Four (4) reasons we will never fulfill the Great Commission

Christians are a meeting and talking people. We meet in church buildings, chapels, public halls and classrooms. We meet in those rooms to talk or to listen to someone talk. We make sure someone is talking most of the time. Someone talks to us in assembly twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. That’s 156 times a year not counting gospel meetings, workshops and seminars. Mostly, we talk to ourselves.

Somehow we must jump from talking to doing from gabbing to going. We must kick ourselves out of the chat rooms and step boldly into the world as the Great Commission demands. We have to get out because few of Christ’s commands are accomplished in some room.

Okay, let’s consider, one more time, the Great Commission:

Mark 16:15, 16 And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned.”

Matthew 28:19, 20 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Now let me give you four reasons why the Great Commission will never be fulfilled.

New Ben Stein Movie — EXPELLED

This is something every theist should see and promote.  Also check out the movie website here. 

Powers and Principalities

Let me recommend an excellent article by my friend and brother in Christ, Robert Odle, regarding the supernatural. You can read it here.

Don’t Forget Your Change!

Once upon a recent day, I was at a large, anonymous store to pick up a prescription. It was late in the day and the pharmacy was closing in 30 minutes. The line of customers promised a 15 minute wait. Sometimes such things can be boring…but not this time. A very disgruntled customer was providing us with some drama.

The first hint of something gone awry was a man, about 35 to 40, yelling, “Yeah…call the manager, I’d LOVE to talk to your manager!”

Paltry, Hodgepodge Evangelism

I believe that one of the most beneficial changes the church could make is to correct our misunderstanding of evangelism. We’ve made such a monster of it in our minds that very few of us do any of it at all. Instead, we count on the drawing power of user-friendly churches with seeker-sensitive assemblies featuring state-of-the-art equipment and methods. We rely on doing Bible classes and assemblies so well that when people visit us to do their “church shopping,” we hope they’ll choose us instead of that other church down the road. There are four things wrong with that.

· First, it’s not evangelism. It’s marketing.

· Second, it’s not conversion, it’s accumulation.

· Third, people who have to be won by attractive methods and surface cosmetics will only last as long as those do.

· Fourth, it is a focus and emphasis unknown by, and alien to, Jesus, the apostles and the early church.

The church that won the Roman Empire knew nothing of “user-friendly churches” or expensive, explicit, exploitive, explosive methods of reaching the unconverted. They simply knew that they were salt and light. To live was to be like Jesus to their world. Mark Galli writes,

What it did have seems paltry: unspectacular people, with a hodgepodge of methods (so hodgepodge they can hardly be called “methods”), and rarely a gathering of more than a handful of people. The paltry seems to have been enough, however, to make an emperor or two stop and take notice. Without publicized campaigns or even an explicit evangelistic strategy, Christianity made its way quietly and effectively in an environment not wholly unlike that in the post-Christian West today (Christian History, Issue 57, p. 8).

Glenn Hinson writes, “Most churches had the same goal: evangelism.” But it was not evangelism based on getting people into church buildings since it was nearly 300 years before the first one was built. This was evangelism by friendship and relationship. It was outreach through good works such as feeding the hungry and rescuing abandoned children (1 Peter 2:12). It was the message of a moral and pure way of life (1 Peter 3:2) proclaimed by word and deed. It was seen in their keen pursuit of justice. Each disciple was ready to tell their friends and associates the reason for their hope (1 Peter 3:15).

Evangelism (being salt and light in our world) is the life-blood of any congregation of the church. We need a transfusion of it! When it begins to course through the veins of the church, when it surges through our sanctified innards and spiritual muscles, then we will see revival.