Following Orders

Luke 24:44-49

Introduction

As many of you know, I am a chaplain in the Canadian Armed Forces reserves. I have long been interested in the military and their way of doing things. I even see a number of intersections with the military and the church. I don’t think I am too far off the track, as there are many military metaphors in the Bible, including in Paul’s letters. I think there was a reason why William Booth created a Christian organization called the Salvation Army.

One of the things that I find interesting about the military is about how they get things done, especially their use of orders. What does a general say to those under them when they want to get something done? Do you think they just send out a message, “Go and do some army stuff.” That would not be very effective.

There is actually a very organized way of doing orders in the military. I am not going into the details of all the parts, but I do want to share what I consider to be the two most important parts: the commander’s intent and the desired end state. Let me give an example. In the Baptist church, the pastor definitely doesn’t give orders. But if I did, this is how I would go about in terms of our support of the food bank. My intent would be that we would be actively supporting our local food bank. The end state that I would like to see is that by the time everything is done, we would have collected a certain amount of food and money. How that happens is not necessarily my concern. I would just want to know that my intent was turned into the desired end state. But again, as a Baptist pastor, I do not give orders.

But Jesus does give orders. What we are going to look at is what is called the Great Commission. This is slightly different from the more familiar version in Matthew. 

In terms of what we have been saying, the commander’s intent in the Great Commission is that the gospel would be preached widely. The desired end state is that every follower of Jesus would fulfill their role of being his witnesses. Now let’s take a closer look.

What

So as followers of Jesus, we are expected to share the message of the gospel. But to do that, we need to know what the actual content of that message is. I’m surprised at how much misunderstanding there is when it comes to the nature of the gospel. Three parts are given to us in this passage regarding the message we are to share.

Many Christians would define the gospels as Jesus dying for our sins. But that is not where Jesus starts in his description of the message. In fact he starts where we might not expect. He talks about the law of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms. What is that? Those are the three categories that the Jews used to describe what we call the Old Testament. I thought Jesus was about the New Testament and not the Old? The point that Jesus is making is that everything in the Old Testament was moving toward Jesus. The appearance of Jesus was not a last minute attempt to fix a sudden problem. If we look closely, we can see all sorts of hints that God had been planning this for a long time. This reminds us that God is the God of history, God is in control in ways we can’t understand. By remembering that this is where salvation army has been leading, we see the activity of Jesus in a fresh way.

The next part of the message is about the death and resurrection of Jesus. The death and resurrection of Jesus. Remember what many people think is the gospel, that Jesus died for our sins. That’s fine as far as it goes but it also includes the resurrection. A number of years ago I was in a leadership training program and we had to preach a five minute evangelistic sermon. The hardest job the instructors had was to get people to preach both the death and the resurrection. Everyone wanted to preach the cross! But of you think about it, we would have no idea if Jesus’ death did anything if he didn’t rise from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus must be included in the message.

So far we have looked at what God has done. But part of the message is how people need to respond. Another part of the message is the call to repentance. The gospel is not a history lesson, filling in facts about what God has done in the present. The gospel includes our need to repent. When Jesus first started his ministry, Mark tells us that he preached the gospel. Obviously that gospel didn’t include his death in resurrection, but it did include a call to repent and to believe. But what does it mean to repent? For some people, repentance is about praying what’s called “the sinner’s prayer.” The problem with this is that type of prayer has really been around since the revivalism in the last couple of centuries. It is something God uses, but you won’t find it in the Bible. Is repentance about feeling really sorry about some bad thing we did? It can include feelings of regret but it is not about emotions. This is how I see repentance and believing. You are driving in the wrong direction in your car. You realize that the direction you are going is not going to get you to your desired destination. Repentance is slowing down and doing a u-turn. Believing is putting your foot down on the accelerator and going in the right direction.

This is our message, that God has been at work all through human history, the Jesus died and rose again and that people are called to repent.

How

That is the what of the message but what about the how? It is not about methodology. Some people are convinced that their methodology is the right way. It is all about door knocking and handing out tracts. It is all about feeding the poor. It is all about medical missions overseas. All of those can be good, but I don’t think Jesus has a preference for the method, as long as it is done ethically. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus has no thoughts on the how.

Jesus tells his disciples that he is sending them. In other words, it is not about minding our own business and hoping someone approaches us. We are to be sent. The church is meant to be apostolic, with apostle meaning “sent one.” What does that look like? It could mean international missions, but probably not for most of us. We want to know where we are sent to, but our first question should be where we are sent from. We are sent from the gathering of the believers. But that’s not how we want it. What we want is for people to come into our church building and hear the message that is preached inside. But what Jesus wants is for us to go out from the gathering. We are to be Christians not just at 57 Queen St but everywhere we are. It is ironic that I am preaching this at a time when we can’t gather physically together and we are forced to be the church in our own neighbourhoods. It seems to be a rather apostolic situation that we are in.

Here is the other part of the how. We are to do this in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they receive the power of the Spirit. We don’t have to wait for that event as the Spirit has already been given to the church. When it comes to the Spirit and sharing the gospel, we often think of the boldness to share beyond our comfort zones. That is part of it but there are other ways the Spirit helps us. Sometimes the Spirit helps me to keep my mouth shut. How does that help? Sometimes our words are more hurtful than helpful. We are provoked by a statement and we want to respond strongly but the Holy Spirit may prompt us to shut our mouth. I have had numerous statements make it right up my throat and then die as I was convicted to keep them to myself. The point of all this is that Spirit helps us in all ways, in what to say and what not to say.

Conclusion

We have been given our orders. The commander’s intent is that the gospel is shared widely. The end state is that followers of Jesus will be his witnesses in the world. We are given a lot of latitude as to how we do this. We need to keep the message correct. God has always been at work in the world and scripture testifies to this. Jesus both died and rose from the dead. The response to this message is not just mental assent but repentance. The how is to go. It is not to stay in our holy huddle and hope some good comes. We are sent ones. We are an apostolic church. And God does not leave us unprepared. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit. How we witness for Jesus will look different for all of us. But doing it is our Great Commission.