A Commission for Our Moment
November 13, 2022
Preached by Ben Bechtel
Scripture Reading
Matthew 28:18-20
18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 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, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
From this text, we are going to talk about church planting this morning, the process of Christians starting new churches. As many of you know, we are currently in the process as a church of planting another church called Midtown Community Church in the city of Harrisburg. I am going to be sent out as the planting pastor of this new church. Now, the more cynical among you might say “I know what this sermon is. This sermon is the appeal to tug on the heart strings to get more people to give their time and money to see this new church planted.”
That is not the chief aim of this sermon. I actually have something much bigger in mind. This sermon is not an appeal for you to get on board with Midtown Community Church, but with church planting in general. I am going to appeal to you this morning that every Christian and every church should be meaningfully and sacrificially invested in planting more churches. And that every Christian and church ought to see this not only as a burden, something we have to do, but an immense joy, something we get to do.
1. The Great Church Planting Commission (v. 19-20a)
Let’s begin by rereading the command of Jesus to his disciples starting in verse 19:
19 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, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
Most Christians and churches throughout the ages have given this command a high place in their thought and practice. It truly is a great command, a great charge. This command sets the priority for the life of a Christian. Another word for disciple is the word apprentice. Think of someone who apprentices in a given trade. They observe and watch their master’s craft in hope to one day follow in his or her footsteps. If you are a Christian your life exists primarily to make disciples of Jesus Christ, to make other apprentices of Jesus. That is one way the Bible frames the ultimate purpose of your life. Bible scholar D.A. Carson summarizes these verses by saying, “The aim of Jesus’ disciples…is to make disciples of all men everywhere without distinction.”[1]
However, like many passages of the Bible that are familiar to many Christians, we are prone to make unhelpful assumptions about this Great Commission. This is the most unhelpful assumption all of us have with regard to the Great Commission: we assume that the Great Commission is something we do as individuals. In other words, we take the Great Commission only to speak to personal evangelism. But this command by its very nature is corporate and communal in scope. You don’t have to look back any further than a few weeks in our current sermon series on the nature of the church to see why.
Part of making disciples involves baptism. Baptism is an inherently communal activity that involves church elders who present candidates for baptism that credibly profess faith in Jesus and these people who are baptized are baptized into a community of faith. Baptism implies incorporation into a worshipping community, into a local church.[2] So, the Great Commission at the very least implies the planting of more churches into which new Christians of all nations can be baptized and follow Jesus.
When a sports team, particularly either a basketball or football team hires a new coach, typically in one of their first press conferences as a coach they talk about how they’re going to change up the offensive or defensive scheme. They’ll talk in vague terms about how they want to spread out the offense or push the ball in transition. But while the coach’s words communicate what the general contours of her new scheme might look like, we don’t know what this new scheme fully looks like until we see her players execute it in a game-time situation. If we want to know what Jesus’ Great Commission scheme fully looks like, we need to see how his first year players, the disciples, flesh out this initial press conference. How do the disciples apply the Great Commission? How do they go about making disciples?
Turn with me to Acts 14:21-23 for an example of how the apostles Paul executed Jesus’ Great Commission playbook:
21 When they had preached the gospel to [Derbe] and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, 22 strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. 23 And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
In Acts 14 before this Paul goes and preaches the gospel in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra, before coming to Derbe. Paul goes through these areas preaching the good news of Jesus’ sacrificial death and victorious resurrection. But notice what he does after that: he goes back through each city appointing elders and committing the believers to these elders. In other words, the apostle Paul follows up his evangelism with a church planting tour. Paul “puts what remains in order” as he commands Titus to do in Crete (Titus 1:5). Local churches are God’s means for making disciples, for seeing people trust in Jesus, get baptized, and start following him. In other words, in order to fulfill Jesus’ command here we must plant churches. This is a Great Church Planting Commission.
This means that every church and every Christian, in order to be faithful to this commission to make disciples of all nations, must be meaningfully invested in church planting. Friends, one of your primary purposes in life is to see more churches planted so that more people become apprentices to Jesus. All Christians and all churches are called to sacrifice in order to obey Jesus’ command to see churches planted both here in the States and across the world.
2. A “Great” Church Planting Problem (v. 17)
How does your heart naturally respond to this talk about church planting? How do we react to the resurrected Jesus’ totalizing command over our lives? I imagine our reaction is a lot like the disciples’ in verse 17:
16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted.
Here the resurrected Jesus appears to his eleven disciples, likely along with a much larger crowd. When his disciples see him some doubted.
Now that word doubted can also be translated, and I would argue is better translated as “hesitated.” Think about it: at this point the eleven disciples have all seen the resurrected Jesus and have acknowledged both with their heads and heart that Jesus is the resurrected Messiah. This word has less to do with intellectual questioning and more to do with waffling in the face of something unknown. Most of us tend to hesitate when facing an unknown situation. We hesitate to invest our money, even in a worthwhile venture, because we don’t know what our rate of return will be. We hesitate to buy a home because we can’t foresee where the market will go or what problems this house may have soon after buying it. We hesitate to truly disclose ourselves and form deep friendships with people because we don’t know for certain whether this person will hurt us emotionally.
The disciples here were facing a great unknown. Jesus, their Messiah and master, who they just thought went to his death, has come back to life. That’s wonderful news! But none of Jesus’ disciples were anticipating it. So when the resurrected Jesus pops back onto the scene three days later they’re overjoyed but also must have been filled with so many questions about what this meant for their lives. Would Jesus now bring about the kingdom of God (Acts 1:6)? What is my place in that kingdom? Where do we go from here?
Jesus answers some of those questions for his disciples with his clear commission in verses 19-20: because I am raised from the dead, Jesus says, you now are to go make disciples in all the world. But even at that, they still hesitate to believe this direct implication of Jesus’ resurrection on their lives. Although we live 2,000 years later and we know the Great Commission and many other biblical instructions, we still hesitate to believe all that Jesus’ resurrection and ascension mean for our lives, particularly his command to plant churches. And we hesitate because of the unknowns.
Church, we face so many unknowns as we step out to plant this church. Will MCC make it as a church? What hardships will come for those of us going to plant a new church, as hardships often do come? Will we replace the people we send out here at Community? Will we replace the finances we send out here at Community? Will we continue to grow after we plant this church? What will the new pastoral hire look like and how long will that process take? On a broader scale, what does it look like to plant a church in the part of our region that is the most hostile to Christianity even as our country is growing increasingly hostile to Christianitiy? On a more personal note, will I still see the people that go to the other church? Will our relationships have to drastically change?
These are just some of the questions that could cause us to falter and draw back from realizing the implications of the resurrected Jesus, that could keep us from following through on planting this church and others in obedience to the Great Commission. So then, how do we move from hesitancy and doubt to worship and obedience? How do we willingly and joyfully sacrifice to see new churches planted and more people come to know Jesus?
3. Two Great Church Planting Promises (vv. 18 & 20b)
We need the promises of Jesus in order to obey his commands, and this command specifically. Jesus graciously gives us two promises, one in verse 18 and one in verse 20 that I pray we as a church cling to tightly as we step out in faith to plant a new church. These promises aren’t just the foundation for planting one church. Rather, they are the jet fuel that can power the engine of our hearts to a lifetime of service to see more churches planted here in Harrisburg and around the world.
A. Jesus’ Power (v. 18)
Read verse 18 again with me please:
18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
When we read this verse, I think those of us who have been Christians for a little while naturally think in the category of God’s sovereignty. In other words, we think Jesus here is saying that as God he is in control of all things. While that is certainly true, that only fills up our tank half of the way with fuel. There’s more to this promise.
Think about it in terms of a king over a specific nation. You can say that king has authority over his country and you would be exactly right. However, what if enemy forces came in and occupied the territory that was the king’s by right? And then what if the king personally led a resistance army to drive out his enemy and take back control of the nation? That is a different kind of authority than just general sovereignty. This is the type of authority Jesus is speaking of here in verse 18.
In other words, to say it a bit more provocatively, Jesus has a type of authority in Matthew 28:18 that he didn’t have in Matthew 4:9 where Satan comes to him and offers to give him dominion of every kingdom if Jesus will only worship him. Rather than taking the easy path to victory and joining with the enemy, Jesus as our faithful king pushed back the darkness from this earth during his life and he defeated our great enemies of Satan, sin, and death by sacrificially giving of his life and rising from the dead. Jesus was raised from the dead as “the Son of God in power” (Rom. 1:4) having defeated the enemy and reclaimed his rightful rule over every nation of the earth.
Do you see then if we keep reading in verse 19 that the Great Commission is specifically tied to Jesus’ victory? Go, therefore, and make. Because Jesus has taken back his rightful lordship from our enemies of every square inch of this globe, we go to “all nations” with confidence, because we go under the banner of a resurrected and victorious king, joining in his victory by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony (Rev. 12:11).
Jesus is the rightful Lord over Midtown. He is King over Midtown, he is King over this region, he is King over our nation, and he is King over this world. He has knee-capped Satan by his death and resurrection. He cannot stand against the power of the gospel of King Jesus. There are many things that might scare
us about Midtown. On the surface it seems like there is greater ideological resistance to the gospel. There are divergent sexual expressions and spiritualities. But there is no threat to the lordship of Jesus in Midtown. And where Jesus’ church proclaims the gospel and displays it by their actions, we bear witness to his authority. The life stories and trajectories of the people in Midtown are not a dead end! They are not consigned to continue in idolatry just as praise God we are not. We go not under our own authority but under the banner and flag of our great king.
B. Jesus’ Presence (v. 20b)
Look with me at the very end of verse 20:
“And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Matthew, who began his gospel declaring that Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, concludes his gospel with the promise that God with us will not leave us alone but continue to be with us. Now, this may seem like a silly question, but if Jesus says this right before he ascends up into heaven, how will he be with his disciples? How will he be with us? In Acts 1:8, a parallel passage that recounts what Jesus says to his disciples before he ascends into heaven, he says this:
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
Jesus promises his disciples that he will be with them every step of the way as they seek to obey his commission by his Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the empowering and comforting presence of Jesus. God gives us his Spirit to enable us to obey the commission, even when its scary, and to comfort our hearts along the way by making the grace and love of Jesus plain to our hearts.
Church, we do not go about this endeavor of planting a church on our own. Jesus doesn’t give us this daunting command and then peace out. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with us to encourage us in our struggle to obey the commission and who is with us to give us the power to actually do it. He gives us the power to share the gospel, to lead out in generosity, to step up into service, to adopt a young couple going to Midtown to mentor them, to comfort us as we mourn friends going out to plant a new church, to consider going with this new church even though you want to remain here where things are more comfortable.
Now the word “behold” there in verse 20 is an attention grabbing word. It says, “look here, this is important!” Several other translations render that word here as “remember.” Remember I am with you always. We are so prone to forget this promise of Jesus. If we forget this and we begin to think that it is all on us to accomplish the work of seeing more people come to know Jesus and new churches planted, we will putter out. But if we remember that Jesus is with us by his Spirit, that he goes before us, that he is the one working to see this new church come about, then our engines will be filled and ignited to sacrifice joyfully to plant this church and more churches, so that Jesus might be exalted among the nations.
[1] D.A. Carson, Matthew, 596.
[2] Tim Keller, “Why Plant Churches?,” 1.
Sermon Discussion Questions
What are some reasons from the sermon, or that you can think of, why the Great Commission is ultimately about church planting?
Where are you hesitant like the early disciples to live like Jesus is truly alive? What unknowns are you facing that make obedience to the Great Commission difficult?
Which of these promises do you need to hear? How do they speak specifically to the areas you are hestitant to trust God not just about the church plant but in your whole life as it relates to the
