What Do You Want Me To Do? Pt. 1

Have you ever been handed a responsibility and had absolutely no idea what to do next? Maybe it was a job or a new role and you were left wondering: Now what? Pastor Nick Gatzke reveals a special assignment you and I have been given, as he explains our role in The Great Commission.

How many of you guys like the Olympics? I love the Olympics every couple of years. It’s fun to follow the drama, the athletic competition, the politics behind it, whether or not Olympic Village will be standing by the time it’s done, all those fun things. But you know that the highlight of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is when the Olympic torch comes into the stadium and it lights the cauldron of the host site, thus marking the beginning of the Games. And the showmanship attached to that over the years has increased, and it’s impressive in its site.

You know, the origin of the Olympic flame is based in Greek mythology, but the modern expression of this in the Olympic Games is believed, it is believed that the flame has been perpetually lit since the late 1920s, early 1930s. And before every Olympic Games began, there’s a ceremony that happens in Olympia, Greece, that begins the relay, which will eventually end at the host site. The ceremony began in Greece. And as the ceremony began, it was a number of days in Greece, and then from there, the flame moved to Switzerland, where it was eventually moved to Brazil. It landed in Brazil, and the relay continued from that point. The torch relay will have traveled through Brazil for 92 days.

It will have reached 90% of the population. And if you know how big Brazil is, and the massive population there, that is an impressive feat. The torch will have passed through 300 cities and towns, and all in all, 12,000 torchbearers will participate in this travel over 20,000 miles by road and 16,000 miles by air. The role of the torchbearer is one of great honor. It’s a role that is viewed as a person who guards something important and advances that thing that is important. Imagine with me for a moment if you were a torchbearer that you were in the relay, but you didn’t know when the torch was coming to you.

Imagine that when the torch arrived to you that you had no idea what to do next or where to go. I mean that would be a pretty embarrassing thing. The world is watching. It’s waiting for the advancement of this flame so the games could begin. It’d be embarrassing because of the importance of the torch. Hence we’ve all heard the expression, passing the torch, right? Passing the torch is an expression that we use to say this is something that’s significant, that’s moving on from one person to the next through season and season. And we’ve looked at a variety of verses over the last few months. We could look at a number more.

We’ve been encouraged, we’ve been challenged, we’ve been corrected, but the passage we look at today in Matthew chapter 28 is a passage in which Jesus is passing the torch. And he’s passing the torch to his 11 disciples that remain there in front of him, but in a very real way, he’s passing the torch to you. And he’s passing the torch to me. And before we read the text, here’s my biggest fear. My biggest fear is that so many of us have dropped the torch, that we didn’t see it as important, or that we didn’t understand our role as the torchbearer to both guard something and advance something. that God himself would have us to do. And so turn with me to Matthew chapter 28 as we’re challenged and maybe even confronted afresh with this passage that we call the Great Commission. It’s familiar to many of us. Matthew 28 found on page 835. Please do turn there with me and follow along. This is what it says. “Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him. But some doubted. And Jesus came and he 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. the very end of the age.” Jesus is nearing the end of his earthly ministry. In fact, these are the last recorded words in the Gospel of Matthew. He had come, he had displayed God’s power in a variety of ways, he had taught, he had served as a sacrifice for people’s sins in which he died. Many came to faith in him, he rose again from the dead, conquering sin, death, and the devil, securing eternal life. This is the wonderful news of the gospel that God gives you new life and eternal life when you put your faith in the person of Jesus. And you can imagine the sense that these eleven disciples had. They see him again, some worship him, and some doubt him at the same time. There’s fear attached to this context.

And at the very same time, there’s a sense, you can almost feel it in the text. It’s the collective sense of, now what? What do you want me to do next? It’s that same sense that I hear from people from time to time, so many Christians that have a wonderful encounter with Jesus, they were told about God’s love for them. They experienced that love, they saw their own sin and their need to be forgiven. They put their faith in Christ, they received tremendous joy, new life and eternal life. And as they continue to take a step down the path in their relationship with God, there becomes a sense. Now what?

What do you want me to do next? Go to church? Yeah. Grow spiritually? Of course. How do I do that? Well, in a variety of ways. But beyond that, isn’t there something I’m supposed to do in this life with God? And here’s where we see the Great Commission fits in. Jesus is standing before his disciples before he leaves them and he’s passing the torch. You’re supposed to do something, he says. You’re supposed to live a certain type of life. And if we were to summarize it, we’d summarize it this way. Christians, you’re calling in life. The most important thing for you to do is to be a disciple maker. Your calling is to live a disciple making life. Well, what does that mean? Let’s look at this calling a little bit more carefully. We might divide it in really two ways. The what of the calling and the who of the calling. We often hear this passage, this very well known passage to be one of missionary calling. For those who would go off to a foreign land and serve God. And in all reality, that is true. Some of you will be like Carol Perkins and Joanne and Mary Lou and go to a foreign country to serve God. Sometimes short term, sometimes indefinitely with your life. God does that. But this passage is not just meant for those who are going abroad. This passage is meant for everyone. For everyone who would call themselves a Christian.

[REVIEW FLAG: “Carol Perkins,” “Joanne,” and “Mary Lou” — proper names of individuals mentioned. Please verify spellings against source/church records.]

You ask, what does God want me to do with my life? Answer, make disciples. Wasn’t that just for pastors and missionaries? No, it’s for everyone. How do we know? Well, let’s look at this charge more carefully. Verse 19, look at it with me. Jesus looks at his disciples, and he says very directly, “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, and teaching them to observe or obey all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the very end of the age.” There’s a common misconception about this charge, and this is the misconception. We often think that going is the primary command here, don’t we? I mean, look at your Bible. It says, go therefore.

And it’s a no wonder that a vast majority of Christians don’t think this applies to them. I mean, you’re rooted in Northeast Ohio. Some of you say, I know God has me here. My job is here, this is how I’m provided for my family. My extended family is here. I’m supposed to be here, and I know that. And so if he’s telling me to go, but I know I’m supposed to be here, well then it makes sense that this must be for somebody else. But this is the misunderstanding, because the command here in the original language is not going. There’s one command in this passage, and the command is to make disciples. And there are three supporting descriptions, participles of how you make disciples. You make disciples by going, you make disciples by baptizing, and you make disciples by teaching.

You might say it this way. The command that Jesus gives to his disciples, the command that he gives to you and to me is this. “Therefore, make disciples — going, baptizing, and teaching.” That’s the call that he’s placed on your life if you’re a Christian. But this leads us to a common misconception about our lives, and that is that we think, we tend to think, as Christians, that we go about our work, our play, our family life, and the idea of faithfulness to God is simply found in belief, that we believe in Jesus, and then, if we try hard enough to please God in the different activities that we’re in, our life becomes about him. In this sense, we go about our own agenda for our life, and we Christianize it. by saying, I’m gonna try things for God in the middle of this, and then my life will be defined by him. And unfortunately, Western Christianity has done a really good job of placing such a heavy emphasis on belief, and a very small emphasis on what happens after belief. And we understand why. I mean, belief in Jesus is the hinge. It is the entry point into your relationship with God. You don’t have a relationship with God without belief in his son. You have none of the benefits of a relationship with God without the belief in his son. And so we emphasize belief. But when you don’t emphasize what happens after it, you end up with a whole generation of people that say, now what? Aren’t I supposed to do something?

Belief in Jesus is the entry point, but friends, he’s not done with you after that. He calls you to be a disciple. To be a disciple is to be a Christian, and to be a Christian is to be a disciple. That simply means that you follow him. It means that his priorities become your priorities. It means that his desires become your desires. It means that his way of life becomes your way of life. And God does this in you as you get to know him more and more. And God’s glory creates these desires in you. Abraham Lincoln met with a group of ministers during the Civil War for prayer. And there’s varying accounts about Lincoln’s faith. it’s pretty commonly believed that he was not a churchgoer, but that he was a man of some kind of faith. And as they were having breakfast together and as they were praying, one of the ministers said to him, Mr. President, we need to pray that God will give us victory, that God will be on our side in this war. And Lincoln’s response showed far greater insight. He said, no, gentlemen, let us pray that we are on God’s side in this war. He reminded those ministers that religion is not a tool by which we get God to function on our agenda. Quite the opposite is true. When you put your faith in Jesus, you choose to sign up on his agenda. And that begs the question, if you really stop and look at your life, Whose agenda are you following? Yours? God’s? Somebody else’s? To be a Christian is to be a disciple and to be a disciple we see here is to be a disciple maker. We might say that if you are not a disciple maker, then you’re not on God’s agenda. That’s a hard word. It’s a hard word because I know the reality of it. The reality is if we pulled the room and said how many of you have participated in making disciples, very few of us would actually raise our hand. And so we’re confronted with the greatest call of our life and the torch being passed to us and so many of us standing there and saying, what do I do next?

Christian, you are called to a disciple-making life. And it is the best life that you can have. If you look back with me at the text, you see these three descriptions of a disciple-making life. You see that it includes verse 19, going. And I love this expression, even though we so often misunderstand it. Going here is a description of making disciples. We might phrase it this way. In your goings, make disciples. As you go about your work, as you go about your play, as you’re at your kids’ sporting events, as you’re engaging in the neighborhood barbecue, in those contexts of everyday rhythms of life, be a disciple-maker.

That’s a different way of looking at your daily existence than so many of us do. Disciple making becomes a key component. It becomes a fabric. It becomes a motivation for the life of a Christian. It’s part of my rhythm. It’s one of my goals. Baptizing can then aptly be described here as another element of making disciples. It’s to say that people are initiated into the life of faith. Thirdly, we see teaching. It says teaching them to obey all that I have commanded. And so you get the progression, right? The Christians say, I’m going to, in my goings, make disciples. I’m going to be where people are. I’m going to engage with people. And when they put their faith in Christ, they’re going to be baptized. This is part of disciple making. And then when they’re baptized, we continue in teaching them how to live. They’re gleaning how to follow God with their life and the ins and outs and the ups and downs with the joys and the pains.

In the big picture, God is not calling you to participate in just helping people to believe, but he’s calling you to help people walk down the road of transformation. And in fact, there’s a torchbearer who’s handed you the torch, and it’s time for you to advance it. Christian, you are called to a disciple making life, and if that’s the what of your calling, then what about the who? There is a surprise in this passage, and the surprise is one that is sometimes lost in us with Western eyes. It’s not that God has put a calling on your life to do something. I mean, really, just step back and think about it. We’re talking about God, the King of Kings, and Jesus, who expresses here in this passage, he has all authority to do anything he wants. His resurrection has guaranteed that he has authority over. everything in the universe, including you, and therefore he can tell you what to do. And it makes sense that he would tell us to do this because he wouldn’t be so cruel as to leave us purposeless in this life to just sort of figure our way through. No, God in his mercy and his grace wants us to be fulfilled, wants us to be part of something meaningful, even the most meaningful. And so one of his great kindnesses to us is that we get to participate in this cosmic plan of redemption that he has for humanity. The surprise is not that he has a call on your life and that he expects you to do something. We should actually expect that. But the call or the surprise in this call is who he expects them to do it to. He’s speaking here to his 11 remaining disciples. They’re Jewish.

And for centuries, the Jews have experienced God as their God and their God alone. And for centuries, God has displayed his works and his ways through these people. And for centuries, there was the expectation that he would save the nation of Israel and the nation of Israel alone. And now, in some of his final interactions, he stands before them and say, go and make disciples. But he doesn’t say, go and make disciples with the nation of Israel. Go and make disciples with all nations. And who are all the nations? You. You represent the nations. The vast majority of you here are Gentiles. And here in Northeast Ohio, we have people of Italian descent, Slovaks, Poles, Irish, English, Arab, Africans, Mexicans, even Germans. even Germans, I know. You are the nations, we are the nations. And so when you think about this call that God has placed on your life, okay, it’s not just for pastors and missionaries, it’s for all Christians. And he tells them to engage with the nations, but the nations are right here. You are sitting in the middle of the nations. And now you say, man, this really is for me. He’s placed me in the middle of it. He’s called me to do it. But what’s one of the biggest hurdles? One of the biggest hurdles that we have, that so many of us have a hard time getting over, is that to make disciples, you really need to invest your life in other people.

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** This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.