Sharing Christ's Word in Obedience
Samuel Zwemer once remarked, "If evangelical Christianity is reducible to a successful communication of a valuable experience, we need no theology of missions. But the New Testament makes perfectly clear that the aim of Christian missions is the fulfillment of a Divine Command…"* This Divine Command, known as "The Great Commission," is found in each of the first five books of the New Testament.
Matthew
And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, 'All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.' —Matthew 28:18-20 (NASB)
Mark
And He said to them, 'Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.' —Mark 16:15 (NASB)
Luke
And He said to them, 'thus it is written… that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all the nations…' —Luke 24:46-47 (NASB)
John
Jesus therefore said to them again, 'Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.' —John 20:21 (NASB)
Acts
But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth. —Acts 1:8 (NASB)
The words of our Lord in Acts take on even greater impact when we realize they were His very last words on earth. While this may seem incidental to some, the subject was evidently important enough to Jesus to occupy His final thoughts.
There is in these great commission scriptures an unmistakable command—Go. As Loren Cunningham reminds us, "Go means a change of location." Jesus' promise that He would be with us to the end of the world is linked to His command to "Go." The extent of Christ's "Go" in our lives depends solely on His purposes at any given time. Every true Christian understands "he is not his own" and that therefore personal plans are not to detain us against Christ's call. Many times when we say we don't feel a leading, we are really saying we don't have a feeling.
Our absolute obedience to Christ is a manifestation of our absolute love for Him. We don't go into the world proclaiming the gospel in order to impress each other with our dedication. We do not go out of a sense of sterile obligation. But neither do we go primarily because we feel such compassion for the lost. No, we do not go for their sakes—we go for His sake, because Jesus Christ deserves to have what He died for. As His servants, we obey His commission of love to go to the ends of the earth in search of a bride. No nation or city, village or island must be forgotten, no street or field overlooked. She is everywhere, and He wants her. We must fetch her.
