Responsibly Generous

Call to Worship

To all who are weary and in need of rest

To all who are mourning and longing for comfort

To all who fail and desire strength

To all who sin and need a Savior

We, Moraga Valley Presbyterian Church, open wide our arms

With a welcome from Jesus Christ.

He is the ally to the guilty and failing

He is the comfort to those who are mourning

He is the joy of our hearts

And He is the friend of sinners

So Come, worship Him with us.

Scripture Reading & Reader

Matthew 28:18–20 NIV

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.”

Post-Scripture Prayer

Pray.

Introduction to Sermon

Good morning, my name is Brandon Morrow and I serve as one of the Pastors here at Moraga Valley! So glad to be with you all, and glad that you’re joining us for the fourth week of our series that we’ve titled, Six Stones, a series on the Value Statements of our church.

With God’s help, we hope to be a Christ Centered, Disciple Making, Hospitality Driven church that is Responsibly Generous.

The value we’re going to talk about is the one I just mentioned, Responsibly Generous. A Responsibly Generous church places their lives underneath the authority of Jesus, practicing obedience to whatever He asks of us.

Today we are going to be looking at the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 as we look at where Jesus gets His authority, and why that’s the root of all of our obedience.

As you’re turning to Matthew 28… I do want to mention one thing about Matthew 28, — discipleship, or making disciples, is the heart of this passage, as well as the church’s obedience to making disciples... but for the life of me, I can’t bring myself to preach a sermon on the HOW of being obedient in making disciples, because I could give you all of the methods in the world, and if you didn’t have the WHY in being obedient in making disciples, your heart would never be moved towards making disciples.

Oswald Chambers, who wrote the popular devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, said about obedience.

The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.

Oswald Chambers

For as much as we want to make the Christian life about mountain top experiences, where we go through massive transformations, big spiritual breakthroughs, most of our Christian life is day to day, largely uneventful, where God is very active, but inconspicuous — present in our parenting, work, leisure — and we’re responsible for staying obedient, even in those moments, those mundane, hardly miraculous moments. That’s where the seedbed of transformation is prepared, that’s where character gets its formation, that’s where discipleship happens.

I think this should frame up our time together nicely, turn with me to Matthew 28:16 and we’ll start a few verses ahead of schedule to paint a picture. Jesus has resurrected from the dead, and the religious leaders can’t handle being made to look like a bunch of fools, so they pay off some soldiers to go around and say that the disciples had stolen the body, and Jesus had planned for a rendezvous point after the resurrection in Galilee, and verse 17 says that “they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”

The word for doubt used in verse 17 is the same word used when Peter was walking on the water but began to hesitate in his trust of Jesus.

There are all sorts of hesitations by the disciples. He has died, but now He lives. They saw His body, lifeless, and now He stands in front of them. This verse, in many ways, sets the tone for verse 18, where Jesus announces the authority He has, because whether or not we’re ready, whether we’re ready to receive it or not, whether or not we believe it to be true, Jesus stands as Lord and Savior, demanding our attention. He is Lord, whether we like it or not.

Jesus gives his demanding statement in Matthew 28:18 “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

Because we’re not as steeped in the Old Testament as the disciples were, we miss the connection that they would have known when Jesus said these words. They would have connected this moment to the childhood stories they heard about “the son of man,” the coming Messiah who would win the hearts of all of Israel.

They would have heard this story at meal times, at festivals, in the synagogue — they know this all too well, they know other version of it, they know elaborate tellings of the “son of man” — the one who ascends and descends on clouds, the one who slays dragons, the victorious King who demands worship from all other gods — this story, would have likely taken them back to Daniel 7:13-14 which recalls a vision that Daniel had concerning the coming Savior:

Daniel 7:13–14 NIV

“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 nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

Daniel has seen a vision of Jesus, standing in the presence of the Father, and the Father has placed on the Son — all authority, glory, and power — who is worthy of all worship — whose rule has no end, whose Kingdom will never be destroyed.

There’s a lot of puzzle pieces that are all fitting together at this moment. In Matthew’s gospel, the term “son of man” is used pretty frequently. In Matthew 20:28, it reads “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

The Son of Man has not only come to gain all authority from the Father, to receive worship from every tribe, language, and people, whose Kingdom knows no end, but He has also come to ransom us.

Ransom is a LOADED word.

To ransom something, is to redeem something, — it is to pay a price to obtain the release of a captive.

In 1973, the grandson of the richest living person in the world, was kidnapped while he was living in Rome. He was kidnapped by an Organized Crime group that demanded $17 million dollars to get his grandson back. Grandpa was going to call their bluff, and refused to pay the ransom. They received a package not long after saying, “This is your grandson’s ear. If we don’t get some money within 10 days, then the other ear will arrive. In other words, he will arrive in little bits.”

They paid the money, and he was reunited with his family — safely.

The way the Bible speaks of ransom, it is that sin is holding the world captive, and the only way to pay the ransom note for the world is for the Father to give His Son. 1 Corinthians 6:20 says “you were bought at a price.” Acts 20:28 says that Jesus “bought (US) with his own blood.”

The sinful human condition is like a form of captivity that you can never free yourself from — but the truth of the gospel is that Jesus has secured your release. Sin has no power, or authority, over us. Why? Because the Son of Man, Jesus, has given His life as a ransom for many!

I can’t even imagine those conversations that very wealthy family had, the debate on whether or not to pay the money to see their grandson freed.

To most there’s hardly a debate to be had about it.

Thankfully our ransom did not go unpaid.

In Matthew 20:21, the mother of James and Jon, the Sons of Zebedee, come asking for a special place with Jesus, and he says in verse 22, “You don’t know what you are asking,” and then he asks a very unusual question. He says, “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?” They think they can.

The cup here represents the wrath of God — only Jesus can satisfy the wrath of God — only He can pay the ransom for sin.

Scholar Dan Doriani wrote these words, “Jesus came to give his life for many, as a substitute for their sin. He drank down the cup of God’s wrath so that the redeemed would not. No mere human can drain that cup. If it were ever to be emptied, Jesus had to do it. This is the purpose of God coming to earth; this is why “the Son of Man came.”

Let’s bring this all together now… Now that we see where Jesus gets His authority…

Notice what Jesus says in Matthew 28:18-20 “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.”

The authority that the Redeeming King gives us, is to tell all the world, to teach obedience, and to know that He will not leave us alone or powerless.

If the unfading Kingdom, whose King has all power, glory, and authority, has granted authority to the church today — and we know that He has because He says His authority won’t ever leave us — , then that means that all power, glory, and authority has been given to you — it means that you can never tire in resources, in courage, in opportunities to be obedient. It also means that all that I am, today, because I have been ransomed by Jesus, belongs to Him — He paid it all. It’s all at His disposal. All that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become through Him — is His.

Our church has a stated value around this belief. It reads:

We will be a community that shares our time, talent, and treasure. We will view mentoring, giving, and acts of kindness all as expressions of generosity because in the gospel, God is incredibly generous to us.

Generous in that the Father has paid our ransom with His Son. Generous in that “all authority” has already come at an incredible cost.

To be obedient in what Jesus wants, to exercise what some might call “generosity,” is an exercise in being ransomed people. The One who has paid my debt is the One who owns all things — and He has given us something to do. Actually, the One with ALL AUTHORITY is speaking — and we have to give Him our attention.

It would be easy for us to gloss over the magnitude of the Great Commission, and we typically do — we’re pretty okay at baptizing, pretty okay at teaching, and we like the verb “go,” but we’ve dismissed these words for special occasion moments, like mission trips, or Sunday school classes, — or we’ve dismissed them altogether, forgetting that we would “teach them to obey all that I have commanded,” and altogether dismissing obedience.

We have chosen lesser methods: maybe we’ve decided to “let go and let God,” but we won’t have been found obedient to His Words.

We have chosen lesser methods: believing that Jesus has told us something other than “making disciples.” We’ve taken the word “go” as the command, instead of the hard work of ransomed discipleship. — Here’s a fun fact: in Greek, go is not an imperative, it’s not a command, it’s a verb — and a better translation for it is, “as you are going,” — as we are going, in the mundane, hardly miraculous moments of our lives, we live as ransomed people do, making disciples and exercising the generosity of a God who has been so generous with us through His Son.

Alec Motyer said,

The life of sanctification is the life of obedience.

J. Alec Motyer

We will never be more like Jesus than when we are doing the things Jesus has asked us to do.

There are at least two ways in which we can respond to this message:

Make Disciples — I’m going to just refer to the wonderful message that Pastor Dave preached last week so go on our YouTube page and check that out, and if you’re still unclear with what making disciples implies, I would give you this quote for thought: “As someone once said, if the church wants to know what Jesus says to the church today, he can look to the parts of the Gospels that they have not underlined.” I’m sure it’ll be something that requires pointing ourselves and others to Jesus in holiness.

Do What Ransomed People Do — Liberated people are able to remember a time when they were held in bondage — when they were slaves to addiction, lust, achieving status, impressing others, — and they are also able to articulate what freedom did for them. We are free to be generous with the things that Jesus has already paid the price for… the gospel has demonstrated to us that Jesus has given the church an inexhaustible wealth through the limitless love at the cross. Pay attention to where the Son of Man might be calling you to trust Him in your busy day-to-day lives, in glorifying Him in service, and where He can best use His money. Ransomed people will live as if Jesus paid it all, not just paid for some of it. This is what it means to live under the authority of Jesus!

A responsibly generous church lives under the authority of Jesus, doing whatever He asks us to do, giving whatever He asks us to give, telling whoever He asks us to tell — the Son of Man has spoken, will we be found to be obedient?