Foundations- The Great Commission

In this episode, we explore the Great Commission Jesus gave in Matthew 28:18–20: to go, make disciples of all nations, baptize them, and teach them to obey everything He commanded.

The Great Commission is not only a call for missionaries or church leaders; it is the responsibility of every follower of Christ. Nick discusses what it means to live with purpose, share the gospel, invest in others, and help people grow into mature disciples. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Big Rudy Podcast again today. So if you're checking out the vibe for today, we're gonna be getting a little heady, but I also want you want you to see something clear because this is one of the most important scriptures when it comes to how we do discipleship. It is the the final commission that Jesus gave us before he ascended into heaven, and it is used as the backbone of the mission of the church today. So if you want to go a little bit deeper, if you're looking for a little bit more, grab your cup of coffee, let's dig in and let's get curious.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Hey friends, welcome to the Be Rooted Podcast with your host, Nick Kugler, author, discipler, and your guide on this journey. Around here, we mix ancient and modern wisdom with real life principles so that you can grow deep roots and live out your faith intentionally. So let's stay curious and dive in.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Alright, so today we're gonna talk about the Great Commission. Now, I'm gonna be doing a little bit of a word breakdown because there's some things that I need you to see, that I really want you to see. Now, I also want to remind you that I'm not here to convince you of anything. I'm just here to bring you what I have and ask you to stay and to be curious. There's a lot of talk about the Great Commission, and there's a lot of different views and ways that we can look at it. So I'm gonna try to show you why I do what I do and why I think this is one of the most pivotal verses, but not just in our English language, but in the original Greek. So I'm gonna dive in a little bit deeper. Now I'm not gonna give you all the Greek words. There are resources for you for that. And if you're really curious, I think you can find them. But I want to point out a couple of things that have helped me to understand what Jesus was doing when he gave us this command and how the disciples would have understood it and how they would have taken it when this command was given to them. Now you'll see that I have part of this command written above my head here. I did not write the whole thing because there are only parts of it that I want to help to clarify today. But I still want to set the scene. At the end of Matthew 28, Matthew records Jesus' command for the eleven to meet him at the mountain where he had commanded them. So I think this is significant because there's only the eleven there. There were a lot more that were following Jesus at the time. There were said to be over 120 in the upper room just before that, or after that, actually. So what I want you to see is there's something specific that these eleven had experienced that Jesus wanted them to hear something specific for them. Now, when he, before he says, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, he actually says, All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me. So this is a pretty important statement. Jesus is saying, Hey guys, I'm about to head out and it's on you. I still have all the authority, and I am sending you with that authority. And at the end of this great commission, he actually doubles down on that when he says, And behold, I will be with you even to the end of the age. Like all this authority that I have, I'm not leaving. Now I think one of the ways that he does that is he dispenses his Holy Spirit into us and into this world in a way that he had never done before. But I think the personhood of Jesus is also with us. It's not just, and it's and it's found in the Word of God, it's found in the Scriptures. So this is extremely important that we understand the Scripture so we can understand who Jesus is and the example that he set for us. But the commission is this. And I'm gonna play a little bit of a trick on you because you can't respond. I'm gonna ask you, where's the first verb in this command? Go, therefore, and make disciples. Well, I I would assume it's go. But that's where I want to draw on some clarity. Like the original Greek, that's not a verb. It's actually a participle, which is a modifier. It's kind of like an adjective, but it but it modifies a verb or a subject. So that's not actually part of that the command, that's not the verb, the action that he wants us to take. And to take that a step further, it's a passive participle, which means the person that's being, or the thing that's being modified is a passive recipient, not an active producer of this action. And I think that's important. Because when when Jesus says go, he's actually saying, because you have gone, now make disciples. Because I've shown you, I've done this to you, I've walked this with you, I have been the active agent on you, you have been the passive recipient of this process of discipleship as we have gone through life together. So if you've been walking with Jesus, this command is for you. If you haven't been walking with Jesus, I want you to question whether or not you have the ability and the calling to do this. I also want to clarify that if God, if you have given your life to Jesus and you haven't gone through discipleship, then you need to. You need to go because this command is for you. It might not just be for you just yet. Because how can you give something you don't have? How can you disciple somebody if you've never been discipled? Now that brings me to back to that question. So what is then the first verb that the Greek uses here? Your next assumption will probably be the word make. But then again, there again, you'd be wrong. I was wrong for a long time. And I thought that just means I'm called to do this thing. I'm called to make this thing, I'm called to produce this thing. But the reality is the word make doesn't actually show up in there at all. It is the verb form of the word disciple. Why is that important? Well, let me tell you why first. Because it might like you might begin to think that I don't really like translations and I'm wrong. That would be wrong too. I love them. Um and I understand the reason why the word that make is there, because the reality is there is no verb form of the word disciple in our English language. So the the translators used the desired outcome of discipling and added that verb action to that. But the reality is the original Greek just simply said disciple as an action. So Jesus says, I have discipled you. Disciple others. I think this is important because when we look at what that word make does to us in our current society, is we're so built on performance that now we think that it's our job, it's our duty to produce in others what Jesus produced in us. And that's just not true. You are not called to produce anything, you're just simply called to walk alongside them, to help them to discover their unique journey into the likeness of Christ. You're their, and they will do the same for you. They will help you to discover your unique journey into the likeness of Christ. So discipleship is this it is your journey towards the likeness of Christ and another person's journey towards the unique likeness in Christ. So how you disciple, I think is the next question. So the answer to the question that I asked earlier is the first verb is actually right here. No, it's an eras tense um imperative verb that is action-oriented. It's not passive like the participle go. It is, hey, this is your imperative. Disciple. Enter into somebody else's spiritual journey and enter into your own spiritual journey, learn from me, and help others to grow in theirs. And and I added these to, well, before I get to the next ones, all nations is extremely important. Every tongue, every tribe, every person, every color, every race, every ethnicity. Jesus says, don't leave anyone out. Everyone is important. Every single human is an image bearer of God because I created them to be an image bearer of God. There is something that I, there's a stamp on them that shows the world who I am, not me, God, that our job is to glorify God. And when we do that as a collective, all people, then we are able to express the goodness and the character and nature of God in a way that we could never do on our own. We could never do as just a white guy or just a black guy, or just a Mexican, or just a Japanese, or just like whatever it is. Like there is something about you that bears the image of God. You are valuable, you are important, and so is every other person that bears the image of God. And if they are a human, they bear the image of God. So nobody gets left out. So from there, I think there are two kinds of offshoots that help us to understand how we perform this action of discipleship. And I just put baptizing up here because I didn't have enough space, but it actually says to baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And this is what Jesus is doing. And this is the first time or the only time that I have found where Jesus actually uses baptism of the Trinity, where he uses all three of them. And this is why I think that's significant, is he is saying, introduce them to the family of God. Bring them into the family of God. And when and when they have received my spirit, I want you to wash away the old person and bring them to the new person that I have created for them. And they will be in error. They will be one of my adopted, they will join my family. So baptism is a significant part, but I want you to see the significance of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that they are a forever unioned community. From the beginning of time, the Alpha, the Omega, from the beginning of time to the end of eternity, which will never exist, they have always been a perfectly cohesive community. And what he is doing is saying, I want you to baptize them into my community. I want you to bring them into my kingdom. This thing that I've been preaching about, Jesus preaches about the kingdom of God more than any other topic. And what he is saying is, this is what it's like in my family. This is what it looks like when you obey my family rules, and this is what it looks like when you don't. When you observe the family structure, things will go better for you. If they don't go better for you in this life, they will certainly go better for you in eternity. It's not a promise that things are going to go the way that you want them to. It's a promise that God gives you that they will be better. So when it doesn't feel better when we when we do things the right way, it's probably because we don't fully understand what that right way is. And we want it our way, not his way. So baptizing them into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I think that is about bringing them into the community of God. It's the evangelistic leg of discipleship. How do you example for them what the kingdom looks like? How do you live within that structure? And the next piece or leg of that, so I'm just gonna put a I'm just gonna uh evangelism. A little abbreviation there. So if part of that is bringing them into the family, the next side is this, because it says not only just teaching, but it says teaching them to observe all that I have commanded. And I think that's what this is goes back to that kingdom of God. It says, I have shown you what it looks like to live inside my kingdom, to live within my family rules, to live in the oikos of God. And it is this come and then be, but allow yourself to be transformed. Learn how to observe within these family rules and this new family structure that I've called you to be a part of. You're not gonna be perfect right from the beginning. It's impossible. So on one side we have evangelism, and on the other side we have what I call what scripture calls sanctification. It's the process of becoming set apart like Jesus was set apart. It's the process of becoming holy. It's it's and you are in that process. It doesn't matter if you've been a Christian for a day or 30 years or a lifetime, you are still in process. You have not arrived. You are not perfect. You you there is something about the family structure and the family rules that you can work on, and you can grow in. And sometimes that's just simply embracing the the heirship that He's given you, that just believing that you are a son or a daughter, that you can just simply grow in that. So I want you to see how the Great Commission exposes what discipleship truly is and truly looks like. It is what Jesus did to us when he called us into his family. And it is what he did to us when we accepted that invitation that he continued to sanctify us. He continued to grow us, he continued to love us, he continued to forgive us, he continued to convict us, he continued to challenge us. So there are no intentional next steps for you today. I'm not gonna tell you what you need to do. I'm not even I'm just simply going to tell you what God did to me. If you've seen some of my videos, you know that I I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I didn't have a great example as a father. I was lucky enough to have a stepfather that came into my life later in my life, but I was almost an adult and I didn't really give him the space to be a good father to me, even though today he's probably the best father that I could have had. But when I joined the family of God, and I realized I wasn't living according to Jesus' house rules. I was living according to my desires. I was living based on what I wanted to see out of my life, not what was best for me or the people that were around me. And there were seasons of my life that that helped to expose these yearnings and these callings and these desires to fill the holes that I had had. Why am I struggling so hard to find someone to fill the role? I'm an adult and I'm still struggling with this. And it felt like the Holy Spirit just simply said to me, you know why that is, don't you? You know the hole that you're trying to fill, don't you? And it was my my dad. I never felt like a priority. He left me. Psalm periodically. A lot of times I felt like he had a better relationship with his ex-wife, my mom, than he did with us kids, with me. And and I was yearning to have that hole filled. But the part that hit me the most was when I heard the words of my heavenly father. He said, You've always been a priority to me. I thought of you before you were born. I knew you were gonna be here. I knew you were gonna need this moment, and you have a choice. You can believe that to be true, you can accept that to be true, or you can keep trying to fill this void that nobody is ever gonna fill. And just like now, I couldn't hold it. I had to pull over on the side of the road, and I had to just weep. And I was at a crossroads, I was literally on the side of the road, and I had to ask myself, am I truly gonna believe this thing to be true? That I've been learning about for years now. Am I really his? And I believed it. That was part of my sanctification journey. It was part of me growing in the knowledge and understanding of who I am. Now that now I that doesn't mean that I don't struggle with that reality from time to time. But I will never forget that moment on the side of the road where Jesus came into the car with me, sat down with me, and he helped me to find the Father above. He helped me to learn something about myself that I had been desperately trying to fill with other things. So as you go through your discipleship journey, as you enter into the lives of others and try to help them along their journey, I want you to remember don't leave anybody out. Everybody was worth the blood of Christ. He said so, so you need to treat them that way. But allow yourself to be part of a family. Be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but don't just stop there. Allow him to change you, allow him to shape you and allow other people in your life to come alongside of you and help you to observe the family rules. Because you need it. I need it. So one of the keys to this whole thing is staying curious, my friends.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

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