EYES on the NATIONS: A 5-Day Journey Exploring God’s Unchanging Heart for the NationsSample

Church for All Nations

As we saw yesterday, all four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) include some form of Jesus’ post-resurrection words of commission to his followers, sending them out to the nations. Luke, who also wrote the Book of Acts, reiterates that commission in his second volume. In Acts 1:8, Jesus indicates that the mission will develop in concentric circles of ever-expanding cross-cultural ministry: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (NLT).

For forty days after his resurrection, Jesus had been teaching and instructing his disciples and offering them time and repeated opportunities to process the reality that he was indeed alive. The commission he gave them in Acts 1:8—his final words before his ascension—is the culmination of those Spirit-inspired instructions, the goal toward which those forty days had been leading.

Just as Jesus’ own ministry had been carried out in the power of the Holy Spirit (Luke 3:22; 4:1), so would the mission of his followers need the Spirit’s empowerment. That’s why Jesus tells them to wait in Jerusalem (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4) until they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Once they receive that gift, they are impelled into mission, spilling out into the streets of Jerusalem with the good news (Acts 2), and soon reaching into all corners of Judea (5:16).

It seems, however, that the Jerusalem-centered church may have been a bit slow to embrace the larger circles of their mission (Samaria and the ends of the earth). While they were hardly “comfortable” while making disciples in Jerusalem (see Acts 3 and 4), neither were they in a hurry to embrace the boundary-crossing aspect of their commission from Jesus. But the Spirit was not content to leave them in their places of familiarity! By Acts 7, through both persecution and supernatural Spirit compulsion, the disciples of Jesus are being thrust out in Samaria and then later into the non-Jewish territories of the Roman empire. The rest of Acts (indeed, the rest of the New Testament) shows the “all nations” character of the early Christian movement.