that matter): Expect to be trained in the ways of the Bible and the Christian tradition and expect to be expected to observe all that Jesus commanded of his followers.
A couple of questions to think about today . . .
1. Do you intentionally memorize scripture?
2. Do you regularly read the Bible expecting God to call you to change something in your life or the way you are treating someone else?
3. Do you spend time with other believers studying God’s word and learning how to apply it to your life?
