The Great Commission
Easter Messages Part 15
Matthew 28:18-20	4-7-2013
Summary: We are to make disciples which involves two steps: 1) baptize (convert - persuade them to believe and repent), and 2) teach them to obey everything Jesus commanded (whole Bible). This requires not just education, but training -  bringing them to the point of being fully committed, persevering, etc. And we must do this in all nations. This can only be done through the church. Agape is poised to make great strides if we could expand our facility.
Review
The Task: Make Disciples
Baptizing
Persuasion
Teaching Them to Obey
Students
Perseverance
Training
The Scope: All Nations
Daunting
Who Can Do This? The Church
Church Planting in Missions
Motivation
What Next for Agape? (Main Campus)
What Next for Agape? (Littleton Campus)
1:25 Questions

Matthew 28:18 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."

Review
Before Jesus died He told His disciples to meet Him at a rendezvous point on a mountain in Galilee. After the resurrection He spent weeks spreading the word and reminding everyone to make sure they were there. Of all Jesus’ appearances after the resurrection, this was the most important one, and yet when it happened, Jesus only spoke three sentences. Last week I referred to them as the great claim, the great commission, and the great comfort. And we spent all our time last time just focusing on the first sentence - the great claim. That was my Easter message, and my plan was to return to our study of 1 Peter. But all week I kept thinking, “How can I preach on Matthew 28:18 and not go on to give at least one sermon on verse 19, the great commission?” We have a whole, six-part series on the Great Commission on FoodForYourSoul.net, so I am not going to go through it in that kind of detail again. But I do think it would be fitting for us to have one sermon on it, since it was so important to Jesus.
Matthew 28:19 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. 
The Task: Make Disciples
Our task is to make disciples, which is another way of saying, “Make Christians.” When the Bible refers to Christians, only rarely does it use the word “Christian.” Most of the time the preferred term is “disciple.” All through the book of Acts all believers are referred to as disciples (twenty-six times). All Christians are disciples and all disciples are Christians. So the great commission is to go out to all the nations and make the people Christians. How do you do that? How do you make a person a Christian/disciple? Two steps.
Baptizing 
19 Therefore go and make disciples ... baptizing ... 20 and teaching 
First you baptize the person. That is a reference to conversion. When a person first hears the good news about Jesus Christ, if that person believes, then he or she will repent - turn from their life of sin to a life of following Jesus. And the way to publically declare that that has happened in your life is to be baptized. That is why in Luke’s version of the Great Commission he does not even mention baptism.
Luke 24:47 and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations.
Repentance is when a person finally admits the direction of his life is moving away from God, and he becomes sorrowful and contrite and broken, and then reverses the direction of his life toward God. It involves the whole person – your thoughts, attitudes, motives, emotions, actions – your whole being Isa.55:7). So step 1 in the great commission is to call people to faith in Christ. And you can tell they have faith when they repent.
And that is not easy. It requires some persuasion. 
2 Corinthians 5:11 Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. 
Teaching Them to Obey
That is our task. And if that sounds a little bit daunting to you – that is not even the half of it. Jesus is not finished. Bringing people to conversion and baptism is only the first step.
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. 
When you explain the gospel to someone and persuade him to repent and follow Christ, you are not done. If you had an evangelism ministry that was so effective that you managed to get every single person on planet earth to genuinely believe and repent and follow Christ, and every last human being was baptized as a true follower of Christ, you still would not have fulfilled the great commission. You would not even be halfway done.
Once you get someone baptized as a Christian the work has only just begun. Next you need to teach that person to obey everything Jesus commanded. Everything Jesus ever commanded! That means you have to explain the meaning and significance of all the principles in all Jesus’ sermons...
-	and the meaning and significance of all the parables,
-	and all the prophecies Jesus made,
-	and all the lessons of the cross
-	and all that Jesus taught by His actions and miracles.
And that is not all. Most of what Jesus taught is not written in the red letters in the gospels. Most of it He whispered into the ears of the Apostles, and after Jesus ascended back to heaven they preached those things and recorded them in the rest of the New Testament. So in order to teach someone to obey all the Jesus commanded, you have to teach them the entire New Testament. I did a search and found that there are about 1650 imperative verbs in the Greek New Testament. If you think God gave us just ten commandments, you are off by orders of magnitude. Sixteen hundred fifty in the New Testament, and it is impossible to understand the New Testament without understanding the Old Testament because it is based completely on the Old Testament, so you have to teach the entire Bible.
OK, so what if you managed to get everyone converted, and then you had a Bible study at your house and worked with those people until every one of them had all of the thousands of commands in the Bible memorized? They had them down cold, so they could repeat them all back to you word for word. You’re still not done. Not even close.
The world’s approach to education is the ability to regurgitate a bunch of information on a test. But would you notice please that Jesus does not tell us to make disciples teaching them to memorize His words. He did not even say, “teaching them to understand” His words. He said, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey  That is hard. It is so much easier to just teach people to memorize information. And obviously that part is crucial. But by itself that is not enough. You have not fulfilled the great commission with someone until you have taught him not only to understand all that Jesus said, but to obey it all.
Galatians 6:1 Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. 
The word translated restore is katarizo. It means to repair. It is the word used in Matthew 4:21 where the disciples were mending (repairing) their nets. It means to fix something to make it the way it is supposed to be. Our tendency is to notice a deficiency in someone, and cast them aside like a piece of garbage, or gossip about him or look down our noses at him. But the great commission commands us not to do any of that, but rather to repair him. Fix what is broken in that person’s soul so they obey everything Jesus commanded. That is the great commission.
Students
There is a reason why the Holy Spirit preferred the word “disciples” rather than “Christians” when He spoke of the followers of Christ. If you just use the word “Christian” rather than “disciple” it is easy to forget what it means, which is exactly what has happened in our day. People think being a Christian is like being a Republican or Democrat. It is just an affiliation. You just decide that is the way you want to identify yourself and that is all there is to becoming a Christian. The Lord wanted to protect us from that kind of confusion so He picked the word “disciple,” which literally means “learner,” or “student.” In that culture, if you wanted to get an education you would not enroll in a school. You would become a disciple of a teacher, and you would follow him around and learn from him. That is what it means to be a Christian - to have a life of following and learning from Jesus.
Perseverance
Perhaps the most deadly lie Satan ever came up is the lie that says Christianity all about just having a conversion experience. You invite Jesus into your heart one time, and from that moment on you are locked in, no matter what you do the rest of your life. Just pray the prayer once, and you are safe forever. That is a very popular doctrine, and as a result there are millions and millions of people who go through a very profound and moving conversion experience - complete with tears and all the rest, and it is as heartfelt as can be - but months later they are living exactly the way they used to live. There is no difference between them and the world. That old question - “If you were on trial for being a Christian would there be enough evidence from the way you live to convict you?” - they would have to say, “No, there’s not.”
What did Jesus have to say about people like that? Are they real disciples?
John 8:31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you remain in my teaching, you are really my disciples.”
All those millions of people who have an initial positive response toward Jesus, but it does not have any significant impact on the way they live - those people are not disciples. They think they are saved, but they are not. In order to fulfill the great commission we have to make disciples who remain in Jesus’ teaching and obey it.
In fact, a true disciple is so closely identified with Jesus, and so much like Jesus, that the way people feel about Jesus is the way they feel toward the disciple (Mt.10:25). If they love Jesus, they love you. If they hate Jesus, they hate you. If there is such a disconnect between you and the Lord that people reject Him and love being around you, chances are you are not a disciple.
That is why Jesus commanded us to make disciples, not just decisions. Lots of people make decisions for Christ. They make the decision, but there is not any real transformation.
Luke 14:33 any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple. 
If you share the gospel with him and he prays the sinner’s prayer and gets baptized, but he has not surrendered his whole life to Christ, is he a Christian? No. Nor is he a disciple if he is not bearing spiritual fruit in his life.
John 15:8 This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. 
Making a disciple means making someone who is constantly being used by the Holy Spirit in great measure – producing much fruit.
Training 
And you cannot do that with just classes and textbooks. To bring a person to the point of living in obedience to Jesus’ commands requires not only instruction and teaching through sermons and Bible studies, but it also requires walking with the person through life and showing them how it is done. You can’t just preach, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children.” You have to be in the man’s home and say, “No, not that way. This way. See, here’s how you do it in this kind of situation.” You cannot just preach, “Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds.” You have to preach what that means, but then you also have to be there in the hospital room when the person is in agony and just wants to die. And you have to be there in the person’s living room when they just discovered their baby has Down’s Syndrome. You have to walk them through how to respond and how to think biblically about it when they lose their job or lose a loved one or lose their health, and show them step-by-step, “This is what it looks like to consider it pure joy...”
And you do that again, and again, and again until they start to get the hang of it. This is our commission. If you take a Christ-rejecting unbeliever and persuade him to repent and be baptized, and he becomes a learner and follower of Christ in all that he does, and he is being perfected and trained and made holy, and gives up everything for Christ, and perseveres through trials and temptations, and is so identified with Christ that people feel the same way about him as they feel about Jesus, and he is bearing much fruit; - once you have done that, then you have made one disciple. 
The Scope: All Nations
And as if all that is not daunting enough, look at the scope of the commission.
Matthew 28:19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations
The word translated nations is ethne, which means “people group.” We get our word ethnic from it. We use the word “nation” to refer to an entire country, like the United States or Russia or China. But within a country are many, many different ethne - many different cultures and people groups. We need to reach not just every country, but every individual people group, and make disciples in every single people group in the world.
Moses stood on Mt. Nebo and commissioned the people to take the land. Jesus stood on this mountain and commissioned us to take the world. Israel was to gain the land through military conquest. We are to win hearts through persuasion - attracting men and women to Christ in every culture.
That is an incredibly difficult thing to do. It usually takes decades. Someone has to go into that culture, become accepted, learn their language and customs and ways of communicating, translate the Bible into that language, and then find a way to communicate the truths of the gospel into their way of thinking. And many cultures do not even have a written language. It is only spoken. So in those cultures the missionary has to invent a written form of their language. Then teach everyone in the culture how to read and write, then translate the whole Bible into that new language, and then teach the people to obey all that is written in the Bible. That takes decades. And if the people are not receptive at first, it can take many, many decades.
The magnitude of our task is absolutely staggering. I was out of town earlier this week and flying back on Wednesday I was looking out the window as we flew over Denver, looking at how many houses there are - thinking of how many people there are to reach just in this one city. It is absolutely mind-boggling when you are up there and see it from the air - all of it at once. And this is just one city - millions of souls.
Daunting
The task is so massive it is almost paralyzing. Where do you even begin? How do we take millions of lost people – people who are gratifying the cravings of the flesh and following its desires and thoughts, and who are by nature objects of God’s wrath; people who are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts and who have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more; people who are enslaved to sin and who are enemies of God, dead to God, and blind to all that is wonderful about God; how do you take millions of people like that and make them disciples who obey all that Jesus commanded?
Who Can Do This? The Church
We have learned in our study of 1 Peter that the power to do this kind of thing comes only through grace, and grace flows mainly through the use of the spiritual gifts. And I know that some of you are ultra-gifted. But I don’t know anyone who is gifted enough to pull all this off. And yet we are commanded to get it done. There is only one way this is going to happen. The only possible way the great commission can ever be fulfilled is for all of the gifts to be used together in an organized, cooperative way. All the disciples of Jesus Christ in each area will have to join forces and work together - pooling all our spiritual gifts.
•	One of us will be up here preaching, and 
•	someone else will be in the living room of that person who is about to falter and needs encouragement, and 
•	someone else will be meeting once a week with the new married couple who is trying to learn how to follow Christ in their marriage, and 
•	someone else will be writing some articles and books that will be just what certain people need to learn to obey Christ in certain areas, and 
•	some others will be doing various acts of mercy and kindness for those who are in trouble, and 
•	others will be connecting that person who needs a friend with this other person who also needs a friend.
Maybe that person sitting a couple rows behind you or in front of you needs prayer in a serious way, and you have no idea - but that’s okay because the people in that person’s prayer group know about it, and are praying hard. All those things - and a thousand other things, all taking place as the Head of this body - the Lord Jesus Christ - orchestrates all the movements of the various parts of the body in such a way that the work gets done.
And that includes the support ministries. I have a very weak voice. I cannot preach to 400+ people every week unless there is money to purchase sound equipment, and someone has the knowledge to figure out how to make it all work. And there also has to be a building and chairs and lights and plumbing and all the rest. And you don’t have enough money to provide all that, nor do you have the time to arrange it all and keep it all clean and repair things that break., but that’s okay because there are other parts of the body that take care of all that. And hundreds of people are pitching in for the costs.
What about the unreached people groups? You cannot go and reach them with the gospel. Maybe one of them, but that’s about it. And so we need to send lots of missionaries - but you can’t afford that. With the amount of money you have, you can’t even afford to send one missionary. But that’s okay, because there are hundreds of others also contributing.
Is the task daunting? More than daunting – it is downright impossible, for an individual. But Jesus didn’t give the great commission to an individual. He gave it to His Church. And that is exactly how you see it carried out in the book of Acts - through the Church. Every bit of it takes place through local assemblies. Not even the Apostle Paul went out on his own - apart from connection to a local church. If anyone could do that, it would be Paul, since He was commissioned directly by the risen Christ Himself, in person. You would think that might qualify Paul to bypass the normal ordination process. He was the greatest missionary that ever lived, wrote thirteen books of the Bible and was sent personally by the Lord Jesus Christ. Who is going to tell him what to do? I’ll tell you who – the local body of believers in Antioch. Paul becomes a Christian in Acts 9, but he does not become a missionary until four chapters later when a little group of believers in Antioch confirm that God has indeed called him and they lay their hands on him and send him off.
Why? Because no single body part can do anything at all apart from the rest of the body. In order to get anything done, each body part has to be responsive to the signals that come from the head. And those signals travel through the rest of the body. How do you know what your role is in the church? One way is through your own assessment of your gifts and desires and what is fruitful in your ministry. But another crucial aspect is which of those things are confirmed by the saints in the church? There are plenty of men running around saying, “I’m called to preach, I’m called to preach,” and a bunch of saints following behind say, “No he isn’t, no he isn’t.” The way your brain communicates to the various parts of your body is through other parts of the body - the nervous system. And it is the same in the church. The Head of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ, communicates to you in large measure through the church. It is through us that He confirms your calling.
And in many cases guidance in that ministry also comes through the church. You face a decision in your ministry - should I pour my time into this aspect, or focus more on that aspect? Should I recruit some help? Should I back off of this area so I can spend more time in that area? Which approach should I take? Why try to answer all those questions on your own? Why not seek guidance through the wisdom of the saints in the church? Especially the leadership? If part of the job of the leaders is to lead and oversee, doesn’t it make sense that God would provide guidance through them for the various ministries?
So often people just go off into a ministry without any connection to the church at all. The first we ever hear about it is when they need some support. They come to the leadership and say, “I’m doing this thing God called me to do, and I would like you to support it.” And there is never any discussion with the church about whether we would affirm that God has actually called them to do it or how it should be done. We are an individualistic culture, and we like to be independent and on our own.
But that is not how a body works. Independent body parts are dead body parts. Independent soldiers, who just go off by themselves and try to win the war on their own, accomplish nothing. One soldier cannot defeat the opposing army by himself. One body part cannot accomplish the work of the body. And one Christian cannot carry out the great commission.
The Church is the one and only organization that Jesus said He would use to accomplish His work. It is the Church against which the gates of hell will not prevail. This is the means Christ has chosen to do His work. So if you want to do your part to make sure the great commission happens, then do your part in making sure the church is strong and healthy. Think of the church like a tank in enemy territory. You cannot defeat the opposing army by yourself. But if you just do your part in making sure the tank is running, that will bring victory.
Church Planting in Missions 
This is why our missions policy is what it is. We do not support traveling evangelists or crusades or any other kind of missionary program that does not involve church planting. Why? Because if you just hold an event and make a bunch of converts, and then take off and leave them, you have not made disciples. Who is going to be in their living room teaching them how to obey Christ in the area of their finances? Learning to obey all that Jesus commanded is a lifelong process.
Here is what we expect of our missionaries: We want them to make disciples. That means they need to not only baptize people, but teach them all of Jesus’ sermons and parables and prophecies, all the lessons of the cross, all that He taught by His actions and miracles, and all He taught through His Apostles in the New Testament. And then train them to obey all that. The missionary might say, “How am I ever going to get all that done? I’ll be dead before I finish.” And we say, “Well then, you’d better plant a church. Plant a church that will still be there after you are dead that can finish the job.”
If you want to obey what Jesus commanded us to do at that meeting on the mountain in Galilee that day, the way to do that is very simple - do whatever you can to contribute to the success of the church. You do that, and the Head of the church will see to it that it all comes together and the task gets done. We know that because of the great comfort - the third sentence Jesus gave that day.
20 ... Behold I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
Motivation
Can you see why the great comfort and the great claim are so important? Jesus did not just give us the great commission. He sandwiched it in between the great claim and the great comfort. He reminds us that all authority has been given to Him, and then He promises to be with us always. Clearly Jesus is wanting to motivate us to action. He wants to get us moving and make sure we get this done. But we need special motivation for that to happen because this task is so difficult and so massive.
So the great claim gives us boldness. That is our universal warrant. If the police want to come inside your home and search for something, they cannot do it unless they first get a search warrant from a judge. They are not allowed in your home without a warrant that grants them special authority. The great claim is our divine warrant. What gives us the right to demand that all men and women everywhere repent and follow Christ? The fact that all authority has been given to Him.
And what keeps us from getting discouraged or overwhelmed at the magnitude of the task? The fact that He has promised to be with us always, even to the end of the age, until this task is done.
Can you see that Jesus is trying to motivate us? He is not just giving us information. He empowers us, then commissions us, then encourages us because He wants us to act.
What Next for Agape? (Main Campus)
So how about Agape? What is next for us? What is the next step we need to take in our effort to be faithful to the great commission? I am not really much of a visionary. Some leaders can look into the future and see great, glorious things, and they know how to mobilize a group of people to reach those goals. I look into the future and see nothing. I do not know what God has in store for our future. It is all I can do to try to keep up with what God is already doing right now.
What is God doing at Agape? Well, I couldn’t even begin to summarize it all, except to say this - all those aspects of the great commission that I described in this sermon – it is all happening here. Preaching and teaching, counseling, encouragement, people building friendships and going into each other’s living rooms and hospital rooms and helping one another progress in the direction of discipleship, mercy ministries, kindness ministries, compassion ministries, sharing the gospel, helping the poor, correcting, rebuking, training in righteousness – it is all happening.
And another thing I observe is that God keeps bringing more people. We don’t advertise, we are not into all the church growth techniques, we don’t do outreach events, we are not into gimmicks to get more and more people to come. And yet God just keeps bringing people. This graph shows our average weekly attendance for the entire existence of our church - from January 2007 until now.
As I said, I’m not a visionary. Nor am I an expert on statistics or forecasting. However, even a guy like me can look at that and spot a trend. And when I look at that graph, the question that comes to my mind is, “What if God decides to keep doing what He has been doing?” If that line keeps going anywhere close to the same trajectory it’s been on for the last six years, then what? In fact, even if it stays on that line for one more year, where does that put us? It puts us beyond what this building can handle.
The truth is, we are basically full. We could squeeze a few more people in the sanctuary most weeks, but the classrooms, hallways, bathrooms – we have gotten to the point where the overcrowding is hindering the ministry. If a visitor comes to this church we would never dream of telling them, “No - we have enough people, we don’t want you,” and turn them away. But there is a sense in which that is exactly what we are doing if we have a facility that can’t handle any more people. We are telling everyone, “We don’t have room for you.”
I say that because we have to make a decision, as a church family, what we want to do - where we believe God would have us go from here. There is a lot of discomfort that comes with any kind of growth. You get used to things being one way, then they change. More and more people you don’t know. Things get crowded. You have to share more. Messes are bigger. You don’t know everyone’s name. You have to park further away.
But on the other hand, if we believe in this ministry that is going on here at Agape, and we believe there are thousands of people here in Denver who would profit in great ways spiritually if they found their way here, how could we not want to make it available to them? There are churches that would give anything to have half as many visitors as we get. They spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to get people to visit, and they don’t get close to the number that come here. For whatever reason, God has seen fit to just send us a tremendous number of people on a regular basis. It may not always be this way, but right now the reality is we could reach far more people in our effort to fulfill the great commission if we just built a bigger building.
We tried going the route of opening another campus, but that really did not do much to free up seats here on this campus. We have about eighty people down there, but it’s mostly new people. We only freed up about ten seats or so up here. We added a Saturday night service, and that is another eighty or so, but most of them are also new people. Only a dozen or so were people who were attending on Sunday.
So it is wonderful that we are reaching more and more people, but the problem of Sunday mornings remains. And, of course, I say “problem” tongue in cheek. “Opportunity” is more like it. If we had a larger building we could most likely, within just a few years, expose hundreds more to the ministry that takes place through the spiritual gifts at Agape, and make significant progress in the great commission.
So why haven’t we built a building? This graph shows our average weekly giving for each year we have been in existence.
You can see the trend there is not quite the same. The downturn starts right at the first of this year. I don’t know why it turned, and I doubt it would be wise for me to try to guess. It might be a hundred different reasons. But that graph is actually a great encouragement to me because of 2012. In the past I never really pushed in the direction of a building because I thought the only way we could ever do it would be to pressure everyone into giving huge sums of money that they can’t really afford to give. But right now we are at a point where all we would have to do to build would be to return to last year’s giving levels.
Think about the opportunity that God has placed before us! We have all kinds of wonderful ministries in place that have recently been greatly improved in their organization so they can handle growth. We have leadership – we are about to ordain three more elders and there are more in the pipeline after them. That is something we have never had before. We have the ministries, we have the leadership, we have some more maturity and stability now as a church, we have a great location, and God is sending us a constant stream of new people. The opportunity is just sitting in front of us on a platter. And the only thing holding it back that I can see is the lack of an adequate facility. And if all we did was return to last years’ giving levels, we could easily afford to build a building that would double our capacity.
When I think about all that is happening in people’s lives right now in this church, and I think of hundreds of others who are desperate to receive what we are all enjoying, and I see how relatively easy it would be to make that happen, it is an incredibly exciting thing to think about. As daunting and impossible as the great commission seemed a few minutes ago, suddenly it does not seem so impossible. Taking some major strides in that direction is very much within our reach right now. After our studies in 1 Peter about spiritual gifts, so many of you have stepped forward to serve, and with all the new leadership and the staff we have now - so many things are in place.
And yet, there is a danger. Any time a church stays the same size for very long, it usually creates a mindset that makes future growth much more difficult. When you stay the same size for a while, you get real comfortable with things being the way they are, and that creates a culture that resists change. So once a church stops growing numerically it rarely starts again. If we wait too long, we could potentially miss the opportunity.
But if we decide to do what it takes to go ahead and plow forward with expanding our facility, I think there is a very strong probability that the Lord will continue to do what He has been doing the last six years, and we will see blessing upon blessing poured out into the lives of hundreds more people. 
There is a group of people who have volunteered to look into our various options for expanding - adding on to this building, building a new sanctuary right next to this building, leasing modulars for our prayer groups, building a whole new building with classrooms and all the rest, a temporary building, steel building, a tent building - we are meeting with architects and are looking into every possibility we can think of. And very soon that group will be presenting you with the various options, and we will need to make a decision. 
I say very soon because the need is pressing. You may have noticed we are out of space for prayer groups, and the Agape 101 class just keeps adding more and more people. So as soon as those people get done with Agape 101, right now there is very limited space for them to have a prayer group. We might be able to squeeze one or two more in the sanctuary, but then that’s it. Six months from now, when we do our reshuffle, and the typical Fall growth spurt also comes, I cannot see it fitting in this building. So it seems that now is the time for us to make a decision about what direction we want to go.
And for that reason I am asking you to pray about this. We are not going to hire one of those companies that come in and do big fund raising drives. Those tactics raise lots of money, but we don’t believe in them because they tend to put a lot of pressure on people, so that the giving is somewhat coerced. And God’s Word is clear that our giving is to be cheerful and willing. I do not want anyone to be pressured into giving by anything other than the compulsion that comes from a driving desire to make progress in the great commission, and a heart that takes delight in sharing what the Lord has given us with others. So please spend some time in prayer, and let’s all, as a church family, seek God’s guidance. Ask Him to show us what He wants us to do next as a church. And then in a few weeks we can talk it over and see how the Lord leads us.

What Next for Agape? (Littleton Campus)

So how about Agape Littleton? What is next for us? What is the next step we need to take in our effort to be faithful to the great commission? We have been in existence now for six months. At the north campus it took eighteen months to get to this size. You did it in less than six, meeting on Sunday nights.
At the north campus we currently have only two pastor/elders, although we are finally about to ordain three more here in a few weeks. It has taken us a long time to develop leaders. Down here we are just six months in and Scott announces a character builder (which is the first step in the leadership process), and a third of the church signs up. It is not going to be long and this church is going to be equipped to make some major strides in the work of accomplishing the great commission, as long as each one of you is faithful to discover and carry out your role.
But that is the only way it will happen. We could come up with the most brilliant marketing gimmicks, and fill up a building with hundreds of people every week, and we could become the biggest church in Denver - we could do all that and make zero progress in fulfilling the great commission if only a small percentage of the people are faithful in their calling. That happens all the time - churches find a way to attract thousands of people, but they never do learn the difference between a crowd and a church. Everybody shows up to hear the preacher preach and the band play and then they go home. And all those other elements of the great commission go undone. People are alone in their living rooms and hospital beds, and if they have a big problem in their life, they are on their own. They have access to the ministry of a few spiritual gifts of a few staff members, but nowhere near the variety they need to learn how to obey all that Jesus commanded.
We will never be able to measure the success of this church by the number of people or the rate of numerical growth. It will not be measured by our popularity or our reputation or our busyness or our building. It will be measured by our progress in fulfilling the great commission. If we are all faithful to discover and carry out our role, and we are pouring ourselves out to one another in ministry, then the more people who come here the better because they will all receive grace upon grace. But if we drift into a spectator mentality, and push off all the responsibility onto the leaders to do everything, then numerical growth will be a bad thing because people will be coming to a place that will not help them learn to obey all that Christ commanded.
Every church has its strengths and weaknesses. At Agape, if we fumble around a little bit in certain areas here and there, let’s at least make sure that we are solid when it comes to the great commission. Let’s make sure we are passionate about getting that done. When we put our gifts in the offering box, let it be with a heart that is so excited about reaching the people in this part of town with God’s Word that we give for that reason. When we make decisions about what we are going to attend, what ministries we are going to do, what sort of involvement we will have - let those decisions be made with hearts that long to see the great commission carried out. When we make decisions as a body - new location, different meeting time, Sunday mornings - whatever, let it all be with the goal of calling the greatest number of sinners to repentance and teaching the greatest number of saints how to obey all that Jesus commanded. We have the authority to do that - He has given us the universal warrant. And we have His promise that if we are about that business He will be with us always, even to the end of the age.

Benediction: Ephesians 3:20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever
1:25 Questions
1.	What do you believe your role is in the fulfillment of the great commission?
2.	What is the greatest threat or hindrance to you carrying out that role?