Real Hope: Back to Basics - the Great CommissionSample

Level Playing Field

Who was it who first told you about Jesus? Did you learn about Him from a friend or parent? Or did you go on your own journey of discovery, exploring the Christian faith and the man at the centre of it?

Part of the role of a Jesus follower is to tell others about Him, and in Matthew 28 Jesus gave instructions to His disciples about how He wanted this to be done.

He told them that they would go with His full authority, that He would be with them in the journey and, as we see in verse 20, to be ‘teaching them [the people they met] to obey everything I have commanded you’.

One of the reasons I like this verse is because it levels the playing field between Jesus’ disciples and everyone else. Sometimes the idea of ‘evangelism’ can come with a hint of self-righteousness: we the ‘enlightened’ are passing the torch to the stumbling, we the ‘perfected’ are showing others how to find holy perfection too.

In this verse, though, Jesus reminds His disciples that what they’re being asked to teach others is exactly what they must learn and abide by themselves.

However long any of us have been a Christian, we are all at a stage of learning. When we evangelise, we’re not showing others how to become like us, we’re showing them how to sit under Jesus’ teachings and, together, how to let His commandments be our guide.

Written by LAURA BENNETT