I just ran back to the room where
I'm staying and shaved.
I didn't have the excuse that Doug Moo
had of my barber, so I decided that
I'd better...
I came back and here we are together.
I want to ask you to turn with
me to two passages this afternoon, one of
them from Daniel chapter 7, where I will
read a very familiar passage, just verses 13
through 15, and then after that we will
look in the New Testament.
While we're finding the passages, let me just
say, pray very much for the Providence Theological,
what was the Theological Institute and is now
to be the seminary, very difficult to establish
a school in Texas.
I think this is ringing slightly, am I
wrong about that?
Yeah, that'll be better.
I always tell the people that do the
sound that I like as much sound as
possible, because I tend to drop my voice
at the end.
When I do that, of course, people don't
know what I'm saying.
There'll be a certain number of people in
the room who really do want to know
what I'm saying at the end of time,
so it helps to have lots of voice.
Daniel chapter 7, verses 13 through 15.
In my vision at night I looked, and
there before me was one like a son
of man, coming with the clouds of heaven.
He approached the Ancient of Days and was
led into his presence.
He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power.
All people's nations and men of every language
worshipped him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will
not pass away, and his kingdom is one
that will never be destroyed.
Even though, of course, that comes from the
Old Testament, it is a prophecy concerning the
Lord Jesus Christ.
There's never been another person, never will be
one that fits that passage so wonderfully well.
Now in the New Testament, I'd ask you
to turn with me to Matthew 28.
I just want to read the very, very
familiar passage that we know together as the
Great Commission.
Matthew 28, starting at verse 16.
Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to
the mountain where Jesus had told them to
go.
When they saw him, they worshipped him, but
some doubted.
Then Jesus came to them and said, 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.
We'll stop our reading there at what is
obviously the end of the chapter and the
end of the Gospel of Matthew.
Now very quickly, by way of review, I'll
remind you that I have been telling you
that Jesus Christ is the chief agent which
God has for revealing what God is like.
And that is very important for us.
It includes God's will, it includes God's character,
everything that God wants to reveal to humans,
he reveals, or virtually everything, through the Lord
Jesus Christ.
And if you ask a question, where can
I see God best?
I suggested that it's suicidal not to answer
that question.
If you answer it, you must answer it
by saying, In the Lord Jesus Christ, God
is best revealed.
And I closed my message yesterday by calling
your attention to something that you are already
very familiar with, and that was the transfiguration
in which Peter is trying to allot the
glory of the transfiguration to the various figures
who are there, the Lord Jesus and Elijah
and Moses.
And a cloud comes over Peter and a
voice comes out of the cloud, obviously the
voice of God, and says, You are my
beloved son.
Or, let's see, yes, I get my vows
and you's mixed up.
And then the voice says, Hear him.
And I made the point, I think, that
Jesus didn't say anything right after that.
And the conclusion that I drew from that
was that it wasn't a statement about what
Jesus was going to say next.
Someone might say, Hear Tom Wells, and I
might have something worth saying immediately after that.
It might be debatable, but we won't go
into that.
But if I said nothing, I probably would
simply be missing the point they were making.
But when Peter was told to listen to
the Lord Jesus Christ, as I suggested, it
wasn't that he was to listen to that
which Jesus said next, although obviously that would
be true, but he is saying, This is
the one to whom you must listen for
the rest of your life and for the
rest of eternity even.
This is my beloved son.
Hear him.
And so, Jesus Christ is the agent whom
God has selected to reveal his character, his
will, his purposes.
And I remind you again what agents do.
Agents represent somebody else.
And the Lord Jesus Christ is representing nothing
less than the triune God sent by the
Father.
You remember the Lord Jesus makes that point
a number of times.
I came into the world to do this,
that, or the other.
My Father sent me.
And later on when he appoints some apostles,
he says to them, As my Father has
sent me, even so send I you.
So the Lord Jesus is very, very conscious
of the fact that he was the agent
of God.
And when we turn to the pages of
the New Testament, we find that emphasized in
other ways.
The very beginning of the book of Acts,
we didn't look at that and we won't
look at it now, but you remember that
Luke says in writing the book of Acts
that in the earlier book, that would be
what we call the Gospel of Luke, the
Lord Jesus Christ is represented as beginning to
do and to carry on some things and
some work.
But now Theophilus, I'm going to go beyond
what Jesus began to do in his lifetime
and I'm going to expound to you what
he does from now on.
And even though there are places in the
book of Acts where it looks as if
the Spirit of God is communicating directly to
people, and there are such places, it's also
true that at the very beginning of the
book of Acts, it is made plain that
because Jesus is Lord and Christ, the Holy
Spirit is come.
In fact, Peter says in his sermon on
Pentecost, God has made this same Jesus Lord
Christ and he has poured out what you've
seen and what he poured out, of course,
were the gifts and the work of the
Spirit.
And so all through the book of Acts,
that's what's going on.
The Apostle Paul is run down by the
Lord Jesus as he's on the road to
Damascus and he hears a voice saying, Saul,
Saul, why are you persecuting me?
And he says, who art thou Lord?
He didn't know who he was.
The word Lord there is used probably as
an address of honor to anyone.
Who are you Lord?
I am Jesus whom you're persecuting, but rise,
get up on your feet, go into the
city, there will be told you what you
must do.
And so the Lord Jesus Christ intervenes all
through the book of Acts.
Now in the passages that I've called your
attention to this afternoon, we see the Lord
Jesus Christ laying out his program.
We're taking a look this afternoon at the
program of the Lord Jesus and we won't
have much to say about verses 16 and
17.
The only thing perhaps that I would say
about those is that they're kind of an
introduction to the rest of it, but also
there is one very interesting statement where we
read in verse 17, when they saw him
they worshipped him, but some doubted.
And I've always been grateful that that statement,
some doubted, was in there for the simple
reason that if it really means doubt, it's
conceivable that it means some hesitated for one
reason or another to go forward.
But if it really means doubted, it is
clear that we're having an eyewitness account here,
not necessarily by Matthew, although it could well
be, but somebody saw that when people came
to the Lord Jesus Christ and he gave
what we call the Great Commission, somebody saw
that there were some who doubted and that
shows that there was eyewitness evidence because I
don't think anybody making up this story would
have stuck that in.
It is simply the fact that some doubted,
whatever that may mean, and some others saw
it and were impressed by it.
In this 45 minutes or so that we
have, I want to look at three things.
First of all, the present status of the
Lord Jesus as it is revealed in this
passage.
And then I want to talk to you
about the program that the Lord Jesus Christ
has for the world and then finally we'll
talk a little bit about how we Christians
must live in light of that program.
The present status of the Lord Jesus, we
find it in verse 18, Then Jesus came
to them and said, All authority in heaven
and on earth has been given to me.
Now, I take it that the passage that
we read from the book of Daniel, chapter
7, says very much the same thing as
that verse 18 in Matthew 28.
If you remember that passage in Daniel, it
talks about his dominion is an everlasting dominion
that will not pass away, his kingdom is
one that will never be destroyed.
And while words like power and glory and
sovereign power and so on are in there,
I call your attention particularly to the word
dominion because that's the same word in the
Septuagint that is translated authority here.
The Lord Jesus Christ has a dominion or
authority.
We talk about the kingdom of Christ and
he is asserting that authority as we come
into what we've come to call the Great
Commission.
Now that authority that the Lord Jesus has
is of course closely related to the other
things that he will say in the following
verses.
But I want to suggest some things that
are implied in Jesus talking about his authority
before we actually look at his authoritative commands.
I want to suggest to you that there
are four things that are included in the
authority of the Lord Jesus that are particularly
relevant to us today.
First of all, the Lord Jesus Christ has
the authority to create the conditions for the
spread of the gospel.
Who does that?
The Lord Jesus does it because he has
all authority.
Secondly, he has authority to bring in his
elect.
And thirdly, he has authority to benefit the
church.
And fourthly, he has authority to judge the
world.
And I want to just call your attention
to a few passages and ideas that say
those very things.
Let's think, for instance, of his authority to
create conditions to spread the gospel.
Well, to begin with, that's what he's doing
here.
He's informing his disciples that this is the
way you need to act and these are
the things that you ought to do.
And that's what he was doing again when
he knocked down Paul on the road to
Emmaus.
He was creating the conditions to get the
gospel out and Paul becomes one of the
greatest gospel ministers of all church history.
I was thinking and telling somebody, I think,
this week about how I came to my
vision for missions.
You know that I've written a book by
that title, but that title fits here.
The Lord Jesus did some things with me
to set me up to be tremendously interested
in missions.
And those of you who may have been
to our church will realize that that is
a major thrust of our church.
We had some missionaries come in one time
and they said, now all you need to
complete this is to have some maps of
the world around here.
They said that tongue-in-cheek because we've
got maps of the world all over our
auditorium in order to remind us to be
interested in getting the gospel to the ends
of the earth.
When I was a young man, back in
1954, I went to Europe as a short
-term missionary with Youth for Christ.
We were laboring in Germany.
I was in a quartet.
We conducted tent meetings.
We had a German evangelist and we sang
in German.
All of our singing was in German, except
I think that we did, on occasion, Negro
spiritual in English, but otherwise all of our
singing was in German.
But one of the things that struck me
in Germany when I was there was the
paucity of the gospel of Jesus Christ, how
little there was.
And particularly in the small towns, you would
never go into a small town and find
an evangelical church.
What you would find would be a kind
of sisterhood, something like we would call nuns
if they had been connected with a Roman
Catholic church, but they were connected with the
Reformed and with the Lutheran churches and they
were evangelicals.
And they would set up meetings for us.
We had the privilege of speaking to four,
five, six hundred people.
There weren't a lot of things to do
in a German village in those days.
And then we had the privilege of going
on Sunday morning to the local church and
listen to the pastor denounce us from the
pulpit.
But many people came to Jesus Christ through
those women, older women, and I thank God
for them.
But I was struck with a darkness.
And the same thing, I wasn't in France
very much, but going across into France was
darkness.
And we take for granted that there would
be a church that is evangelical on almost
every corner in our major cities and they
just didn't have that.
And so I came back, well to begin
with, I didn't plan to come back.
When the rest of the quartet left, I
stayed in Germany, but it was in the
days when your draft board told you what
you could and could not do and it
wasn't very long before I got a letter
from my draft board which told me that
I had to come back to the United
States.
And so I was not able to stay
there.
But you will see what happened there was
that the Lord Jesus Christ sent me out,
not anyone special, just me and a few
other people, and he gave us a vision
for the darkness of the world.
And from that time forward I was determined
to do everything I could do to get
the gospel and the ends of the earth
by supporting, praying for, doing anything that I
could to get missionaries out.
And if you ask why that happened, well
it happened in the providence of Jesus Christ.
We often speak about the providence of God,
but the providence of God is in the
hands of one who has all authority in
heaven and earth, and therefore we are talking
about the providence of Jesus Christ.
And the Bible tells us that he opens
the doors and no man shuts them, and
therefore that's the reason you heard the gospel,
because Jesus opened the door and nobody shut
it.
Now of course it's obvious that right conditions
are not all that is needed, and so
the second thing that I would say to
you is that the Lord Jesus has the
authority to bring in God's elect.
And I will read to you a verse
that again you're familiar with from John chapter
17, in which the Lord Jesus is in
prayer and he says this, Father, the time
has come, glorify your Son that your Son
may glorify you, for you granted him authority
over all people that he might give eternal
life to all those you have given him.
What is Jesus saying?
He's saying, Father, you've given me the privilege
and the authority to bring in your elect,
and he's been doing that ever since.
I had a note here to tell you
a bit about my conversion, which was a
pretty remarkable set of circumstances, but I don't
think the time will allow for that.
Let me just move on.
The third thing that the Lord Jesus Christ
has authority to do is to benefit the
church.
And over in Ephesians chapter 1, if you
would like to turn there, let me read
to you from the middle of verse 19
through the end of the chapter.
Ephesians chapter 1, and I will give you
time to find it.
Let me tell you one of my pet
peeves.
The preachers who say, turn to such and
such, they've already found it, and while you're
starting to thumb through your Bible, they're reading
it to you, and you don't hear what
they're saying because you're looking for the passage.
And I just, I get upset over that.
So I will give you time to find
Ephesians chapter 1.
Do you have it?
Ephesians chapter 1, starting in the middle of
verse 19.
God's power is like the working of His
mighty strength which He exerted in Christ when
He raised Him from the dead.
Now that is great power.
That's God's power being described here.
And seated Him at His right hand in
the heavenly realms, far above all rule and
authority, power and dominion, every title that can
be given, not only in the present age,
but also in the one to come.
So, Paul is telling Ephesians that Jesus Christ
has so much power that He has power
over all the other things that you can
name as power.
With the exception, of course, of His Father.
Verse 22, God placed all things under His
feet and appointed Him to be head over
everything for the church, which is His body,
the fullness of Him who fills everything in
every way.
Interesting to read the commentators, they usually land
on to the church, which wouldn't really mean
a great deal of difference.
But if you look through the translations, they
almost all say for the church.
You may have one that doesn't, but that
will be an exception.
So, Paul is saying to the people to
whom he is writing, the reason Jesus Christ
has this authority, I should say a reason,
is in order that He might benefit the
church with it.
And He didn't just reel us in, you
see, like a fisherman might do, and lay
us aside and go look for more fish.
It is true that He brings in a
lot of fish in the course of this
world, but He does it in order to
benefit the fish.
Any of you fishermen do that?
Some do, I suppose.
Those who get fish and put a little
clamp so they can be traced to find
out where they are migrating and so on
and so forth.
But the great majority of fishermen don't fish
for the fish, for the fish's sake, but
for their own sake.
Now finally, and again I won't have you
turn here, but you'll remember that in the
fourth place, the Lord Jesus Christ has the
authority to judge the world.
And if we had time, we could turn
to Acts chapter 17, where Paul is on
Mars Hill and he is preaching the gospel
of Jesus Christ, or at least preparing to
do that by laying a groundwork for the
character of God.
And he winds up, didn't intend I take
it to wind up here, but he winds
up saying, and God has given authority to
a man in order to judge the entire
world, that man is Jesus Christ.
And in this case the meeting broke up
because they didn't want to hear this.
So, the authority of the Lord Jesus is
exercised to create the conditions to spread the
gospel, to bring in his elect, to benefit
the church, and finally to judge the world.
Now in verses 19 and the beginning of
verse 20, we have the program that the
Lord Jesus Christ is going to run as
he does this.
And so let me read to you 19,
the first part of verse 20, and then
we'll talk about that.
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.
Now you know the old chestnut about where
you see a therefore, see what it's there
for.
And in this case, of course, it means
that because I have authority, I can carry
out this program, or you can carry it
out because I have authority to give it
to you.
And basically it has two commands.
It has a command, first of all, for
us to go and to make disciples.
And then, of course, it has the implicit
command that those to whom we go must
respond.
They won't all do so, of course, as
we well know.
But the implicit command to all men is
to respond to the gospel, and the command
to the church is to carry the gospel
out and to make disciples.
When we read this, it looks as if
he's telling us to do three different things.
First, go and make disciples of all nations.
Secondly, baptize them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit.
And thirdly, to teach them to obey everything
I have commanded you.
I say it looks as if that's a
three-pronged program.
I'm going to suggest to you this afternoon
that it's not a three-pronged program at
all, but it's a single program in which
the Lord Jesus Christ says the same thing
three ways.
Let's start with the statement, Therefore, go unto
all the world and make disciples of all
nations.
What is a disciple?
Well, if you were to look the word
disciple up in the dictionary, you would find
that it means something like a student, a
learner, a disciple is somebody who sits at
the feet, figuratively or literally, and is taught.
And Jesus is saying, therefore, go and make
disciples of all nations.
But while those dictionary definitions are correct, one
of the things that you soon learn when
you're studying English and the Bible and any
literature is that words mean all kinds of
things depending upon their context.
And it is frequently true, it can frequently
be said that words have no meaning apart
from a context because the meanings are so
varied and so many that unless you have
a context, you don't know how the word's
being used.
I looked up in my desk dictionary, the
dictionary at my desk at home, which is
one about that thick.
It's not one of these huge ones, and
it's not, of course, a child's dictionary.
But I looked up the word cut.
And how many definitions do you suppose that
I found for the word cut in that
dictionary?
Ninety-one definitions.
So when you see the word cut outside
of a context, you have no idea what
it's talking about.
I mean, something will come to your mind,
but you've got one chance of ninety-one
of it being what has come to your
mind, you see.
And so words have many meanings, and the
more common the word is, the more meanings
it has.
So let me, having laid that groundwork, talk
to you about the word disciple.
Disciple means a student, a learner, yes, but
it has a little nuance of its own.
Suppose, for instance, in a university nearby, I
said to you that there are two professors
who are experts on Karl Marx.
You can tell I'm old, or I wouldn't
be using that illustration, but for the purposes
of illustrating, it's all right.
These two men are experts on Karl Marx.
And then I said to you, one of
them is a student of Karl Marx, and
the other is a disciple of Karl Marx.
Now you would immediately pick up on the
difference.
The first man has a tremendous amount of
information about Karl Marx.
He could talk about him weeks, months, and
years perhaps, and expound his writings to you,
and so on and so forth.
But the word student is a neutral word.
You don't know whether he likes Karl Marx
or he doesn't like Karl Marx.
Are you with me?
Okay.
But if we say the other man is
a disciple of Karl Marx, we've said something
far more than that.
He knows a lot about Karl Marx.
We're saying that he is a follower of
Karl Marx.
And as you know, serious followers of Karl
Marx would be people who often risk their
lives for the particular loyalty that they have,
not perhaps in the university, but in many
parts of the world.
Now Jesus said, I want you to go
and not make students, but to make disciples.
That is the business of the Church of
Jesus Christ.
That's the first thing that Jesus says when
he talks about his programs, because a disciple
will be somebody who is prepared to follow
the Lord Jesus Christ wherever he goes.
If any man will come after me, let
him deny himself and take up his cross
and follow me, Jesus said.
And a student of Jesus Christ may or
may not be willing to do that, but
a disciple of Jesus Christ will follow him
to the death.
Now the second thing he says is, having
made these disciples, baptize them in the name
of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit.
Now the thing that strikes me about that
is, that's another way of saying make them
disciples.
Now let me back that up with a
little bit of scripture at least.
Remember over in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, that
the Apostle Paul is talking about the Israelites
coming out of Egypt, and he speaks of
them as having been baptized into Moses.
Remember that passage?
Baptized into Moses.
What does that mean?
Well it means that they came under the
authority of Moses.
On one side of the Red Sea they
were under the authority of Pharaoh, on the
other side of the Red Sea they were
under the authority of Moses.
And when people kicked against Moses' authority, God
saw to it that those people were punished.
They were baptized into Moses.
They came under Moses' authority.
They were Moses' disciples.
And I think it would be fair to
say that when we look in the New
Testament, 1400 years later, we see a lot
of people who claim to be Moses' disciples.
And they are the descendants of those who
came out of Egypt and followed Moses.
So when the Lord Jesus Christ says, baptize
them in the name of the Father and
of the Son, the Holy Spirit, he's saying
make them disciples.
Make those people who come under the authority
of the Triune God, of whom, of course,
he is the visible representation.
Now we can go a step further.
The last thing Jesus says is, teaching them,
verse 20, to obey everything I have commanded
you.
Remember the distinction between a student and a
disciple?
A student may know everything that Jesus commanded
him and not do any of it.
But a disciple is a person who does
what Jesus says.
And that's what Jesus says here.
You teach them to keep everything that I've
commanded you.
And in saying that, he's saying, make them
my disciples.
How do you do that?
Well, you make them those who follow the
Lord Jesus, who are baptized and thus come
under the authority of the Lord Jesus, and
who do what Jesus says.
So that's what a program, that is the
program of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now in the book that I've written called
The Priority of Jesus Christ, the very last
chapter, I have a chapter on how we
must live, and so I want to conclude
this afternoon by talking a bit about how
we Christians must live.
Because I gave you something at the beginning
of the book and something at the end
and in between, of course, I had to
leave many things out.
But what is it that we must do
as Christians?
Or to put it another way, what are
the commands that Jesus gives?
You remember in the Old Testament it said
the people of Israel had to follow all
the commands which God gave through Moses.
And now we have to keep all the
commands that God has given us through Jesus
Christ.
And that is what many of us have
come to call the Law of Christ.
The Law of Christ.
Not the Law of Moses, but the Law
of Christ.
Now in the New Testament there isn't a
great deal of explanation about the meaning of
that phrase, the Law of Christ.
It appears in Galatians chapter 6 and verse
2 where we are told to bear one
another's burdens and so fulfill the Law of
Christ.
And if we look around in that passage
we are likely to see some clues or
hints as to what is being talked about.
But some would say to us, you know,
there is no such group of commandments in
the New Testament such as we have in
the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament.
So displacing the Ten Commandments of the Old
Testament with the Law of Christ, you have
to make a big leap.
But I think we can see that that
is not the case for the simple reason
that the New Testament is loaded with commands.
There are commands all over the New Testament
that are directed to us over and over
and over again and it is not unreasonable
to put that name upon them, the Law
of Christ.
And the Apostle Paul also in writing to
the Corinthians says that while he is no
longer under the Mosaic Law he is in
law to Christ, which I take means that
he is under the Law of Jesus Christ.
So let's see if we can understand in
the time we have left what we might
have to talk about here.
I'm going to suggest that in the New
Testament there are five things, there are more
probably, but I'm going to suggest to you
five things that may be called the Law
of Christ.
First of all, the Law of Christ is
the character of Christ himself as he reveals
the character of God.
One of the themes that comes up repeatedly
in the New Testament is the theme of
family likeness.
Somebody has already made the point, I don't
remember who it was, but somebody has already
made the point that we are not natural
sons of God, but we are adopted sons
of God.
And if you have an adopted son, of
course, one of the things you can't count
on is that he will just be like
everybody else in the family, but you try
to create and instill in him the family
likeness.
And the Lord Jesus Christ came to display
the family likeness.
He says that I only do the things
that my father tells me to do.
I say the things which my father wants
me to say.
And in saying that, he is pushing family
likeness.
Now, that's what the New Testament is telling
us to do.
We must have the family likeness.
How are we going to know what the
family likeness is?
Well, one way we come to know it
is by looking at Jesus Christ, who is
the best revelation of what God is about.
Some years ago, I don't know if this
is still true, but ten years ago, let's
say, if you stopped in a truck stop
on the way somewhere, you would see all
of these buttons and different things that had
on them, WWJD.
WWJD.
And what did that stand for?
Tell me.
What would Jesus do?
Now, I have friends who took exception to
that, and their exception is well-grounded in
one respect, and that is, of course, we're
going to talk about what would Jesus do?
You have to know something about Jesus.
And great numbers of people wore those buttons
around who knew, I take it, little or
nothing about the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so they were inventing out of their
minds what Jesus would do, and then they
would go and maybe do that or maybe
buy another button and throw that one away.
I don't know.
But the idea itself is a good one.
What would Jesus do under these circumstances?
Now, if you don't have any clue to
the answer to that question, then you have
to exercise your own judgment.
But if we go through the Bible from
beginning to end, and particularly in the New
Testament, we'll see more and more of what
God is like in the person of the
Lord Jesus, and we'll better be able to
answer the question, then what would Jesus do?
And so I would say that that's one
of the first components of what we would
call the law of Christ.
Now, in the second place, there are implicit
commands and implicit law in the ideal descriptions
of Christians that we meet in the New
Testament.
Now, let me explain what I mean by
that.
It really comes out two ways.
First of all, let's say in Matthew chapter
5, you remember at the beginning we have
the Beatitudes.
Blessed is the man who is like this,
and blessed is the man who is like
that, and blessed is the man who is
like that, meek and poor in spirit, and
so on and so forth.
All of those are ideal descriptions of the
Christian, but as ideal descriptions of the Christian,
they're the goals toward which we must be
pressing all the time.
We're not supposed to read those and say,
that's pretty.
I think I'll write a song about that.
Maybe it could be whistled in church next
Sunday morning.
No, of course not.
When we read those ideal descriptions of Christians,
we're to say to ourselves, that's what I'm
to be like.
Now, that's one way ideal descriptions come up.
Another way is in the epistles, particularly of
Paul, in which he says to us something
like this, not in these words, but he
says something like this, become what you are.
He gives a terrific description of what a
Christian is and how he's free from sin,
and so on and so forth, and then
he says, get rid of sin.
And he sometimes specifies which ones are to
be dropped and which ones are not, and
what is he doing there?
Well, he's starting with an ideal Christian painting,
as it were, a description of the Christian,
and he's saying, set that as a goal
before you.
Don't take your eyes off of it.
You be like that.
Now, in the third place, the explicit commands
of the Lord Jesus, of course, are his
law.
The Sermon on the Mount, we get various
ones.
He says, for instance, that you've read in
old time that you must not commit adultery.
The man who looks upon a woman too
lust after her has committed adultery already as
hard, and the command, of course, that Jesus
is giving us is you must not do
that.
You must not look at women to lust
after them.
You must not do that.
And the Sermon on the Mount is filled
with all kinds of laws set down by
the Lord Jesus Christ.
All right.
His character, as the best view of God,
is one of these ways that we know
the law of Christ.
His implicit law in the ideal descriptions of
Christians, the explicit commands such as in the
Sermon on the Mount, and then the demands
in the fourth place of his agents, the
writers and the apostles.
And if you go through the epistles, they're
just full of things that we're told.
And most of those things have to do
with the heart.
Now, I'm very aware of the fact that
under the Mosaic law there were lots of
things directed at the heart.
But as a percentage, the overwhelming number were
directed at the activity because that was national
law and a mixed multitude.
And a mixed multitude cannot have a right
heart, but they can keep from murdering or
lying in court or other things.
But when we come to the New Testament,
it's different.
Now we're meeting commands like humility, patience, love,
and on and on, over and over again.
And they're not coming now from the lips
of the Lord Jesus directly, but they're coming
from his agents.
And if we had time, we could explore
the various ways in which the writers of
the New Testament show themselves to be the
agents of the Lord Jesus.
If any man thinks he's spiritual, Paul says,
let him do what I'm saying here in
the end of 1 Corinthians.
Finally, and in fifth place, and perhaps most
of all, the two love commandments, taken from
the Old Testament, to be sure, but they
do not have the place in the Old
Testament that they have in the New.
They're taken from two different passages, the one
about love to your neighbor, relatively obscure spot,
but when we come to the New Testament,
we're told over and over and over again,
you must love.
You must love.
I've often said, it may be a hyperbole,
a deliberate exaggeration, but I've often said that
when I began to preach years and years
ago, there were two subjects that we didn't
talk about.
One was the humanity of Christ, and the
second was love.
You say, that can't be, Tom.
We hear about love all the time.
Yes, but those were the things the liberals
were preaching about in those days, and the
Church of Jesus Christ in fundamentalism almost lost
any view of the humanity of Jesus Christ,
which is as tremendously important for us as
the deity.
And we didn't talk about love because the
liberals were talking about love all the time.
Now, we need a definition for love so
we know what we're talking about.
Let me give you one.
To love someone is to seek their benefit,
or to seek to promote their interest.
To seek their benefit, or to seek to
promote their interest.
And the reason I have two parts to
that definition is because we have to cover
love to both God and man, and we
can't do anything to benefit God.
He's absolutely self-sufficient, has everything that he
needs, and if we were to give him
something, it would only be something that he'd
given us.
But that's what love means, to promote the
interest of someone, or to seek their benefit.
And that is the command of Christ.
And when we look in the context of
Galatians chapter 6, bury one another's burdens and
so fulfill the law of Christ, one of
the things that's very prominent in that context
is we must love one another as Christ
loved the church.
Now, the program that I've laid out for
you has either three elements or one, depending
on how you look at it, to make
disciples of all nations, to baptize in the
name of the Father and the Son and
the Holy Spirit, and to teach them to
do all the commands of Christ.
Now let me ask you a question.
Don't answer it, but let me ask you
the question.
Will this program succeed or fail?
And from what I've said thus far, we
don't know whether it will or not.
It's like three volumes that are between two
bookends.
And if you can imagine these bookends pushing
together one volume that says make disciples, and
another volume which says baptize them, and another
volume which says teach them to do the
commands of Christ.
If you can imagine that as three volumes,
then imagine these bookends, which are tremendously important,
and the first one is all authority is
given to me in heaven and on earth.
If all authority is given to the Lord
Jesus Christ, then there is the possibility that
this program may be successfully carried out.
But we also need the other bookend, without
which the first one is of no use.
And that other bookend is found in the
last verse of this chapter.
And surely I'm with you always to the
very end of the age.
Now what's Jesus saying?
His authority without His presence would mean nothing
in this program.
His presence without His authority would lead to
frustration on the part of all who try
to engage in this program.
But because the Lord Jesus has all authority
in heaven and on earth, and He gives
this relatively short, simple program with enormous, of
course, implications, because He puts the bookends around
it of His authority and His presence, that
program will succeed.
I had lunch today with Greg Barkman and
I thought about having made a statement like
that in his church many years ago at
a missions conference.
And it had one bad result, so I
want to clear that up as much as
possible.
I say it had a bad result because
there was a young man there who was
a missionary somewhere in South America, and I
said the program of Jesus Christ is bound
to succeed, and he'd seen very little success
and concluded that he was not called to
be a missionary.
And I hated that for the simple reason
that that success that Jesus promises will be
seen over the course of history at different
times and different places.
We look at Western Europe, as I suggested
a little bit ago, and Western Europe was
just as dark as it could be, and
you couldn't see the success of the gospel.
But today, while Western Europe still lies in
darkness, the greatest revival that has ever come
to humanity is going on in the nation
of China, and today China has more evangelical,
serious evangelical Christians than any other nation in
the world.
And that is a mark.
So it's not that I'll succeed, or you'll
succeed.
It is that Jesus Christ will succeed with
his program.
And so what is our business?
Is our business to be successful?
No.
Our business is to be faithful.
And as God enables us to make disciples,
to baptize them, to teach them to do
what Christ commands, and if Christ hasn't commanded
anything, there's nothing to tell them to do,
but there is a law of Christ which
is contained in those elements that I've mentioned
to you today.
So may God enable us to do this
for his glory.
Let's pray together.
Thank you, Father, for the privilege of speaking
about the authority of Christ, and for the
privilege of having his presence.
We have it when we feel it, as
it were, and we have it when we
don't feel it, if we are members of
the church of Jesus Christ is alive.
Help us, Father, to carry out his law,
and to please him, we ask in Jesus'
name.
Amen.