Jesus has every right to tell us what to do.
In Matthew 28:18, Jesus says, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth." That means He has every right to tell us what to do.
Through the apostle Paul, God tells us in 2 Corinthians 6:19-20, "You are not your own. For you have been bought with a price." The price was Jesus' very life. He laid down His life for me and for you. That means you and I have no right not to do what Jesus says. So, asking the question, "Why me?" is irrelevant, if not disrespectful and even disobedient.
Jesus has called each of us who claim to know Him to make a trip for Him. A life-long journey, actually. He says to us, "Follow Me."
He has told us what He wants us to do while on this journey. He says, "As you are going, make disciples."
But as we'll see (and you probably already know), very few of us are making disciples of the kind or in the way Jesus has in mind. In fact, very few of us are living as such disciples ourselves. We've never become, or been made into, disciples of the sort Jesus intends.
Why is this so?
The “easy” answer some people would give is that, in fact, most of us who have truly received Jesus are just willfully disobedient to God. But I disagree. I don't think this is a good explanation.
Another “easy” answer is simply to question the sincerity of the faith of most "Christians," or to question the level of their "commitment," as many writers and speakers do. Well, it is always good to test and examine ourselves to see if we truly are in the faith, as God says in 2 Corinthians 13:5. “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you — unless indeed you fail the test?”
But what if these explanations are too superficial? What if they are just easy answers that seem to explain the virtual absence of making mature disciples without really examining the situation. Ask yourself:
Could it be that we are missing something?
Are there aspects of disciplemaking that we do not understand, that we have not thought out well enough?
Is there a way to see more clearly, more fundamentally and more practically what disciplemaking is all about, from God’s perspective?
Can’t we talk about the critically important Great Commission of our Lord Jesus in ways that we can practically picture and grasp and apply, rather than just with Biblically-correct phrases that leave us in a fog, unclear as to how to move forward?
To all these questions, I say, "Yes!" We'll explore this together in our next blog.
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