Mission

Today's reading is from the gospel according to Matthew chapter 28.

Matthew 28 · chapter mention

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.

And when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.

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.

This is God's word.

You may be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Let's pray and then we'll move into our text for the morning.

Holy Father, we thank you for bringing us together.

We thank you for the work that you have done for your church, your faithfulness to your church, Lord.

We praise you that your promise to be with us has proved true throughout the ages.

And Lord, we thank you that it continues still this morning.

So, Lord, as we come together into your presence, as you promise to inhabit our praises, you promise that where two or three are gathered, that you are with us in some sort of special way.

Lord, we pray that we would acknowledge that and that this whole morning takes place before your face as we gather together to worship you.

Lord, we pray that our worship would honor you and glorify you.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, yeah, thanks for joining us this morning.

You may notice um some nude furniture up here.

Uh because for communion today, we've got cups that we'll be drinking out of.

Uh we're not just dipping this morning.

So it's an exciting morning.

Picked a great morning to come to Redemption Church Denver.

Also, um it's it's only 9.50, and I'm starting preaching.

Yeah.

Okay, the the Holy Sacrament was not as exciting, but the starting on time, I that is, that is pretty exciting.

So we we we really did it.

I mean, great work, everybody.

Um, to start on time.

I was joking on the way in.

The reason that we've committed to starting on time, instead of just starting like, you know, whenever we feel like, um, is just so that we can generate fights between couples on the drive here.

Great.

So uh we just wanted to, you know, there's a lot of young families, and we just wanted to make it harder on you guys uh to get to church on Sunday morning.

So anyway, you it'll be sanctifying in the long run.

Um consider it all joy, my brothers, when you face trials of various kinds.

So this year marks the sixth year of Redemption Church Denver, and if all goes according to plan, this will be the year that we joined the Presbyterian Church in America.

I spent all Thursday at our uh Presbytery meeting.

Those take place three times a year, and it's all the churches in our region gather together and they make decisions and uh people become ordained.

In April, I should be the one who is becoming ordained.

And that will um uh it basically entail I'll go before a committee and they'll grill me on all sorts of theological things.

I got to witness this happening to um uh one poor man.

Uh and then you go before the presbytery, and then the presbytery grills you on those things, and you what you learn is um people have pet projects in theology that they they really care about.

Um and they they stand up and ask and ask those questions.

Um and there's also all kinds of wonderful things taking place.

There's um committees for shepherding.

So when local churches are experiencing particular difficulties and perhaps in their leadership or on their elder boards, there's committees that uh travel and just care for those people.

There's a mission to North America, which is um uh an exciting thing to be a part of.

It's a church planting sort of uh uh mission within the Presbyterian Church in America.

It's planting churches in it really uh uh eager to plant churches, especially here on the front range, um, which will be an exciting thing to be a part of.

There's um uh missions for Christian education and just the the building up of Christian education for discipling uh the children amongst us.

There's missions for uh there's a mission to the state, which is uh a guy who just it's actually several folks that just go to the Capitol every day.

They sort of treat it like a campus ministry, and they just connect with politicians and the people that work in the Capitol every day and seek to build relationships and pray with them and to um uh seek their hearts for the Lord.

Uh there's the Reformed University Fellowship, uh, which is the campus ministry of the PCA, which is an exciting thing to be a part of.

I met uh the campus director of Colorado State University, which means that we got we gotta get somebody for the buffs.

So there's not an RUF for the University of Colorado.

I think everybody's scared, you know.

Um, but I'd say it's prime time we had a yeah, so I've got a couple of initiatives in my back pocket I'd like to see.

You got a couple of changes in mind for this uh presbytery.

Um and uh we uh uh sang and worshiped together and took communion together, and uh uh it was a it was an exciting time.

So anyway, that that is our our full participation in that community is is coming forward for our church, and so we're taking this time at the beginning of the year to sort of take a step back and it and look at the church itself.

And as I've explained, this is not something that you want to do all the time because the church is meant to serve a sort of invisible function in the lives of uh its members.

And uh when the church is really working well, you're just looking through it.

You're not considering it a lot, you're considering Jesus a lot.

You're considering how it is that you love one another a lot uh when the church is really working, and the church sort of itself becomes invisible.

But just like if you get a smudge on your glasses, uh it is helpful to every now and again take off the thing that you are looking through so that you might look at the thing you're looking through and uh understand it more completely, uh make adjustments and corrections so that we might see through it uh uh more rightly.

I was gonna say more better.

That's where my head was really going, but then I it would have been embarrassing to have said that in front of all of you.

So what we've looked at is the central focus of our church, which is the gospel.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the central focus of the church.

And from the gospel, which is the announcement that Christ is Lord, that it is Christ who has atoned for our sins, who draws us together and adopted us, and it is his lordship, which is to spread over all of the world.

This is the central focus of the church.

And our response to that is our worship.

So worship is the central activity of the church, but out of our worship flow these two characteristics: that is the nurture of the church and the mission of the church.

So from our worship flows the nurture of the church, which is that the church cares for those who are its members.

The church care, we as the church care for one another.

And God understood that the type of creatures that we are are relational beings.

He built us to be in relationship with himself and in relationship to one another.

And so we can't know God as these isolated, autonomous individuals disconnected from one another.

We require relationship for knowledge.

And so, in order that we might know God, God draws us into his church, that we might share and participate in his love for us, in our love for one another.

And also flowing out of our worship is the mission of the church.

And that means the church is not just care is not just occupied with our love for ourselves, it is not just this sort of navelgazing organization, but it is uh it is an institution that cares for those who are outside of its membership.

It is a seeking institution, one who seeks to love those who are outside of the church, that they might one day share in the nurture of the church.

And those are those are ways that we worship God.

And they are also ways that we participate in the very things that Christ does for us.

When Christ calls us into his body, we receive his nurture and his particular care for us, who he calls friends, he calls brothers, who we call together with him the Father, our Father, because we are adopted into his family.

And we share with Christ in his pursuit of those who are not in him, because that's what he did for us.

He came from the heavens, took on flesh, the second person of the Trinity, was humbled to the point of being born, and humbled even to the point of death on a cross in his pursuit of his people.

And so he calls us to share in that pursuit as well, and that is the mission of the church.

And that's what we're looking at this morning.

Today we are looking at the mission of the church.

Now, the church as an organization that nurtures and cares for its own, it's relatively non-controversial.

But the church as a missionary organization is the place that the church experiences its greatest controversy.

And this, of course, makes sense because that is where we come face to face with the most disagreement.

Because our proclamation is this Christ is Lord.

But there are a lot of competing lords, and entire cultures and nations are formed around competing lords.

And our announcement is Christ is Lord.

Now, the church was born into this moment in the first century where this was laid out in perhaps its most stark terms, where the political environment was such that the emperor was worshipped as a son of God.

And so the proclamation into that environment that Christ is Lord is a direct proclamation that Caesar is not.

And so there's this hostility that the early church immediately encounters.

And that is obvious that that is just sensible, because it is in turning outward that that hostility is faced.

And the mission of the church is like the mission of a kingdom.

It is like the mission of a kingdom in that it has enemies, it has places that it seeks to bring into submission, the hearts and minds of people that it seeks to bring into submission of its Lord.

And it has this sort of, I'll use a controversial word just so it's provocative.

The church has this imperialist flavor to it.

It seeks to cross borders and move into them and bring people into the allegiance of Christ in his kingdom above all their other allegiances.

But there is a difference because, like all kingdoms have enemies, the church too has enemies, but the difference is not in kind, but in relationship.

How is it that the church is called to relate to her enemies?

It is to love her enemies.

That is a unique disposition among all the kingdoms of the world.

Because we are to seek the nations in the very way that Christ sought us.

And just as was read this morning in Galatians 2.20, he is the one who loved us and gave himself up for us.

And so we see that the mission of the church has these kingdom parallels, and it is a kingdom structure, but it is shaped by the gospel.

That first principle, which propels us in mission to declare Christ as Lord, also shows us the means in which we participate in the proclamation of Christ's Lordship, which is we seek in the way that Christ sought.

And he sought in a way that loved his enemies, even at great cost to himself, so that they might be brought in and experience the love of Christ.

And so we share in that mission together this morning.

Last week, I'm preaching, by the way, I forgot my iPad in the mountains, so I'm preaching on paper.

Like, like the I don't know, like what is this?

Like like 1901 something.

It's absurd.

It's archaic medium.

Just as we saw last week, nurture is the is the reason that Christ calls us into the nurture of the church in order to know him is because that is the type of creature that you are.

You are made relationally.

Relationship, in fact, is prior to knowledge for you.

And you know this, but this is most evident in that you came from a mother, you depended on her knowledge in order that you might become a person in the world.

By her love, you were brought into the world.

And so you are necessarily this relational being.

And we experience the nurture of the church in that same way.

As we are reborn, the church plays this motherly role in loving us when we have no knowledge of our own, so that we might gain the knowledge of the church.

Well, just as the nurture of the church is sort of baked into the reality of what it means to be human, and is this restoration of what it means to be human, so too is the mission of the church baked into the reality of what it means to be human.

That what it is it is necessary that if Christ is saving and redeeming the humans that He made in the way that He made them, that He would make them a multiplying people, that they would become a new type of person that multiplies the type of person that they are out into the world.

When God created Adam and Eve on the sixth day, he blessed them.

But it's a strange blessing because it's a command.

And this blessing that he gives to them is this in Genesis 1.28, it says, And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So Adam and Eve, at the sixth day of creation, are the crown of creation.

And they are given dominion over all the creatures, and they are called themselves to be fruitful and to multiply over the world.

Now, a way to understand this is God has done this incredible creative work.

You can actually um go to this museum and visit the creative work that God did.

I'm just kidding, it's everything.

You've seen it.

It's great.

It's really great.

And when God does this work and he places humanity into it, he says to them, now you with me do what I've been doing.

Do what I've been doing as the type of thing that you are.

So you create people.

You make categories and separations and divisions, and you be the ones, just as I spoke everything into existence and gave them their names.

Now you name the creatures in the world.

So you be a generative force, a naming force in this goodness which I have built into creation, you make more of it.

Become, share with me in this creative work that I have done by participating alongside of me in this glorious creation.

And so when God redeems the sinful people, a people who had fallen from their had corrupted the dominion that they held, people who were meant to be the good kings over the world, who ended up being tyrannical leaders under their obedience to Satan, when God sought to redeem those people, he did not throw away the goodness of the humanity that he had placed in them.

He did not say to them, Now that I have redeemed you, you will no longer share in the generative work that I have called you to at the beginning.

He didn't say, Hey, that first project, the be fruitful and multiply, take dominion thing, where you would be under me and all that you did would honor me as God, and that would lead to you generating a fruitfulness into the world.

Well, once Satan got involved, I decided to just abandon that project completely.

That's not the way the story goes.

God's redemptive act is a restoration of all of his good intentions that he had at the beginning of creation.

And so we should see the beginning of creation and we should anticipate that all of the goodness that he had built into this, he is redeeming.

And so, if he is making a new people for himself, how could it be that he would make a people and then say, This great redemptive work that I have done, you will not share in?

That's not the way that he works.

He shows us the way that he works in creation.

As he says, This great creative work that I have done, you will share in, so too he says, in this great redemptive work that I have done, you will share in.

And the way that Christ calls us to share in that redemptive work is by showing us his authority as God, by sending us out to, in a sense, be fruitful and multiply and take dominion, and promising us that he will be with us, that he will be our God and we will be his people.

And so we understand that just as our nurture was nested in the reality of who we are as relational beings, and so in order to know him, we need to be called into this relationship.

Well, so too, the mission of the church can be understood as the restoration of who we are, as fruitful beings, who are meant to be who are sharing in the creative work of God alongside of him.

That the fullness of our humanity is redeemed in this story.

So this morning we're looking at the Great Commission itself.

It's been a long time, and I I don't think I've ever preached on the Great Commission, which is probably absurd.

So here we go.

We finally we finally made it.

Thanks for sticking around.

Matthew 28, um, 16 through 20.

We're going to look at the Great Commission.

We're going to see the great claim that Christ makes, the Great Commission, and the Great Promise.

The three things in the Great Commission.

Matthew 28, 16 through 17, provide us some context.

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.

And when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.

This is after the resurrection, and Jesus had instructed the disciples to meet them at a mountain in Galilee.

We don't have the particular instruction, but it was common for them to meet on a mountain in Galilee.

This is sort of, you know, for old time's sake, the one last hurrah, he might have said.

And the disciples meet him there, and as they see Jesus coming, there's mixture in the eleven.

Now, of course, it's eleven now because Judas had gone his own way.

And there's mixture in the eleven as Christ approaches.

Is this really the same Jesus?

The same Jesus we had met on this mountain before, the same Jesus who we have seen die on the cross, the same Jesus we witnessed buried.

Could this be the same Jesus?

Others, however, believed this is Jesus walking towards us.

It makes sense that Jesus, when he approaches the seed form of the church, and he's about to announce the mission that they will go on, that he approaches mixture.

Because Jesus always comes to a world of mixture.

When Jesus comes to his church, he comes to wheat and chaff.

And when Jesus comes to the world, he comes to those who, to some, he will be an aroma from life to life.

To others, he will be the aroma from death to death.

Jesus is the dividing line of the mixture.

And he reveals and exposes it.

But as Jesus approaches, the absoluteness of His claims show that he is who he says he is.

He is the one that they had seen on the cross.

And he is more than they could have possibly imagined.

And so that's what he explains to the disciples in this first claim, the great claim of Jesus before them.

Verse 18, and Jesus came to them, and Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

You've heard that phrase before.

But this is about the most comprehensive claim anyone can make.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

This is the claim of God's own authority.

And Jesus says, This is mine.

All that you see, you know, everything the light touches.

But what about that dark, shadowy place?

Yeah, that too.

All authority in heaven and on earth belongs to Christ.

This is the completion of that self-referential term that Christ used for himself throughout his ministry, as he referred to himself as the Son of Man.

And it's sort of a peculiar term until you read in Daniel 7 this vision that Daniel had in the night.

And in verse 13 and 14 of Daniel 7, he says, I saw in the night visions.

And behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man.

Now, that just means like a person.

You know, one who was like the son of a man.

And he came to the ancient of days, which is God, and was presented before him.

Verse 14.

And to him, the Son of Man, was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.

His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

And so Christ has referred to himself as the Son of Man throughout his whole ministry, and Daniel perceived this as in a vision far off, one full of mystery in the way that he receives it.

It is not as though Daniel received this vision of the Son of Man and was like, oh, there's going to be like Jesus, God's going to take on flesh and become incarnate.

No, this is a deeply mysterious vision far off.

It is like when Jesus was walking towards the eleven disciples, and they are filled with this mixture until he arrives and confirms who he is.

So too was Daniel's vision from far off.

But here the disciples see it.

Not in, not through a glass dimly, but behold, the Son of Man himself, and he announces all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

This is the announcement of the gospel.

This is the announcement that there is a new king.

The king who is on the throne is the one who holds all authority.

And that king is Jesus.

The authority of God is given to Jesus.

These most central claims of our faith can become like a coin that's been used so much that its embossment has worn off and we forget what the original meaning is.

And so when we hold it, we don't realize the wonder of the thing that we're holding.

We are saying that there is a man who is God.

That man lived on the earth.

That he reigns in the heavens now.

There is a son of man on the throne of heaven.

One like you on the throne of heaven.

So that he might rule and reign over you as one who absolutely knows you, knows what it is to be man.

And he reigns now because he is fully God.

Fully God and fully man.

If your categories are breaking, you're beginning to understand it.

This is the truth of our faith that makes our missional proclamation feel that much more absurd.

And we need to be brought face to face with just like the feeling of the absurdity of this proclamation.

Because it is one thing to say we have discovered the principles which hold and govern the world, which hold together the world.

And so I might go to a laboratory and do physics, you know.

Occasionally I just descend into vaudeville up here, which is probably not good.

And I'll discover I've got it.

I've got a unifying theory.

I've got the God particle or something.

I've got the the principle which is able to unite all the strangeness of the quantum world with all of the usefulness of the Newtonian world and all of the whatever Einstein said.

I don't know.

I haven't seen Oppenheimer since theaters.

And there's uh, and it all of those get united into this principle.

And I say, I have the principle which governs the world.

And we might be able to go out into the world, and there wouldn't be this hostility that it would be met with, because we would say, this is impersonal.

This is true whether you like it or not, but this is the absolute principle of the world.

And there's a sense in which an absolute principle like that makes no demands on you, because it is an impersonal principle, which we would say has all authority in heaven and on earth.

It's inviolable.

But this absolute is not a mere principle.

Our claim of what holds absolute authority in heaven and on earth, which demands your obedience, is of a person.

One person, Jesus Christ.

That is the scandal of particularity, theologians have referred to it as.

And it can be what this is one of the most challenging aspects of our faith to communicate that we are saying that the absolute is personal.

That which demands your total allegiance is a person who you relate to by means of love and awe and worship and obedience, that those things are not some other category from the laws of physics, that something like love is a part of the structure of reality.

So that the world is upheld by it, because the absolute that governs the world is a person.

And that person is one man with a name.

Jesus Christ has been given all authority in heaven and on earth.

There is no king which stands above him, there is no law of nature which overrules him.

He is absolute over all things, in which that means that he deserves absolute allegiance, absolute obedience, in the way that a mere principle does not, but in a way that a person, a king, does.

And so this is his announcement.

The very authority of God has been given to Jesus Christ.

And how is it that he receives this authority?

In Philippians 2, it's described to us that he was raised up above all other names, that he was highly exalted because he was the most humiliated.

Because he, the one who is deserving of the most honor, took on flesh, being born just like any of us, and not in a high state, but being born in a lowly state.

And then he is treated as a criminal, and he is punished even to the point of death, and not just death, but death on a cross, bearing the wrath of God, treated as a sinner, bearing the curse as one who hangs on a tree.

And in this absoluteness of his humiliation, the Father sees fit to exalt him as the name above every name.

And so it is this Christ who walks before them, the Son of Man, who has all authority in heaven and on earth.

This is our proclamation.

Christ is Lord.

Christ is Lord of all.

We don't have categories for this, because we think of absolutes as being just principles, and we think of persons as being fickle and unreliable, changeable.

And so there's either something which cannot be known and related to in the principle, or there's something which cannot be absolutely trusted and demand absolute allegiance.

But in Christ, they are one.

The absolute is a personal absolute.

This is an incredible claim that Jesus is making.

This is an incredible claim in our faith.

So with this claim and with the absoluteness of his authority being made known, Jesus then commissions the disciples.

He says in verse 19, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.

So we're just going to work through these words.

Go.

So he sends the disciples.

Just as Christ was sent by the Father and came into the world to go and seek those who were his enemies, he says, You go do the same.

Do what I've done.

You can't just stay anymore.

But now you must go.

And who he's telling this to are the 11 disciples.

These are the apostles, which means that it is for them.

I mean, look, you guys, most of you don't go, you know?

You just are you're here.

It's great.

I like, I like you guys being here.

And but this is this is told to the disciples who are told you will go from Judea to Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

And many of them will participate in that uh literally.

They will be ones who are traveling, missionaries like Paul.

But this is given, because it's given to the apostles, this means that it is given to the church as a whole.

It is given to those who are the foundation stone of the church, which means this is not just their mission, this is our mission.

Because it's given to the apostles, this means it is for us.

And it's something that we participate in as the church.

We are a sent people, which means we cannot look away from those who are outside of our borders.

But our love must spread beyond.

So, go.

The second word is, therefore, the grounds of our going to make disciples is Christ's universal claim of authority.

Because they might have said, Well, who are you to send us?

Who are you that we might go and proclaim your lordship over all things?

To which Christ would have said, See my previous sentence.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

So that means that he is the one who's in charge.

Do you guys remember the Pirates of the Caribbean?

The first one?

The good one.

And then Johnny Depp was like, this will be my personality now.

Forget that Gilbert Grape stuff.

This is way cooler.

And uh at the end of that movie, he gets the black pearl back.

Which was great.

And there's this, yeah, spoiler alert.

You can't do a spoiler, there's no spoilers in 2003.

Um yeah.

Uh Neo is the one.

299 die.

If you've seen 300.

Um He's on the Black Pearl, and he's finally back on he's back on the ship.

And there's this moment where he's just kind of like wandering around the ship.

It's it's so cool.

It's so un almost unthinkably cool.

And um he's like so just enjoying, and he grabs the helm and he's just like holding the helm of the ship.

And then it then it occurs and all his crew are just kind of like standing around, like, yeah, this is this is great.

And um then it occurs to him, I'm the captain of the ship.

And so he just starts barking orders, like you scallywags, get to the parts of the ship you're supposed to be at.

And they all start moving and they all start running around, and nobody, nobody says, Who are you, Jack Sparrow, to be barking these orders right now?

Why?

Because he's the captain of the ship.

The the authority of the ship belongs to him.

And then he says, Bring me that horizon, and that's cool.

So Jesus has all authority.

There is no other captain that can show up.

And so he commands this order: go make disciples.

We would say, maybe I'll opt into that.

No, this is the mission of the church.

It is nested in his absolute authority.

And so that is the therefore.

And so here's this question.

There is this imperialist nature to our faith, where we go and we say, your Lord is not the Lord.

The one we worship is the Lord is the Lord.

And then all of our cosmopolitan sensibilities, we just have this full-body cringe.

And then while we're in the coffee shop and we realize we just said something like that, and then we try and say, you know, which is just what I think, but you could, it could be a good thing for you too, whatever you're finding on your life's journey.

And then the person goes, Oh man, I'm glad thanks for the bailout.

Got really uncomfortable.

And then Christ stands there and says, I am the captain now.

Sorry, references just happen.

And Christ is saying, He, I am really Lord.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

This is your proclamation.

This is what you are describing.

To describe any less than that is to not describe the person of Christ.

It's to say that there is some other person who is absolute, of which no one makes a claim.

Or it is to say that the only true absolutes are impersonal, which is to say that your life as a person is the most important parts of your life, like your love and your obedience, your care and your relationships, are fundamentally meaningless.

Christ is Lord.

That is the therefore.

We proclaim it.

We go and proclaim that because all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to him.

And this is his announcement.

Go, therefore.

Third, make disciples.

This is the call.

Notice it is not merely win converts, it is not even merely proclaim.

But it is make disciples.

Such as you are, he's talking to his disciples, you do this for others.

Do you see how that is always the pattern of what God does?

What I have done for you, you go do for others.

And they will all lay their lives down for the church.

They will all lay their lives down so that disciples will be made.

What I have done for you, you go and do likewise.

Make disciples.

Now that means we we aren't in the disciple recruiting business.

We're not out there saying, like, who would you who among you are disciples?

If you believe all the things that we already believe, then you can come and be in this church world with us.

Well, that doesn't make any sense.

Because where do you learn to believe what the church believes?

At church.

So we aren't going to recruit disciples.

We're going to make disciples.

That means of people who are not disciples.

That means that we will be trying to persuade and to help understand in the strangeness of our claims, we'll try and make sensible to people so that they can be received.

We'll try and understand the ways in which Christ is incomprehensible to them, and we'll try and make him comprehensible.

We'll try and show them the contradictions that they are living within, and we'll try and show how Christ resolves them or exposes them.

We will make disciples, it is not done at mere conversion.

But you see how disciple making requires the nurture of the church.

Because it is within the church that we develop the relationships that allow us to participate in our relationship with Christ, and that allow us to grow in the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that we might walk in a manner that's worthy of him, that's fully pleasing to him, that bears fruit in every good work, that we might increase in the knowledge of God.

And so we seek disciples to be made and we engage with people who are outside of Christ, so that they might see the wonder and beauty of Christ, the Spirit might compel them to turn to Him and to place all their trust upon Him, and they might be surrounded by the nurture of the church, so that they might grow in their knowledge of Him.

We are called to make disciples.

That is a big task that the church is called to.

This has to be a movement of people.

You aren't just looking for the ascent to particular ideas, we're looking for the transformation of people's hearts so that we grow in our love for Christ, our King.

Fourthly, of all nations.

Look at the universality of Christ's call.

This is what was promised to him in Daniel that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.

This is the nature of his kingdom.

That it would transcend all borders, that it would cross into every tribe, nation, and tongue, so that all might see that Christ is Lord.

To borrow that phrase that I love from the Moravian missionaries, that the lamb who was slain might receive the reward of his suffering.

For that we go out.

He has purchased these people.

They are his, they belong to him.

It is right that those from all nations would come to see Christ as Lord.

That there is something.

Let me put it this way.

Every campaign for world peace is necessarily imperialist.

Okay, so there is no such thing as a campaign for world peace.

That does not mean we're gonna get us all to think the same thing.

But there is only one who has the right to make that claim.

And all others are a call to another type of tyranny.

Some other tyrant who is beneath the one who gave himself for you.

There is no other king which has done that.

So make no mistake, this is a project for world peace.

And it has all the fearful components of all projects for world peace.

And it will be painted as being a part of those camps and campaigns.

But it is the only one with the right.

A right that was purchased on the cross.

It is the only one which can call allegiance towards itself by saying he has already laid his life down for you.

And you, the enemy to whom I am calling your allegiance to this same Lord of mine, I would be willing to lay my life down for you as well.

That's an absurd way to spread a kingdom.

It's like a perfectly upside-down way to spread a kingdom.

But our mission is shaped by the gospel.

There are two components of disciple making that Jesus articulates here.

These are baptizing and teaching, 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.

The first component is baptism, and that means that they are given the name of the family.

We are baptized into the Trinitarian God.

All parts of the Trinity.

Excuse me, gosh, if you talk about the Trinity, you just commit a heresy.

Just in case you're wondering.

All persons of the Trinity, our God has no parts or passions.

Am I right?

All persons of the Trinity worked together for our salvation.

It is the Father who in his love sent his only begotten Son.

It is the Son who comes to seek us and lay his life down on our behalf.

The Father and the Son together send their spirit so that we might be united to him.

And we are adopted into his family.

And so baptism is, in a sense, this naming rite, where you are given the family name.

You are of this people.

These are your people.

You call him Father alongside of us.

And just as we see the Great Commission is the restoration of this initial creative work and the restoration of this fruitfulness, he does not do away with his ordinary means of making disciples, but those who are born to Christians are born into the church.

And so they are given the name of the church in their baptism.

So we baptize infants.

And those who are outside of the church with no conversion are able to be brought into the church by faith alone in Jesus Christ.

And we baptize them.

Give them the family name, a naming right.

And we teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.

When you become a part of a family, then you learn what the family is like, how things are done in this family.

And so with Christ as our older brother, our Father as the Lord on high, we are brought into the family at our baptism.

So we are taught to obey him in all things.

And this is what we are to do in our disciple making we are to teach to obey Jesus.

As we find that obedience to Jesus is our greatest calling, our highest hope, our highest joy.

That when we obey him, it is very good.

We are not like our first father Adam.

We're like the second Adam, Jesus.

And finally, Jesus makes this promise.

Matthew 28, verse 20, he says, And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.

Matthew 28:20

This promise is yours, Church.

He is with you always, to the end of the age.

He promises to be with you.

So when the one who makes the command to go make disciples of all nations is the one who has all authority in heaven and on earth, and he promises to be with you in this co-mission, this working together with him, he says, I will not abandon you in this project, but I will be with you through the fullness of this project, then you can make a pretty good bet that that project will work.

It will happen.

Jesus will make disciples of all nations.

He will be sure that the gates of hell do not prevail against his church.

But there is no border which the glory of the Lord will not cross.

There is no nation which will not receive Christ as Lord.

There is no language which will not be able to confess in their native tongue Christ is Lord.

This will happen.

That is his promise.

And so we are right to participate in the Great Commission with this wondrous expectation that Christ's name will be glorified.

That prayer which we pray each Sunday morning, that his will will be done, his kingdom will come, his will will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This will happen.

So it would be wrong to not say at least something pragmatic.

So there are two things.

One is um local for Redemption Church Denver.

I'll tell you something that I'm obsessed with, my pet project.

I'm obsessed with neighborhood conquests.

And what that means is I want us to think about the Great Commission, to not neglect to think about the Great Commission in just a local sense.

That this neighborhood, Berkeley, that we might hope for Berkeley as though it might be in Berkeley as it is in heaven.

That the glory of Christ might be known here, the joy of who he is might be known here.

And you'll I go and I work in, you know, the like, could we get one more coffee shop in Tennyson, please?

And I'll work in there and I'll write in there and I'll sit next to people, and my thought will be these people are fine.

They're dressed so well, they have these jobs where I hear them talk about their jobs, and it's like that's really cool.

They're drinking coffee that they have opinions on.

You know, when you get to when you're having opinions on coffee, it's we think there's a lot going well in your life.

And I will I will start to, in my own heart, write off their need for Christ.

And in my own heart, I'll think, what I don't, I don't have anything to say here.

What am I going to offer them a Lord?

That it I'm going to I'm going to say, hey, don't quit skipping church to go skiing.

My name's James, I'm the pastor up the street.

You know, they're not this I and and it I'll receive the blinders of the world.

Or I'll hear them talk about some political thing, and I'll think they're on the other team.

This person would never hear the gospel.

And I write them off in my own heart.

And what that is, is it's a pride which says, I wasn't so hard to save.

I required no real miraculous intervention so that my heart might turn to the Lord.

I was probably like on the scale of hard to save, it was like a medium.

No, I was as hard to save as it is to make a dead person live.

I was as hard to save as it was for the Father to witness his son on the cross.

I was as hard to save as it was for Christ to cry out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I was as hard to save as it was for Jesus to sweat blood in the garden, as he begged the Father for there to be another way.

And so all of the people who you sit next to, who you might find all of these reasons to write off in your mind, they were that hard to save, and Christ has accomplished it.

So I believe in neighborhood conquest.

I my hope and my prayer is that everyone who lives in Berkeley will know someone who goes to our church.

It's not that absurd.

This is not that big of a place.

So if you can move here, if you can afford to move here, first of all, congratulations.

Second of all, you should.

You should.

If you're a part of our church and you can afford to move here, I want you to.

I want you to be a neighbor here.

I want neighborhood conquest.

And lastly, this is kind of nested in what I already said.

Just normalize talking about your love for Christ.

Don't hedge.

You don't need to hedge around people.

Just be weird.

Just be just be foolish.

I'm a Christian.

I love Jesus.

He changed my life.

He's the most central fact about me.

Be as good of a friend as people are to you.

When they share that like they're shaping their dating lives over what astrological sign he is.

Which, if you want to hear that conversation, sit in a coffee shop at Berkeley.

And so that's sharing like a depth of their heart.

Then you share the depth, don't let them outpace you.

Share the depth of your heart as well.

Christ is Lord.

He gave himself for me.

I love him.