and you know that he wants you. And the call may be quite simply— “stay at home, stay in your job, and there learn from me.”
LEAVING
T. W. Manson used to say that the word behind the New Testament word was not talmidim, a scholar, the man who listened to lectures and read books in college; it was shaliah, the apprentice, the man who learns by living with a master, watching the master practice his trade, beginning to imitate his handiwork, and practices and practices until he too can produce the same finished workmanship. Whatever you make of the linguistic question, that is what discipleship is. There is—I hope—room for books and lectures. But the basic thing is being with the Master, until you begin to think as he thinks, speak as he speaks, and act as he acts.
For you see how Matthew himself puts the object of the exercise. There are two things. The first is that the disciples learn to observe the things that Jesus commanded. There is no time for me to try and tell you this in detail. Take up this Gospel and read chapters 5–7, the Sermon on the Mount. There is enough there to be going on with, and there is more to follow. The first commandment is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and the second is that you love your neighbor as yourself.
Matthew’s second thing is in some ways more difficult to get hold of. Baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I wouldn’t worry unduly, if I were you, about the doctrine of the Trinity, or about the theology of baptism. The more important thing is this. “In the name of . . .” This morning (1/22/92) I received a statement from my bank. It told me the balance that stood there in my name. That is, it told me what the bank was holding that belonged to me. Our baptism means that we belong to the one in whose name we were baptized; that is we belong to God, are God’s people. And that will indeed lead on to the last thing. Jesus has for his people a commission; he has also a promise.
A PROMISE
“I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.” I don’t think we should be too quick to cheer about that. The presence of Jesus is a disturbing, challenging presence. I cannot think about those words in Matthew, perhaps you can’t, without remembering the story of David Livingstone. He always behaved as a friend of the Africans, and assumed their friendship, even when they mistook him for a slave-trader. But now he was caught in a hard place, hemmed in by people who quite misunderstood his offered friendship. He was on a riverbank. Should he find a canoe and slip away across the river under the cover of night? He read this passage in his Bible—“It is the word of a gentleman, of the strictest and most sacred honor,” he wrote in his journal. He could not run for it; he stayed to earn the trust of those who thought he was their enemy.
The commission of Jesus will often challenge us to the hard way, the dangerous way, but it makes sense of life. In other words, it turns on the commission. Reject the commission and you can hardly expect the promise. This brings me to where you might have expected me to begin. This service takes place in the week of prayer for Christian unity; it takes place also in the Decade of Evangelism. Some people think we cannot evangelize effectively before we are more united that we are. I think they are standing things on their heads. It is as we accept to take the commission to take the Gospel to the whole world, that we should see even more clearly than we do now that Jesus keeps his promise and is with his people—with the Roman Catholics, the Salvation Army, with the Anglicans and the Methodists, with the Baptists and the U.R.C. And if he is with them and with us, we are already with one another, and sooner or later the next step will come in sight.
So—out into the world. Take the Gospel to every nation. Do it together if you can, do it on your own if you must. And see how the Lord reveals his presence.
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