GREAT COMMISSION OR GREAT OMMISSION?

GREAT COMMISSION OR GREAT OMMISSION?

Prayer:Dear Father, as we gather for this service, we pray for Your guidance and direction. ... We pray that during this service, your people will be sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable and teachable. So, let this day be filled with Your blessing and anointing; thank You Lord, Amen.

Matthew 28:18-20

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 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, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Intro: Before ascension Jesus issued what has come to be called The Great Commission. A “commission” is “an authoritative command; a directive; a command.” When Jesus spoke these words directly to His disciples, and indirectly to us, He was giving the church her marching orders. He was telling exactly what He expected us to do in His physical absence. The disciples took the Lord’s command seriously. They went into the world and shared the Gospel of Jesus and thousands upon thousands were saved by the grace of God. Their message was so powerful and their witness so effective that their critics accused them of “turning the world upside down”, Acts 17:6.

That was then, and this is now! What was given as The Great Commission has turned into what some have labeled The Great Omission. When something is “omitted”, it is “left out, undone, neglected”. Instead of taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth as the Lord commanded, the modern church won’t even take the Gospel to the end of the street.

We are satisfied to be saved, but we are not motivated to see others come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Somehow we have come to believe that the end of our responsibility is to come to church a couple of times a week, pray when we can, read the Bible every now and then, and live a life that is slightly cleaner than the world around us. We have forgotten the truth that Christianity is a militant, activist faith.

In spite of the conditions around us; in spite of the difficulties and dangers; in spite of every excuse we offer, The Great Commission still stands! God still expects His people to take His message to a lost world so that they might hear the wonderful words of life.

Has The Great Commission become The Great Omission in your life and mine? Are we as a church doing everything we can to find inroads of outreach into the world around us?

I want to take a fresh look at The Great Commission today. I want to share facts from these verses that give us much needed insight into The Great Commission. I want to preach on the subject Great Commission or Great Omission?

I. WE HAVE A DIVINE MANDATE

v. 19Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

· The mandate of The Great Commission is to “Go”. This is a word of action! We cannot “go” if we are sitting still. We cannot “go” if we stay where we are. We cannot “go” if we do not make a move.

· This verb literally means “as you go”. As we pass through this world we are to carry the Gospel message with us, sharing it with everyone we meet along the way. There are two ways we can do this.

1. It involves our Lifestyle – Matt. 5:13-16. Like salt, our life should create a thirst in people for the Lord. Our joy, our peace, our differences from the world should cause them to want to know why we are like we are. Our lives should be like a great spotlight which directs its beam toward Jesus. If He is the focus of our lives, men will see Him lived out through our lives day by day!

2. It involves our Lips – We are told to “teach”. That word has the idea of “making disciples or to instruct”. We are to live the right kind of life, but we are also told to share our faith. We are to tell a lost world what Jesus did for us when He saved us and what He can do for them, if they will trust Him as we did. It is not enough to just show it, we must also say it!

Mark 16:15 says this, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” The word “preach” comes from a word that means “to herald”. Like a king’s herald, we are to pass through the highways and byways of life lifting our voices to declare the Gospel of grace!

The word “preach” is a present tense, active voice, imperative mood verb. The imperative means that it is a command. The active voice means that you are to be involved in carrying out this command. The present tense means that it is something we are supposed to be doing all the time.

In fact, we are preaching all the time. Every moment we live we are preaching through our actions and through our words. We are either pointing people to Jesus are we are pointing them away from Him. We are either saying “He is my Lord and Savior and you need to know Him too”; or we are saying “My relationship with Jesus really doesn’t make a difference in my life.”

(Ill. While D. L. Moody was attending a convention in Indianapolis on mass evangelism, he asked his song leader Ira Sankey to meet him at 6 o’clock one evening at a certain street corner. When Sankey arrived, Mr. Moody asked him to stand on a box and sing. Once a crowd had gathered, Moody spoke briefly and then invited the people to follow him to the nearby convention hall. Soon the auditorium was filled with spiritually hungry people, and the great evangelist preached the gospel to them.

Then the convention delegates began to arrive. Moody stopped preaching and said, “Now we must close, as the brethren of the convention wish to come and discuss the topic, ‘How to reach the masses.’”

Moody graphically illustrated the difference between talking about doing something and going out and doing it.)

He saved us to use us in this world as His tools of ministry to lost sinners! How well are we carrying out this command?

Conc: On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a little life-saving station. The building was primitive, and there was just one boat, but the members of the life-saving station were committed and kept a constant watch over the sea. When a ship went down, they unselfishly went out day or night to save the lost. Because so many lives were saved by that station, it became famous.

Consequently, many people wanted to be associated with the station to give their time, talent, and money to support its important work. New boats were bought, new crews were recruited, a formal training session was offered. As the membership in the life-saving station grew, some of the members became unhappy that the building was so primitive and that the equipment was so outdated. They wanted a better place to welcome the survivors pulled from the sea. So they replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged and newly decorated building.

Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members. They met regularly and when they did, it was apparent how they loved one another. They greeted each other, hugged each other, and shared with one another the events that had been going on in their lives. But fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions; so they hired lifeboat crews to do this for them.

About this time, a large ship was wrecked off of the coast, and the hired crews brought into the life-saving station boatloads of cold, wet, dirty, sick, and half-drowned people. Some of them had black skin, and some had yellow skin. Some could speak English well, and some could hardly speak it at all. Some were first-class cabin passengers of the ship, and some were the deck hands.

The beautiful meeting place became a place of chaos. The plush carpets got dirty. Some of the exquisite furniture got scratched. So the property committee immediately had a shower built outside the house where the victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.

At the next meeting there was rift in the membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s life-saving activities, for they were unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal fellowship of the members. Other members insisted that life-saving was their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all those various kinds of people who would be shipwrecked, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. And do you know what? That is what they did.

As the years passed, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a place to meet regularly for fellowship, for committee meetings, and for special training sessions about their mission, but few went out to the drowning people. The drowning people were no longer welcomed in that new life-saving station. So another life-saving station was founded further down the coast. History continued to repeat itself. And if you visit that seacoast today, you will find a number of adequate meeting places with ample parking and plush carpeting. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown.

That is a parable of the condition of the modern church. I do not want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but here are the facts. We have become more concerned about buildings than about people. We are more interested in having our meetings than we are in fulfilling our mission. We are more interested in our personal comfort than we are about who is drowning in the sea of sin just beyond our walls. We are more concerned about the color of a man’s skin than we are the condition of His soul. We want to see people come into the church, as long as they are the right kind of people. I am afraid The Great Commission has become The Great Omission in many of our lives. That can change and it must! It will change only when we come to the Lord and ask Him to change our own hearts!