The Challenge OF Disciple Making: Changing The Priority

“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 obverse all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Within the Gospel of Matthew, there exists a challenging biblical text. It comes at the end of the book and even has its own label. We call it the Great Commission. Found in Matthew 28:19-20, the Great Commission is a challenging text because it issues a challenge to all believers, calling upon them to put to words and actions their belief in Christ. It's made more challenging because it is a verse that challenges us to do something uncomfortable, it challenges us to think differently about the daily situations we face, and it challenges us to adjust our life to conform to it.

The Great Commission is a text that infuses both purpose and satisfaction into the believer’s life. It brings about purpose by determining the objective of a person’s life, aligning their ambition with the Lord’s direction. Satisfaction then comes from contentment in being in the will of the Lord and being used by the Lord. However, those gratifications don't seem sufficient to persuade us to fulfill this calling.

Somehow, believers seem to have disconnected this call from the Christian life. To make disciples now is a special task of the church's leadership and a particular program of the church's function. However, the call of Christ in Matthew 28 is for believers to merge this command with their everyday living. To overcome this disconnect, I think it is crucial that we understand three aspects: the message, the manner, and the meaning of the Great Commission.

The Message
What makes this text so troublesome is not that the text is controversial but that obedience to it is complicated. In actuality, the text is quite simple. It calls upon believers to make disciples. There is little to dispute in that primary command and when there is something that might even cause a limited debate, simply observing the life of Christ resolves it.

A disciple is a follower. Thus, the call for believers is to make followers, but followers of what? The typical Sunday school answer is correct here: Jesus. The Christian's ambition is to lead others to become followers of Jesus Christ.

The Manner
Several participles make up the Great Commission. Most prominent are the words 'teaching' and 'baptizing.' Together those two words describe the activities that constitute the discipline of making disciples. If we are uncertain about how to make disciples, we only need to look at these words to define the task at hand.

However, less obvious is another participle: going. Though most translations, like the ESV above, begin with 'go,' this term is less precise than the Greek text. A more literal translation would read, “As you are going, make disciples . . .” With these words, we capture the true sense of the Great Commission. It signifies that the manner (or method) of the task at hand is to engage in it as we go about our routine tasks and normal, everyday living.

The Meaning
Sometimes, our habit is to treat the Great Commission as its own entity. We divide it from other tasks of the church and give it its own committee for oversight. This disconnect also carries into our personal life, where the Great Commission often falls into one of two categories. For some, it is a scheduled task, occurring intentionally, but only when someone has made the decision to go out and engage in it. For others, the Great Commission happens circumstantially. Because it lacks intentionality, it lacks form or structure and occurs haphazardly.

Without denying that each of these categories can influence our engagement with the Lord's task in a positive way, the phrase “as you are going” does something important for believers. It reveals that the Great Commission is linked to every aspect of our usual routine. Though the call of the Commission and the routine life of the Christian have become disconnected from one another, “as you are going” unites them together. Thus, the Lord Jesus Christ’s command restores the connection.

Though seemingly small in the text, the concept conveyed here in Matthew 28:19-20 is that the believer is to incorporate the Lord’s will into every aspect of his/her life. It is not a separate discipline we engage in only when convenient or motivated, but it finds its place by being inserted into every task at hand. In a conversation with a co-worker, over coffee with a church member, or on the treadmill at the gym, the Great Commission is not its own activity but instead finds its place in all that we say and do.

Personally, I know that my tendency is to live out my life and then insert the Great Commission at strategic points. The call, though, is that Christians live the Great Commission and then insert life at strategic points. Do you see the difference between those two lifestyles? This text reveres the roles of everyday life and Christ’s command by changing the priority. This aspect is one of the critical difficulties in the Great Commission.

Perhaps to overcome the disconnect, we need to start thinking about not living life and bringing in the Great Commission. Instead, we need to see the way we live as living the Great Commission and incorporating life into that.

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