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Your meditation
God's Heart for Missions
The Great Commission
"All authority has been given to me in heaven and earth....and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you, even to the end of the age." (
Matthew 28:18-20)
The Great Commission is God's command to take the gospel to all the world. It's stated many times in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, but one of the clearest statements is this one. Throughout the Bible we see it's God's greatest priority for history.
Two Beginnings and Two Endings
Let's consider two beginnings and two endings in the Bible. When you read a book, the way it starts is going to tell you the theme of the entire book. The way it ends shows you when the author was satisfied it was done. When people start a new project, the things we say then are the most crucial and important things we can say. And a person's last words are often their most central thoughts and concerns. So let's look at some of the beginnings and endings in the Bible.
The First Beginning: Abraham
Adam and Eve were driven from the garden of Eden, and the effect of sin was known early when one of their own sons murdered his brother. Things kept getting worse. God saw that the imaginations of man's heart were only evil all the time. God was ready to redeem those who would follow him even then, but the result was not good. God finally said he was ready to start over again. He picked out Noah and his family to be the seed of that new beginning, and wiped out the rest of the world with a flood.
After the flood, we see the world picking up again where it left off. It culminated in the Tower of Babel, a monument to the pride of man. God saw their pride and said, if these people remain united in this way, then there pride will be impregnable. I'll never get through to them. So he confused their languages and scattered them. This happens in Genesis Chapter 11. Right next to that there is a list of about 70 families, and many people believe these families become the first nations in the world.
So from the start God is restoring his rule over the peoples of the world, while the world is united against him in pride. He divides the world into nations. Now comes the incredible next step, in
Genesis 12:1-3. God has broken the proud unity of the world, and then immediately he points at one man:
1 "Now the LORD had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father’s house,
To a land that I will show you.
2 "I will make you a great nation;
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
3 "I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
God is no longer dealing with the world as a whole. He's starting with one man who would found one nation, and he's going to bless this man and this nation. They're going to be his own people; they're going to have a special relationship with him. And then what does it say? It says that in Abraham all the nations of the world would be blessed.
The Second Beginning: Jesus' Ministry
Missions to all the nations was in the heart of God from the very first mention of the word nations. Let's fast forward now to another beginning, to the first sermon Jesus gave, at least the first one reported by Luke. It's in
Luke 4:24-30. He's in his hometown, and he opens the scroll and reads one of the great Messianic prophecies of the OT, from
Isaiah 49. His fellow Nazarenes love it--even when he makes the audacious claim that this glorious prophecy is fulfilled in him! He's a real favorite son of theirs! They love having him as one of their own, and they know he's going to make quite a splash in the world!
Then he switches gears and reminds them that God had blessed other nations in the Old Testament. The widow in Elijah's time was not a Jew. Naaman was a Syrian, not a Jew. No Jew received God's favor in those particular ways. At this, a riot broke out.
Jesus started his ministry by pointing to God's heart for all the nations. This was no casual statement--he almost got himself thrown over a cliff for it! So again in this second beginning, the beginning of Jesus' ministry, we see God's heart for the nations, just as in the beginning of the history of nations.
The First Ending: Jesus' Last Words
Let's look at two endings now. Let's look at Jesus' last words. I could point to the same thing in five locations, but I'm going to concentrate on just two. One of them is the Great Commission passage I quoted before, in
Matthew 28:18-20. Do you think the nations were on Jesus' heart? These are the last words in the gospel of Matthew. He could have left any number of final instructions, but this was it! And then just before he ascended into heaven, here are his last words,
Acts 1:8:
"But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
The Nations
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Let's clarify exactly what Jesus is saying in
Matthew 28:19. It shows up again in the last passage we're going to cover in a few moments, and many other places in the New Testament. Jesus commands his disciples to make disciples of all nations. He was not speaking of political nations as you might think, countries like America or Turkey or Russia or Jordan. The Greek word here is ethné, and we get our word "ethnic" from it. You might say that "ethnic group" is in some ways a better translation. He was talking about people groups, defined not by their capital city but by their race, their religious heritage, their language, their tribe, and so on. A country may have many people groups, like the many castes of India or many tribes in an African country. A people group may span more than one country, like middle class whites in North America, or Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, and other neighboring lands. There are about 200 politically defined nations in the world; there are thousands of "people groups" in the sense Jesus was using. Jesus was commanding us to reach every one of them.
The Second Ending: The End of It All
This brings us to the final ending in our story of the heart of God (and then we're going to spend some moments looking at how we're making progress on reaching all these peoples of the world). This final ending is the close of the ages. If you want to have a sense of how important missions is to God, look at
Matthew 24:14:
"And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come."
This is what God is waiting for! Don't fail to notice the promise in there, by the way: the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in all the nations! Not just preached, but effectively! Look at the result in
Revelation 7:9-10.
"After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!'"
Think of the celebration! Think of the glory! Think of the delight in heaven! Think of the way God will glorify himself by bringing together Blacks, Whites, Africans, Asians, rich, poor, men, women, from all ages and from all nations!
It's at the beginning, it's at the ending. It's all through the middle, too. It is truly at the center of God's heart. It's at the center of Seaford Baptist Church's heart, too!
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