Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  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, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (18-20, NIV).

Right now, you may be asking, where is he going with this post?  The reality is that this message is foundational to the life of many churches, especially evangelical churches, and rightfully so I would argue!

I just feel that many times the church is not fully obedient to the words of Jesus.  We read the “go” and announce that people need to get out of their spiritual laziness and hit the streets sharing the good news.  But, if you’re like me, you may have felt like the messengers of this glorious news need a little work?

This little slice of Matthew’s Gospel has a lot to teach us about what it truly means to be a missional follower (read disciple) of Jesus, one whose life is captured by the mission of God.

1. Jesus messianic authority. The verb translated “given” is understood as divine action in which God placed authority over all existence into the hands of Christ.  Jesus is the King and we are His subjects.  It’s not about what can the church do for me or whiny attitudes about whether the church is feeding me.  It is about the Kingship of Jesus and announcing that to the world!

2. The charge to make disciples. The controlling imperative of the Great Commission is the simple charge to make disciples.  This is the only verb in the entire commission that is actually a command.  The central motif of this commission is disciplemaking.  In fact, the rest is merely three participles that explain how the making of disciples is to be carried out – going, baptizing, and teaching.  What do I mean?  Where we read “go”, the Greek is actually saying, “while going“.  While we are going we are to make disciples.  Large numbers at a church service does not equate with discipleship.  Disciplemaking takes time, a commodity that is in scarce resource in our culture.

3. The charge to go.  The word apostle implies one who is sent or commissioned to go on behalf of the sender.  The tendency for a Jew during this period would be to stay in Jerusalem where it is safe.  That tendency still resonates with us today.  But apostleship transforms one’s identity.  These disciples were no longer just living life for themselves.  The radical call of the Messiah mandated that they go to all nations.  Just because followers of Jesus don’t like something doesn’t mean that they must stay away.  We may not like drug addicts, crack moms, drunkards, porn lookers, etc, but God does and we’re called to show His love to even “the least of these”.

4. The charge to baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Disciples become disciples by being united with Jesus.  In the Christian community, we join, are united to, Jesus through baptism.  Baptism is the public declaration of our allegiance to the kingdom of God.  Baptism has been trivialized to simply become a membership development issue in some churches and denominations; I join the church through being baptized.  In the ancient world, and much of the world today, baptism could, and does, mean physical death.  When a believer is baptized they announce to the gathering that they have truly counted the cost of their discipleship with Jesus.  Do the waters of baptism signify to us to count the cost of our allegiance to Christ?

5. The charge to teach them to observe all that Jesus had commanded. Disciples need to be taught what the life of a disciple is all about: the character of the disciple, the ministry of the disciple, the meaning of kingdom membership, how to live as disciples in a Christian community, and where to fix their hope.  This teaching and training are ongoing and unending.  There are always new challenges for disciples.  In the context of Matthew’s Gospel, the expression translated “all that I have commanded you” refers to the teaching/training Jesus did with His group of disciples.  My fear for Christianity in America is that it has become a head game. Theology, Bible, and faith have all become things to study. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy have been forced to stand alone in separate corners while denominations bicker about why the other is wrong for their choice.

6. “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20). This mission is ongoing.  Even with high times and low times, tragedy and triumph, event or no event…the mission of God moves on.  The hope through it all is that the rabbi, Jesus Himself, journeys with us every step along the way.

In the end, I’m left with a question, how am I, how are we, doing in this mission of disciplemaking?  Are we picking and choosing which parts of the Great Commission we desire to follow?

We’re not called to effectiveness, we’re called to obedience.  Paul declares that we’re not even called to win the race but to finish it.  My fear is that we’ve learned to associate big numbers, events, worship services, and buildings with how we live out the life of a disciple.  We wait for the church to create a program or event so we can plug and play into whatever we want.  This week the church is having a community outreach project, I’ll plug into that and check community service off my list.

The life of a disciple is more involved than that.  It’s more beautiful and more heart-wrenching, all at the same time.  In the delicate tension of already and not yet, Spirit and flesh, Word and Spirit, sacred and secular, big and small, deep and wide, in the world and not of the world, we find the pathway to which God has called His disciples.

We can bring the gospel to the world!  I hope that we never lose this missional impulse in the Body of Christ.  But, as we encounter people and as we examine the churches in which we find ourselves, are we also bringing people to the gospel.  Simultaneous to our evangelistic stream should be one of sanctification.  As people are reached for the gospel of Christ, are people meeting the gospel in a transformative way?  As the good news goes forth is it also going within and manifesting lives of purity and holiness.  As we follow the Rabbi are we getting some of the dust kicked up by His sandals on our face?

1. Did we lift the name of Jesus up as a centerpiece of why we gathered? (See Revelation 5:6 and 5:13-14, Colossians 3:17, and Philippians 2:9-11.)
2. Did we have a time in the Scriptures learning the story of God and humanity?  Did we invite everyone to be part of his story today in Kingdom living? (See 2 Timothy 3:14-4:4.)
3. Did we pray together and have enough time to slow down and quiet our hearts to hear God’s voice and yield to his Spirit? (See Acts 1:14 and John 4:23-24.)
4. Did we experience the joy, love, and encouragement of being together as a church? (See Hebrews 10:25 and John 13:34-35.)
5. Did we take the Lord’s Supper together as a church regularly  OR call people to an awareness of the implications of the Elements upon our gathering? (See 1 Corinthians 11:20-32.)
6. Did we somehow remind everyone of the mission of the church and why we exist? (See Matthew 28:18-20.)
7. Did we enable people to individually contribute something as part of the body of Christ? (See 1 Corinthians 12:27 and 14:26.)

The prayer is very simple in its more common, extended form:

“Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, the late Russian Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate’s diocese for Great Britain and Ireland said the Jesus Prayer, “more than any other,” helps us to be able to “stand in God’s presence.” This means that it helps us to focus our mind exclusively on God with “no other thought” occupying our mind but the thought of God. At this moment when our mind is totally concentrated on God, we discover a very personal and direct relationship with Him.  One Eastern Orthodox theologian has said, “It also serves as perhaps the most succinct Gospel message available.”

The Jesus Prayer is one of the oldest of Christian prayers, dating in its original form to the words the two blind men cried out to Jesus in Matthew 20:31. It was formalized by the Orthodox Churches in the 5th century.  Contained in the prayer is a uniquely clear summation of the Christian faith:

Jesus the man is declared by name to be the Christ, the annointed one of God, as well as being the Lord of our lives; he is declared to be the Son of God, and therefore divine; he is declared to be in the position of judgment and mercy, and we confess to be sinners requiring His grace.

The practice of the Eastern Orthodox Churches calls for the Jesus Prayer to remind them of  constant prayer that the Apostle Paul speaks of in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, where the prayer is kept on the lips and in the hearts of believers at all times.  In its ultimate form, this prayer method is called Hesychasm (Greek: ἡσυχάζω, hesychazo, “to keep stillness”).

A spectacular jewel from Eastern Orthodox theology is their view of repentance.  In the West, we take a very juridical understanding of sin and repentance; a wrong has been committed, somebody needs to pay, Jesus paid, we come to Jesus and make a transaction, we take His righteousness and He takes our sins, we are blameless before God, the Father.

This age old understanding of justification is not wrong by any means.  Nor is it complete.  Eastern Orthodoxy takes a different approach to repentance.  John Chryssavgis, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, wrote the following in his essay, “Repentance and Confession”:

Repentance (Greek: μετάνοια, metanoia, “changing one’s mind”) isn’t remorse, justification, or punishment, but a continual enactment of one’s freedom, deriving from renewed choice and leading to restoration (the return to man’s original state).

The Jesus Prayer stands at the center of this journey.  It is merely two statements and a petition.  The first statement is the declaration of Jesus Christ as Lord.  The second statement is the acknowledgment of one’s own sinfulness.  Flowing out of the meeting of the two is a petition for mercy as holiness meets sinfulness, divinity meets humanity, strength meets weakness, love meets scorn.

As the pray-er recites the words of the prayer, the hope is that an inward journey takes place.  At first it is an oral prayer as we encounter for the first time the words and recite them allowed.  The second is the prayer of the mind as we analyze and explore the meaning of the prayer we are reciting.  The final movement is the prayer of the heart where we begin to become the prayer.

My friend, Jerry Flora, often tells a story of a prayer retreat that he attended many years ago.  He was struck at how the prayer gathering began.  The woman leading closed here eyes, paused for a few minutes of silence, and then proclaimed, “We are sinking into prayer.”  Prayer wasn’t so much a formality to begin a meeting as it was likened to a giant, overly-stuffed chair that enveloped him that day.

Brennan Manning in his latest book, The Furious Longing of God, writes:

When the night is bad and my nerves are shattered and the waves break over the sides, Infinity speaks. God Almighty shares through His Son the depth of His feelings for me, His love flashes into my soul, and I am overtaken by mystery. These are moments of kairos — the decisive in-break of God’s fury into my personal life’s story.

It is then I face a momentous decision. Shivering in the rags of my seventy-four years, I have two choices. I can escape below into skepticism and intellectualism, hanging on for dear life. Or, with radical amazement, I can stay on deck and boldly stand in surrendered faith to the truth of my belovedness, caught up in the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God. And learn to pray. (pp. 130-131)

His words bring tears to my eyes.  It seems that I have been misunderstanding this prayer thing all along.  I should not come to prayer because I should but because I must.  Prayer is not encountering an omnipresent, narcissistic deity.  Instead, prayer is crawling into the lap of my Dad.  I may ramble, I may fall asleep…but my Dad just loves when I come to Him.

The Jesus Prayer just might be the great reminder to the church through the centuries that prayer is more than a transaction of sins for righteousness.  It’s not a rags to riches story.  It’s not a laundry list of demands and requests.

Prayer is a becoming.  Prayer is a belonging.

The Jesus Prayer reminds me that I am becoming more and more like Him with every day that I surrender my life and will to Him.  With every decision of every second, I look at my dear friend, Jesus, and decide whether my decision will honor our friendship, will promote His Lordship, and will allow me to experience the deepest of intimacies from God’s parenthood over my life.

The Jesus Prayer reminds me that I belong.  I belong to a passionate, wild, reckless, extravagant, hilarious, steadfast, committed, stay-at-home, out-on-the-street, head-over-heels in love Daddy who would love nothing more than to woo His children back into His arms.  Oh that I could hear His heartbeat and feel the warmth of His embrace!  The tears that would be shed as Abba/Daddy whispers to me, “I’m proud of you, little guy…I will always love you.”

The Jesus Prayer reminds me how simple it really is.  The Gospel is not in need of vast textbooks or great exposition.  It is more than a relationship…it is two lovers meeting and upon their encounter find it unable to take their eyes off of one another.  As close as my next breath is the desire for God to meet with me.  As close as your next breath is the desire for God to meet you.  Are you meeting Him?  Can you feel Him?  Does He bring life to your weary soul?  Does He provide moisture and sustenance to your dry, and brittle bones?

Take the next week and practice the Jesus Prayer as you live each day.

INHALE: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God…”

EXHALE: “…have mercy on me a sinner.”

Inhale His goodness, completeness, love, mercy, renewal, and passion.  Exhale your failures, doubts, insecurities, trivial lusts, pains, sorrows, wrongs, hurts.  May each breath be a reminder of the Gospel, the good news for everyone.  May the good news begin transforming you!

4While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: 5″A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. 7Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. 8Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.”
When he said this, he called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

9His disciples asked him what this parable meant. 10He said, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,
” ‘though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand.’[a]

11″This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. 12Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. 13Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away. 14The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. 15But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.

This past week I began reading a new book (no surprise there!) and a conversation broke out between myself and the Lord regarding the Parable of the Sower (see above).  This same parable is found in Mark 4:1-20, Matthew 13:1-23, and Luke 8:1-15.  Upon review of this passage, a list of questions flooded my mind:

1. Who is the farmer?
2. What is the seed?
3. Why is the farmer so reckless in scattering the seed?  He throws it on rocks, on the path, etc.
4. Why is the farmer scattering seed over thorny patches of the garden infested by weeds?  Shouldn’t he/she weed first?
5. What is the meaning of the crop that is yielded “a hundred times more than was sown”?  That means the entire garden was filled to capacity!
6. Why does Jesus “call out” after this parable, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”?  Isn’t this passage simply about spreading the word of God?
7. What is the “knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God”?
8. What is the word of God?

I have read and re-read this passage for years.  Everytime the point seems to be painfully clear, be like the good soil and receive the word of God.  I’ve also heard this passage evangelistically, as we spread the good news, some people will be receptive to it and others will not.

It is not that these explanations are false.  We should all seek to live lives that are prepared for the goodness and richness of Christ Jesus.  Likewise, out of our lives should flow the good news of Christ to those around is.  And, some people will receive that news and others will not.

The power of this passage lies in what the language we take for granted would have actually meant to Jesus.  This parable is so important that in Mark’s version of it Jesus asks His disciples, “Don’t you understand this parable?  How then will you understand any parable” (v. 13)?  So powerful is the message of this parable that Jesus stakes His entire teaching/training ministry in its contents.  Why?

As I encountered this passage in reading I am immediately drawn to this farmer.  It is not strange for Jesus to use an agrarian parable.  Agriculture was of great importance to those He was speaking.  This farmer, however, seems to be a little sloppy.  If you live a life totally dependant upon the harvest you receive back and you have a limited amount of money with which to buy seed, why would you scatter it so haphazardly as to cover the pathways, rocks, and weeds?  Furthermore, why wouldn’t you first weed the garden?

Verse 8b shows us an amazing feat, “[The seed] came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.”  It seems that the farmer knows the quality of the seed he is spreading.  He knows there is no need to uproot the weeds or chase away the birds.  True to his foreknowledge, the seed produces a crop a hundred times more than was sown.  The garden is filled to capacity (and overflowing)!

This brings us back to a question, if this parable is all about being faithful, why does Jesus  to his followersm “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand’” (v. 10).  This language finds its roots in the commissioning of Isaiah.  God is calling for a prophet to go forth and do two things: 1) Warn the people of God’s anger and judgment for them to repent AND 2) to proclaim a day that is coming; a most blessed day of Yahweh.

In this little parable found in three of the four gospels, Jesus utilizes that same language.  Kind of odd if this message is incredibly simple for Jesus to 1) hinge the meaning of all other parables in this one, 2) to declare that the meaning of this parable is enveloped in the “secrets of the kingdom”, and 3) to have the people recall the commissioning of the great prophet Isaiah.

As I said early, the traditional understandings of this passage are not incorrect.  But, I want to argue that they are not complete either.  There is a grand story at play in this parable.  In verses 11-17 of the passage above, Jesus offers the pieces of the puzzle.  Scripture is forcing us to put the pieces together.  It’s asking us, you’ve read this passage many times BUT do you know the larger story of my narrative?  Do we know the fuller story of Scripture and why this parable is so radical?

The radical piece of this story lies in the discovery of the identity of the seed and the farmer.  The seed is the word of God.  What, then, is the word of God?  It is not the Bible.  The Bible finds its ultimate purpose in meaning flowing out of the true word of God.  John’s Gospel declares, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He [the Word] was with God in the beginning.  The Word became flesh and made his [the Word's] dwelling among us” (1:1,14, NIV).  The seed is Jesus.

The farmer is us, the Church.  We are called to proclaim the identity (the Savior, Lord and King) of Jesus Christ.  The fascinating thing of this story is that the weeds, the rocks, the birds are not eliminated.  Think for a moment the implications of this for our journeys of faith.

Too many Christians spend inordinate amounts of time petitioning Congress, their city councils, etc to remove things they find offensive and sinful.  Here lately, the rhetoric of America as a Christian nation has been written everywhere.  Many Christians think the way to change America is to get rid of all the sin.

I want to argue counter to this.  I find that many people who live according to the above philosophy have golden hearts.  They truly want to see Jesus manifested and people coming into a beautiful relationship with Him.  But look at this parable, the weeds, rocks and birds are not removed.  Instead, the seed is scattered and the crop, in spite of the weeds, grows a hundred times more.

What would it look like if instead of trying to remove the problem of evil, the Body of Christ began to exemplify the overhelming goodness of the Gospel?  What if instead of trying to shut down a strip-joint the people of God sought ways to truly love those entrapped to a life of lust and shame and bring freedom to the captives?  What if instead of saying how much you hate abortion you began to fight for better adoption education and stood in the gap for women who feel they have no other choice?

All throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry, he would declare that the kingdom of Heaven (or God) is at hand.  This parable does not show the destruction of the garden but an all out restoration of it.  The barren spots, weedy spots, rocky spots…they’re all overtaken by the unstoppable growth of a hundred fold crop.

There comes a time where the people of God need to stop picking weeds and need to start planting seeds.  You can pick all the weeds out of the garden and be left with a garden even more barren than it was before.  If you plant seeds, you not only grow a crop.  The crop that is grown has the capacity to produce seed for future crops.  This grassroots, organic, everyday-person adventure allowed the Church to spread like wildfire in the early Church and begs of us to experience it afresh today.

For Jesus, Heaven is not something we wait for.  It’s not something we purify the world for.  Instead, it is something we look forward to, walk lovingly towards, journey with others in the mindset of, and seek to be ambassadors of right here and right now.

May we recognize that the farmer is not God.  The farmer is us!  May we recognize that the seed is the relational good news of Jesus Christ and spread it everywhere we go to produce a harvest for which we will be told, “Well done, my good and faithful servant!”