Disciples to Apostles

Students to Teachers

The culmination of Matthew’s Gospel unites two key themes: The identity of Jesus and Discipleship. There is the resolution that both is the vindication of Jesus’ suffering messiahship and his exalted glory. As well as the next step to the call of the disciples that culminates in their rise from followers to leaders.

They are back in Galilee where it all started but they are not meeting Jesus along the shore but on the Mt. A bookend to the great Sermon On The Mount. The authority of teaching as Jesus is both prophet and priest.

Also, Trinitarian bracketing from Jesus’s baptism and his authority in The Great Commission.

Jesus’s vindication comes out of his humiliation and death through God’s gifting of all authority and enthronement with the resurrection.

The act of ultimate obedience to the Father has made redemption possible.

3. Universal declaration of the kingship of Jesus is declared in the sending forth.

royal emissary took the message of the king to all the town squares of the land and shared the words of the monarch.

The culminating event

John 17:1–19 “After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of…”

Set apart:

“Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life.”- Deitrich Bonhoeffer

We need the whole story:

John 3:16 and John 3:36

Jesus gives the authority he has been given that is in direct conflict to the religious and political authority that crucified him to his disciples.

The disciples answer to Jesus must be more than “I believe” it must be followed by obedience to His will and acceptance of His word.

The world must either receive or reject the life of Jesus.

The social political climate of the disciples say that they can’t “teach in that name”

In a world where it is popular to preach politics, policy, and social principles— the most important truth is Jesus.

Harshness

Truth is offensive: It separates families.

Either Christ is Lord or we seek to claim the slot.

“True humility is a kind of self-annihilation; and this is the centre of all virtues.” ― John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection

The Great Commission is the bookend to the disciples calling by Jesus’s ministry. What began with the beatitudes on the Mt. that becomes the new covenant in Jesus with the Law of Moses as its foundation, declares the authority of Jesus’s message. The disciples are endowed with the same authority as Jesus on earth. With that authority they will encounter the same conflicts with worldly authority as Jesus (“when they hate you they hated me first”). True discipleship bids us to lose our lives against the popularity of this world. What the world preaches as necessary is (while can be important) is not nearly as necessary as the salvation truth of Jesus Christ.