Uh it’s a series based on the great commission just for people like us for for our church to be a church that makes disciples. And we’ll review that timeless commission one more time. It says that 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, teaching them to obey everything I’ve commanded you. And surely I’m with you always to the very end of the age. So, we’ve been thinking this past month about what it means to first be a disciple of Jesus, what’s involved in making disciples. We’ve talked about what a committed disciple looks like. uh just the changes in identities and priorities that shape our lives as we begin to follow Jesus as his disciple. And we saw how spiritual disciplines are important in our growth. How but underneath those disciplines is just an invitation for us to learn to enjoy Jesus and for us to receive his blessing over our lives. And we talked about evangelism as the obvious first step that has to occur if anyone’s going to successfully make disciples. So, one thing I think we’ve looked at or we’ve tried to do through this series is not overthink our task, not help us not get caught up in the methods and programs and curriculums and strategies because those things are needed and are helpful, but they’re only aids. They’re never the determining factor in whether or not we as a church make disciples. I think it’s important for us to remember that over the past 2,000 years of the Christian church, God’s church, whose living head is Jesus Christ, the church has been highly successful in making disciples, reproducing disciples, generating more and more disciples generation after generation. And for most of those 2,000 years, Christians have been making disciples without any disciplehip books or programs or podcasts or curriculum or seminars or conferences, any of the things you and I might think of are important in in growing as disciple and making disciples. In fact, for most of the most of the past 2,000 years, disciplem has continued uninterrupted across the globe. But for most of that time, the great majority of Christians, other than clergy, didn’t have the benefit of literacy. They didn’t even own personal Bibles. But regardless, disciples of Jesus Christ continually produced and reproduced, multiplied over and over again. How can that be? How can disciples be made without books and programs and podcasts? One reason I think is surely found in the phrases Jesus uses to bookend the great commission. At the start he says we’re going to make disciples under his authority. He says all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Meaning we come into this business of making disciples. We’re not don’t need to be isolated and nervous and insecure because we represent a great power and a great authority. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:11, “Since then we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men.” That was his goal. Try to persuade men. And a few verses later, he says, “Were therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on beha on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.” Clearly, the Apostle Paul viewed his disciplemaking ministry through the lens of the authority that had been delegated from God to him. And we’re to view this the great commission the same way. So, we have that book end of authority at the start of the great commission. At the end of the great commission, Jesus says we’re going to make disciples under his guiding presence. He says, “And surely I’m with you always to the very end of the age.” So if you and I if we operate under the opaces the authority of Jesus we’re guided and supervised by his empowering presence then the middle part of the great commission our part it just doesn’t seem as difficult or intimidating anymore. Our part our role says is to go to evangelize to baptize and to teach and instruct new believers so that they obey the commands of Jesus Christ. But if we have both the authority and the presence of Jesus with us the whole time, then for a church like ours to consider a commitment to making disciples, it shouldn’t be overwhelming. It should almost be as natural for us as falling off a log. That natural process and success in disciplem under the authority, the presence of Jesus, that seems to have been largely the story of the church and the story of what’s happened in our world over the past 2,000 years. Of course, the people involved, they’re working. They’re not passive. They’re making sacrifices. They’re being intentional about the disciplem task, but they’re the authority and presence of Jesus always puts the wind in our sales to do anything we want to do for him. So, we don’t want to overthink or over complicate what disciplem involves. Nor do we want to underestimate the power of a disciplem community. Because over the Christian landscape again of the past 2,000 years, those who have been making disciples, they’re seldom Swiss Army types, you know, who have all the attachments and all the tools and they can do it all and they’re tucked in one place. I think there certainly have been some individuals like that. They appear to have extraordinary gifts when it comes to evangelism, helping people grow. Those are the kind of people who could parachute in alone behind enemy lines and contact non-believers and evangelize them with the gospel message and baptize converts and educate them broadly in the scriptures and eventually they’d leave behind this gaggle or pod of disciples who could keep the process going. Those there are people like that but I think they’re like unicorns in the Christian church. It seems that God’s normal method of making disciples involves a community of people like ourselves, a collection of variously gifted people, a community like the one here within these walls this morning wearing the label of a disciplemaker that might be a little too heavy a term for any one of us to carry alone. But if we share the load and the ministry of disciplem together, it seems much more manageable. Even that great pioneering uh missionary evangelist, the Apostle Paul, he’s someone we think of. He’s the prototypical Swiss army knife type disciplemaker who could do it all. But he said these words to the people at the church in Corinth, the church that Paul had initially planted. He told them, “I planted the seed. Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow.” So Paul, he recognized that the great commission first and foremost, this is God’s program. This is God’s work. We just get to join in and be used as workers in that enterprise of making disciples. A work that’s most often accomplished through community. So just for fun this morning, let’s observe a disciplem community in action. An interesting early case in scripture of a disciplem community that we read about in the book of acts chapters 11 and 13. Of course we know the church had its beginning its genesis in the Jewish capital city of Jerusalem. This was a culturally homogeneous region. It was composed almost exclusively of Jewish people. And the first stirrings of Christianity happened suddenly under the power of the Holy Spirit. And the church grew and thrived in Jerusalem for its early years. But Jesus’ commission involves going to all the nations to make disciples. And so it took the the notso gentle nudging of violent persecution to send Christians scurrying to new loces to toward the north regions of Israel and and Samaria and Syria and Asia. Acts chapters chapter 11 19-20. Now those who’d been scattered by the persecution in connection with Steven traveled as far as Phoenicia as the island of Cyprus and up into Antioch. A lot of things happened at that church in Antioch. And and in time it became really the one of the most important churches in all of early Christianity. When the gospel arrived in Antioch, this was the first time the good news about Jesus had ever been taken to a very large city. Because compared to the relatively small provincial capital of Jerusalem, Antioch was 10, 15, 20 times larger, far more densely populated. And unlike Jerusalem, Antioch was urban. It was pluralistic, multithnic, multi-racial, contained Greeks and Syrians and Jews and Arabs and Persians and Egyptians and Africans, people from India. It kind of sat straddling the western world and the Orient to the east. So, it was a crossroads for many different peoples. And if you went to ancient Antioch today, you’d go to actually a smaller city in Turkey called Antacia. It’s only got about 35,000 people now. It’s not nearly the city it was in biblical times. Yeah. About 500 years after the book of Acts, Antioch was attacked and basically demolished by Persian armies, never recovered. And only 3 years ago in February 2023, this powerful earthquake rocked Antacia and the city was almost completely leveled. By the time of the book of acts though Antioch was the third largest city in the entire Roman Empire. Only Rome itself and Alexandria in Egypt were larger than Antioch. So in terms of the great commission first task of Christians is to go and evangelize. The way that was done in Antioch it was extraordinarily radical. It had never been done before. We read, “Now those who had been scattered by persecution, connection with Steven, traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews.” These are people they knew that would uh would have some background and might be open to talking about the Messiah. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Sirene went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. Now Greeks is kind of a an overall term for Gentiles, non-Jewish people in general. But this was an amazing paradigm shift. First time in history where the where the gospel was being preached to just raw pagan Greek gentile people. People who didn’t believe the Bible. People had no prior inclination to give credence or priority to the God of Israel. This was all completely new. You know, when the church first departed from Jerusalem, Philip saw some gospel success among the Samaritans. But before the gospel came to the Samaritans, they already believed in the Jewish scriptures. They interpreted some of them differently, but they were quite close to the Bible. And next, we saw an African man from Ethiopia converted. He already feared the God of Israel. In fact, he was reading the Bible in his chariot. And the next little gospel incursion, slightly more outside the box, uh, Cornelius, a gentile man, but again, he feared the God of Israel. He was highly motivated to listen to what Peter and others had to tell him about God. But in Antioch, we see the gospel presented for the first time. These are people like we run into in our city every day. They don’t believe the Bible necessarily. They don’t have any reason to trust the Bible. They’re not inclined toward Christianity or toward a Christian God. Many of them might have allegiance to their own God or the gods of their home culture or their home religion, something that’s unrelated to Christianity in any way. But the Christians who escaped persecution from Jerusalem to run north, they were bold and they sought to experiment. They thought, is it possible? I wonder that the message of a Jewish man, you know, some 800 kilometers south in Jerusalem who’d been executed by the Romans, is it possible that the message about that man and what he had done might find traction among people who were religiously and culturally completely disincined to believe it. Turns out the chemistry of the gospel message not only reacted with Jewish hearts and people who feared God in general. It also started exciting the molecules in pagan hearts as well. So of those experimental evangelists we read the Lord’s hand was with them and a great number of people believed and they turned to the Lord. It must have been amazing to have been in Antioch in those days. Russell Moore is an American theologian. He’s a columnist. He recently wrote an essay entitled Why I Don’t Debate Atheists. And in it, he says that uh he had a job as a former seminary dean and he would interview people looking for professorships, people looking to teach, particularly in the field of Christian apologetics. That’s the field of study that teaches people how to make arguments and answer questions in defense of the Christian faith. So he was interviewing these applicants who sought teaching positions. They wanted to teach future pastors and missionaries how to defend the faith against unbelief. Moore writes, “Almost all of them were brilliant. They were skilled not only in philosophy and science, but also in rhetoric and logic, and many of them were quick on their feet. They could demolish any atheist, any atheist who dared debate them.” After a while, he said, though, I noticed something that all of these interviewers had in common. When I would ask them, “How did you come to Christ?” Not a single one, to my memory, ever pointed to an apologetic argument. Often those apologists would talk about finding faith the same way I did, growing up in a good church or having parents who shared or demonstrated their faith. One candidate, a towering intellect, who’d been a graduate student at an Ivy League university. He happened to stumble into a tiny congregation to hear a preacher with a fifth grade education level talking about what grace means and and it led him to Christ. Another candidate blushed as he told me that he became a Christian while watching disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swagger quote John 3:16. So Moore continues, “But these scholars had nothing about which to be embarrassed. I walked away from those stories even more amazed by grace than I would have been if they’d told me they were convinced by the cosmological argument for the existence of God.” He says, “Sometimes I wish these apologists who became Christians through seemingly unsophisticated ways would say that more often and more loudly and more publicly. In fact, as the years have gone by, I’m even more convinced that the parts of their lives they mentioned quietly are far more important to defending the faith in the 21st century than any carefully crafted onstage takedown of a professional atheist. So Russell Mo, he’s just pointing out what we considered a few weeks ago when we talked about the evangelism portion of the great commission. The problem’s not with the harvest. It’s already out there. And some people will surprise us. People who we think are so intelligent and so sophisticated, they would never respond to a simple gospel message. But Jesus says the harvest is ripe. People are ready for that message. Problem is just getting enough workers into the field to go and do the harvesting work. Because the gospel, it already contains all the power of God for salvation. and those experimental evangelists in Antioch as they discovered it works in every kind of heart, every kind of person on the planet. Everyone’s lovingly made in the image of God and God’s always drawing people to himself and the harvest is always ripe. So, it just it just works. And often the people maybe we’d least suspect who would ever respond to uh will respond positively the gospel message. If God has been ripening their hearts, their souls are not like they’re not like hard green bananas. You know, every now and again we we we do a lot of work try to convince hard green bananas, but God will give soft yellow ripe ones as well. And we could talk ourselves horse probably trying to share the gospel with green bananas. But then suddenly a soft yellow one appears and a heart will melt and the truth of the gospel will resonate with them and and they’ll respond with repentance and with faith. They feel broken. and they repent of their sin. Message of the cross, it’s not just religious noise to them. It’s something that rings true to their hearts and they put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for their salvation. You know, all of us, we any of us could have remained just hard green bananas all our lives. But God’s hand somehow ripened us so that we could respond to the gospel. He’s still doing that over and over again every day in our city. people we’ would never expect will suddenly respond and they’ll become Christians and other people that we know really well we think yes this is a really good candidate we’ll pray for them and we’ll try to witness to them they may may at this point always seem to be those hard green bananas passage says that the evangelists in Antioch succeeded as they plowed this new gospel ground because the Lord’s hand was with them so the evangelists they fulfilled the first part of the great commission by just being willing to go outside the box with the gospel message. And God provided them with a whole host of young converts to work with. And what was the next task of that young disciplem community in Antioch? Jesus told us that making disciples involves baptizing young converts in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit and then teaching them to obey all that Jesus commanded. So after evangelism comes some extensive education and that was precipitated in Antioch by a man named Barnabas. He had been sent up from Jerusalem to go and check out this amazing thing that was happening there. News spread quickly that far to the north in Syria, these pure gentile people from different ethnicities and races who’d worshiped other gods and idols. They’d come to faith in Christ. So we read news of this reached the ears of the church down in Jerusalem. They sent Barnabas to Antioch. And when he arrived, he saw the evidence of the grace of God. And he was glad. And he encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts. And he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith. And a great number of people were brought to the Lord. Barnabas, his very name means son of consolation or son of comfort, son of encouragement. and he went north to Antioch. Says when he got there, he was so glad and he just wanted to encourage everyone and he rolled up his sleeves, got involved in even more evangelistic work. He was a good man full of the Holy Spirit and faith and a great number of people were brought to the Lord. Now, one thing Barnabas realized quickly was that he was going to need help in teaching all of these new gentile believers. They had no previous Bible knowledge whatsoever. They had no cultural connection to the Jewish people from whom the Messiah had come. You know, our commission instructs us that part of the disciplem mandate is to teach new believers to obey everything that Jesus has commanded. It’s not simply doctrinal truth that’s required, although that’s part of it, but it’s moral instruction. It’s instruction in obedience. Barnabas knew that this infant church community was going to need extensive teaching. He had an idea of a guy who might he he might be able to recruit, a guy who was very academically well-trained, a theologian. He had been a Pharisee. He had persecuted Christians in the early church, but but he’d been marvelously saved by Jesus about 14 years earlier. Barnabas had met him previously in Jerusalem and he knew that he was living only about 150 kilometers away in Tarsus. So Barnabas went looking for and he found the Apostle Paul was able to convince him to come and join him in Antioch. And it says that the two of them became a really busy teaching team. For a whole year, Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. Now you you think of your own life. You’re you’re you’re here today probably because you’re you’re a worshipper and you’re a follower of Jesus and you want to pursue him and you’re a disciple and you want to make disciples. Think of uh the extensive education that has somehow filtered to you over the years through parents and Sunday school teachers and and uh and books you’ve read and preachers and seminars and conferences you’ve gone to. But think of how much you know doctrally and how much you know about moral obedience and obeying Jesus and how much uh probably a lot of godly people have built into your lives through extensive education. That’s what was happening in Antioch over that year. Making disciples, uh, giving instruction, moral education. It’s not a quick process. That’s not something that can be handled in a weekend seminar or a six-week program. It just takes as long as it takes. But this business of educating converts and helping them become solid disciples, pretty crucial step if disciplem is going to reproduce itself and continue. As that disciplem community in Antioch was gaining traction, the followers of Christ actually gained a new nickname. It’s probably not one at all they would have chosen for themselves. You know, they preferred to speak of themselves earlier in the before this portion of the book of Acts. They called themselves believers or disciples or brothers, but we’re told that in Antioch, a new term for them came into common usage because they were too diverse and multicultural. Now, they couldn’t be just considered an offset of uh or a sect of Judaism. We’re told in verse 26 that the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. And most commentators suggest that was a derogatory term. It was a term of derision. It was a form of identification typical of Roman political parties where you’d be identified by your partisan allegiance to some political figure. If you were following Herod, you were you were a Herodini. And if you if Caesar, you were a Caesarini. And in the US, you’d be called either a Trumper or a never Trumper. You know, it pegs your whole personality, your whole allegiance uh to uh your relationship to the president. And similarly in Antioch, the term Christians, it glued the allegiance of all these diverse people, different nationalities, races, social classes to the one person they all really seem to follow, Jesus Christ. They’re coming a diverse body, common faith. The world was forced for the first time to come up with a different name for them. They couldn’t just be called a Jewish religion or a Greek religion or an Indian religion or a Chinese religion because among Christians there was this experience that went deeper than just their ethnic culture, their ethnic background, a reality, a truth. It wasn’t culturally constructed at all. And the world had no religious category to fit it into. You know, some years later in 1 Peter 4:16, that term Christian appears to have been used as a formal charge against people involved in that movement. Peter writes, “If you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed.” Christianity continued to spread and gain influence. Uh, it didn’t have any political or military power, but it still was often perceived as a threat by later emperors such as Nero and others. And so they started going after these Christian people and uh and persecuting them even further. But we’ve seen in Antioch that the formation of a disciplem community, it involved just creative evangelism and that involved some extensive teaching. You read at the beginning of chapter 13, you get another glimpse of how diverse their community was because the Holy Spirit wanted to use that new community of disciples in Antioch to spearhead missions outreach further into Asia and eventually crossing over into Europe that the Jerusalem church that they had sent out missionaries inadvertently, involuntarily due to persecution. But the church in Antioch, it began sending out workers voluntarily as a result of the direction of the Holy Spirit. Those missionaries sent out from Antioch, prominent among them, the Apostle Paul, were used by God to forever change the face of our of our world. Paul later wrote in one of his letters some thoughts on how a disciplem community works. In Ephesians 4:11, he says, “It was he, it was Jesus, who gave some to be apostles and some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, some to be pastors and teachers.” And their job is to prepare God’s people, all of us, for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up big goal until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the son of God and become mature attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. So it’s God’s will that every community of Christ followers, including our own here at Knox, every one of us be effectively prepared for works of service. meaning we all get in the game. We’re all involved at some level in being disciples and making disciples. And we do it through unity and knowledge and maturity together so that we can be the disciplem community that God wants us to be, that we’re meant to be in Old Strath Kona and in Edmonton. So, we’ve seen this morning how the great commission, it’s intended to be accomplished through the authority and with the ongoing presence of Jesus. There’s power in a community when we take on this task together. God’s committed to providing the resources we need, the people we need to help us to become united and knowledgeable and mature so we can assume our role of making disciples in Edmonton and Old Strath Kona. This is the field that God has given us to work in. So, kind of to summarize where we’ve been this past month, we first talked about coming back to Jesus. If we’ve let that great commission lapse in our lives and we hardly have paid attention to it, Jesus asks us to simply open the door to him says he’s knocking open the door. He’ll have fellowship with us. He’ll renew our membership in his society of disciplemakers. Then we talked about the definition of a disciple and how it involves taking on a new identity and new priorities in our lives and how walking with God as a committed disciple. It embraces spiritual disciplines. these holy habits that we develop of prayer, of reading scripture, of studying, of fellowshipping with other believers that creating space in our lives for intimacy with Jesus. And third, we talked about going and evangelizing and understanding we don’t have to be super educated, super equipped, or trained to be used by God as he draws people to himself. There are things we can do to represent Christ to the people around us that involve no real Bible knowledge. No open Bible, no gospel presentations, no knowledge of apologetics. We just have nons superficial relationships with people and we share portions of our lives that we go to church that uh that uh Jesus is is helping us in this area of our lives and can be enormously influence influential in people coming to Christ. Last week we thought about how learning to enjoy Jesus and receive his blessing, it takes a disciplehip and disciplem, not just in the realm of duty and responsibility and hard work, but the realm of delight if we enjoy Jesus. So today we see that disciplem is not usually an act an individual activity. It’s a team game for us. It operates best in a community in a in a culture that seeks to make disciplem a priority. So we could describe there’s difference between a community and a culture. And we could describe it a little bit like this. A disciplem community is a people like us who help one another follow Jesus. But a disciplem culture is what happens when that way of life becomes normal and expected and relational and joyful and reproducible. So an example would be a pickle ball community would be a group of people who enjoy the game. They get together. They play it regularly. But a pickle ball culture would be built as if they’re recruiting as many other people as possible in Edmonton to play the game. And they pester all the city officials to build a bunch of new courts. And they teach pickle ball seminars and they give endless demonstrations. And they sacrifice enormous amounts of their time to raise pickle ball awareness in schools and recreation centers and businesses. and they use their own money to buy pickle ball paddles for those who can’t afford them. You know, it probably be insufferable for any of us to live in such a dominant pickle ball culture. But when a community gets truly excited about something about anything, some kind of culture always has to be built and emerge around it. And in the church, when the disciples, people like us, find disciplem to be something that’s so rewarding and it’s so eternal and it’s so healing and it’s so satisfying, it’s inevitable that it it permeates the entire culture of what Knox Church looks like, what Knox Church does. Disciplem for us becomes normal and it’s expected and it’s relational and it’s joyful and it’s reproducible. So pray that at Knox Church we’d be a community of disciples, a a culture of disciplehip who encourage one another to follow Jesus. At the beginning of our study on disciplehip, we asked the question, what if Jesus’ final words, meaning the great commission, what if Jesus’ final words were meant to shape everything we do at Knox Church? And we’re going to not just leave it there, but try to put some legs on this over the next few weeks and months of understanding what it means to be trained and encouraged as a disciple of Jesus, walking with God, how to how to develop some of the disciplines and holy habits that help us stay connected to Christ. We’ll talk about evangelism, help, some encouragement in just how to get out there and just share Christ with our friends. how to help young Christians grow. If God gives us increase and and and we reproduce, how do we help and train and educate these these young Christians so that they grow as solid disciples as well? All we’ve done really the last five weeks is we’ve laid a bit of a foundation, but it’s a great foundation for us to build on as we give ourselves to this task of being disciples and making disciples. So, some things we can pray about together today. You might want to thank God for those there are people in your lives who’ve taken up the great commission and the result of that is you here this morning. They heard uh you heard and you responded to the gospel message because of their labors and their efforts. And if you can think of some of the specific individuals, maybe it’s your parents, maybe it’s friends, maybe it’s others, but they helped you. Spend some time just thanking God for them that they took the great commission seriously and you’re here as a result of that. And pray that you’d be a person like that in the lives of other people. And finally, ask God to create in our church a culture that naturally and intentionally has disciplem at its core. Let’s just spend a few moments in prayer together.