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Stephen: Forty days after Jesus Christ's resurrection from the dead, as He was about to ascend to heaven, He directed His followers to a mountaintop in Galilee, where He gave them the Great Commission found in our Bibles in Matthew 28:18–20, which says, “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”
Brooks, 2,000 years later, Christ's church has spread far beyond that mountain in Galilee. There are churches on every continent. According to the Pew Research Foundation, there are more than two billion Christians in the world, and the Bible has been translated into more than 700 languages. I can't think of a better place to begin this Ask Missionary podcast than with this question:
Two thousand years later, does the Great Commission still matter?
Brooks: Yeah, Stephen, this is a great question. I was really encouraged to see that this question isn't just a question that's asked by our time or the Christians of our age. This was also a question that William Carey was getting nearly 230 years ago in the 1790s. He's asking and giving the answer to why the Great Commission should still matter. Is the Great Commission still binding on us today as Christians?
I think where he went for part of his answer, some of what he was responding to, was that the apostles had accomplished the Great Commission, which he thoroughly proved through Matthew 28. But then he got into a particular text, and I want to go to the text that he talked about and then two others that I think press home why the Great Commission is still part of what the Christian is meant to accomplish today.
There’s the Great Commandment—to love our God and love our neighbor as ourselves: to love our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But then there's the Great Commission, what many people call the marching orders of the church, what we are meant to do. They get that primarily from Matthew 28. It's the clearest of the five Great Commission passages—Matthew 28:16–20.
"Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
What Carey pointed out was there is this authority of Jesus over all heaven and earth and the command to go to all nations. The “alls” in this passage are actually really instructive—all authority in heaven and on earth, all nations, or all ethne (from which we get the English word “ethnicities”), to observe all that I have commanded you, and then, “I am with you always” which in Greek is not “always” but “all the days.”
So if this commandment was given just to the apostles, Carey makes the point—and it’s observant for our day as well—that it's still binding on those who carry out the commission that was given to the apostles and those who would follow them. As long as the end of the age has not come upon us yet, we are still in all the days that lead up to that great day when the King returns. The commission that He gave to the apostles and subsequently to all those who followed in the teaching of the apostles, who laid the foundation—the apostles and the prophets lay the foundation, and we build upon that foundation. We are to continue to carry out that command, that commission: go to the ends of the earth.
Let all peoples, even those that are farthest out, know of this redemption, this story that was given to the apostles first, those who heard it from Jesus’ lips, but also those who would come up in later generations and would follow the apostles’ teaching.
Then this quintessential passage in Romans 10:13–15 says this. Paul’s talking about how those who are far off, who have yet to have access to the gospel, are to hear. He says in Romans 10:13,
“For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”
Paul’s asking these rhetorical questions. How do people hear? Well, everyone knows the answer: they can’t. Those who have never heard of the grace of God in the person of Jesus Christ will never hear the gospel unless someone goes to them, someone preaches to them, someone lays it out. Implicit in that is if you're going to preach to people who have different tongues, you've got to learn their language. You’ve got to be able to communicate intelligibly to them.
People talk about tongues and the speaking of someone’s language. If I don’t understand the meaning of the language, they’re a foreigner to me, and I’m a foreigner to them. But that whole idea—that those who are far off—this is binding on us if they are ever to hear this message.
This commission still matters, especially to those who have never heard the gospel. For those who have the gospel in their own languages, sometimes this can feel like a far-off thought—that there are entire groups of people, entire languages, that don’t know Jesus Christ, that aren’t familiar with His name even. But they still exist today. I don’t think the number is as high as 3,000—some will say 3,100—but I think it’s less than that. There are still entire language groups that do not know the name of Jesus Christ. They do not know that there is redemption from sin, that they can be made right with the God of heaven and earth.
They look up. They see the stars. They see the seasons changing. They see the general revelation that we see throughout the world. Every human being knows from this creation—Romans 1 tells us—that there is a God. But that knowledge isn’t enough to save; it’s only enough to damn. This is the great work of the church: to go to those places, to begin to learn their languages, to lay out for them who this God is who created heaven and earth.
Then this final passage in 2 Corinthians 5, which I think is really instructive of what’s laid on the church today. This isn’t an individual task. The Great Commission was not given to individuals; it was given to churches. Churches are the means by which the Great Commission will be accomplished.
It says this in 2 Corinthians 5:17:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us.”
It’s through God’s people. This passage is saying it’s through the saints, through those who have knowledge of salvation. It’s through that means that the world will be reconciled.
So the Great Commission very much still matters, and I would argue fervently it matters most to those who have never heard. Until the King returns, He is with us to the very end of the age. But that commission, that going out of the gospel, that force that continues to push past strongholds—where the gospel, praise God, is so resident in your and my country—it’s resident in other areas, but there are other countries, other places, other languages that still have yet to hear.
We do a great disservice to the Great Commission, to the command, to the final marching orders of our God, if we don’t keep in mind those peoples even as we carry on our business, our work, how we raise our families, how we go to church. In the back of our mind, there has to be that thought: What is our church doing? What is my life doing? What are we, as a family, a part of that continues to see that part of the world—those ethne— that still have yet to hear?
What’s our part in that, in seeing them reached? That’s my great hope. I wanted to close this episode with the words from Isaac Watts’s great hymn "How Sweet and Awful Is the Place." The fifth stanza goes like this:
“Pity the nations, O our God,
Constrain the earth to come.
Send Thy victorious Word abroad,
And bring the strangers home.”
That’s the Great Commission encapsulated in that first stanza: bring the strangers home. Father, by Your great hand, bring the strangers home.
This is why the Great Commission still matters—because it’s still the command that God gave us and is still binding on us today.
Stephen: Thank you, Brooks. To find resources that will inspire and educate your church to better follow the Great Commission, visit us online at missionary.com. There you'll find hundreds of free articles, videos, podcasts, and talks all about what it means to follow Jesus’s command.
Finally, if you have a question you would like to hear answered on Ask Missionary, get in touch with us on X, Instagram, or you can contact us through missionary.com, and your question may be featured on the show. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show to get notified when our next episode, Where Are Missionaries Needed Most, airs next week.
Thanks for listening.