The Great Commission: It is not an open-ended warrant


At the end of Matthew's gospel, Jesus says this:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing 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.”

These words have been on my mind lately. They can be read as authorizing and empowering the church until the end of the age to do the things mentioned. They can also be read in a restrictive sense. "Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" may be read as excluding other matters. This reading is too much neglected, at times entirely overlooked. The words authorize us to teach what he taught. Do they give us a warrant to teach anything else?

Many of Christendom's disunity problems can be traced to teachings that have little connection to the things Jesus actually talked about. He did not talk about the metaphysics of communion, saying, instead, "do this." He did not speak in formulaic terms about justification and sanctification. Instead, he said to put our trust in him and do what is right. He gave us a new commandment, that we love one another, prompting the apostle John to later write, "Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen." (1 John 4:20)

The problem is that we get wrapped up in points tangential to the main thrust of the gospel and stop loving one another on account of it. In a dark era long ago, people persecuted each other because they disagreed on such matters as transubstantiation, justification versus sanctification, the correct method of baptizing people, and so forth and so on. Churchmen became absurd parodies of what the gospel teaches, religious experts of the kind Jesus despised in his day, who could talk the talk, but did not walk the walk. Love went out the window as judgmental thinking entered at the door. We still follow in those footsteps, when we uphold such doctrinal denominational distinctives, matters of religion in the abstract, as if they are some sort of holy crusade.

The church of the apostolic era, in stark contrast, preached Jesus (via the kerygma) and then, following that, attempted to explain how to put Jesus' teachings into practice, in everyday, practical ways. The Epistles echo all through with allusions to the sayings of Jesus, as they illustrate how to live a Christian life in a challenging era.

We should return to a similarly Christ-centered model of preaching and teaching. After all, we have in the Great Commission no clear mandate to talk about other things.

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