The story of the faith of the Roman officer reveals the link between faith and authority. We sometimes approach evangelism and witnessing devoid of this faith. The Roman officer had the faith in the authority of Jesus Christ! More so than anyone else Jesus had come across! That is the faith we need to have when approaching the spreading of the Gospel. We do not do this randomly but under direct order of He who has all authority! Do we truly grasp that today? Our responsibility to the Gospel begins with understanding the authority we walk under.
Back to the key verses we come to verse 19, the actual verse that finished in the tenth slot of most searched Bible verses. In it are the nuts and bolts of Christianity and our responsibility to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It consists of five crucial parts:
* Go
* Make disciples
* All nations
* Baptizing
* Teach them all my commands
The first part of the Great Commission is the word "go." Christianity is an action verb beloved. We were not meant to be passively enjoying eternal life while everyone we live our lives with are still destined for hell. The unsaved status of people should be a burden upon us. It should eat away at us. We were not saved to warm a pew, get our hallelujah hop on, pay our offering and go home. Nor were we purposed to simply serve in a ministry and think our Christian duty has been done. We are supposed to GO. Where preacher? Wherever God leads you! For some it will be the mission field but for most the true mission field is in their workplace, their PTA meetings, or even in their church itself. The church was never intended to be for the entertainment of the saints but rather for the rescue of sinners.
But when the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, "Why does he eat with such scum?"
When Jesus heard this, he told them, "Healthy people don't need a doctor--sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners." - Mark 2: 16-17 (NLT)
We have far too many folks in churches with a Pharisaical spirit that looks down on the unsaved as scum. The homosexual as scum. The Muslim as scum. The reality is that we all were scum until the blood of Jesus was spilled for our redemption. The only righteousness we enjoy is because of the cross. It is not our own. When our church becomes a social club instead of a triage unit then only a precious few are saved. We take the authority of Christ and casually toss it aside. Evangelism is relegated to a "gift" that requires people to roam the jungles in search of the lost when the lost sit right next to us in church every week. We must understand the authority we are mandated under and then we must GO.
