by Nate Wilson - 16 May 2004 – SDCS, ROPC in 2003, EPC in 2004, Christ Pres Owensboro 2005, Kitintale 2005, 28 May 2006 (and 12 April 2026) @ CTR-Manhattan, Feb 3, 2026 @ Telos class Manhattan. This goes together with a set of slides with scripture on them which can be read to expand the presentation time to about 45 minutes.
One of my most terrifying memories as a little boy in Alabama was when I was playing inside my parent's car in the driveway of our house. You know how kids do, twisting all the knobs in fascination with the complex mysteries of the automobile. Well, somehow, I managed to knock the car into neutral, and the car started rolling. I still remember the sheer terror of careening out of control down the driveway, seeing the panicked looks on the faces of my little brother and my mom as she came screaming out of the side door, and me sitting helplessly in the car, not knowing what to do. I remember the sickening crunch as the car hit the wall of the house and brought an end to my little drive. That experience gave me recurring nightmares.
But now when I get behind the wheel of a car, I enjoy the experience. I like to be able to skillfully maneuver the car and watch the scenery going by and feel like I'm really going somewhere.
Now what makes the difference? Why was it a terrifying experience for me as a kid, but now, driving is enjoyable? It's because my Dad trained me in all the in’s and out’s of how to drive when I was fifteen, and I gained skill from experience at driving. Being thrown into a situation where you are responsible for something important, yet you have no training or skill, is a scary experience for anybody.
Many people think that’s the way it was with the disciples when Jesus gave the Great Commission. It seems that when Jesus reached the end of His ministry, just before He ascended to heaven He said, “Oh by the way, I want you to go into all the world and made disciples while you’re at it. Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Bye!” It seems the Great Commission was so overwhelming and the disciples were so unprepared that world evangelization was kinda ignored by everybody except Paul and maybe Peter… But was it really like that? Were the disciples as unprepared and ineffective with the Great Commission as a toddler trying to drive a car? Let’s see what the Scriptures say:
Let’s look at the ministry of Jesus and see if Jesus did anything to prepare His disciples to make disciples of the nations. It’s true that Jesus’ ministry centered on the Jews (Matt. 10:5-6), but His disciples watched Him do some pretty amazing cross-cultural outreaches to Gentiles.
Take for instance the time in Matt. 8 when He crossed the sea of Galilee to the Greek-speaking Decapolis area for no other reason than to heal a man who was demon-possessed. They couldn’t have been Jews because they were upset when they lost their pigs! So, early on in His ministry, Jesus took his disciples on this little excursion just to heal a Gentile!
Jesus was not only kind to Greeks; He also ministered to Samaritans.
Samaritans were descendants of the Persian peoples that the Assyrian king moved in to Samaria after deporting the Jews (2 Kings 18).
Their religious system was all mixed up. They were idol worshipers who accepted part, but not all, of the Jewish scriptures.
They were the ones who opposed Nehemiah when he tried to come back and rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. As a result, Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans.
Yet Jesus reached out to Samaritans throughout His ministry:
one of the ten lepers was a Samaritan,
and the woman at the well was also a Samaritan.
The disciples marveled when they saw Jesus reaching out to these Samaritans.
What about Canaanites? Yes, Jesus reached out to Canaanites, too! In Matthew 15, Jesus is not even in Israel; He’s up in Phoenicia with His disciples. Here he meets a local Canaanite woman, complements her for her faith and heals her daughter. (By the way, He says some pretty mean things to her at first, but I believe the things he said about her being a dog and all were not intended to be taken at face value. These were phrases commonly said by Jews, and He was merely using them facetiously to test the faith of the woman and to test His disciples to see if they had yet gained a desire for cross-cultural ministry. His disciples failed the test, but Jesus commended the woman for passing her test!
Greeks, Samaritans, Canaanites… Surely not Romans, though! The Romans were the bad guys, right? They were the evil oppressors. No, Jesus reached out to them, too. In Matthew 8, He actually marvels at how much more faithful a Roman centurion is than all the Jewish believers He has met. He goes on to say that “many will come from east and west and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the sons of the kingdom will be cast into outer darkness.”
Was Jesus preparing his disciples for cross-cultural witness? You better believe He was. He was very systematic about it. He spoke many times throughout His ministry about other nations participating in the blessings of His kingdom. That’s what made Him so mad at the temple. In Mark 11, He steps into the court of the Gentiles and says, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations, but you have made it a robber’s den.”
It’s in the parables, too. Remember the parable of the vineyard? (Matt. 21) The landowner plants a vineyard, puts vine-growers over it, and leaves. The vine-growers represent the Jews in the parable, who kill the messengers and finally kill the landowner’s son. Then what does Jesus say? "The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to another people!"
He said the same thing at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth in Luke 4. Was Jesus preparing His disciples for Gentiles to come into the kingdom?
He communicated His expectations clearly to the disciples that He expected the Gospel to be preached in all the world.
He stated it explicitly in Matthew 24 among the signs of the end of the age,
and
he stated it implicitly in the encounter with the strange woman who
washed his feet, saying “wherever this gospel is preached in the
whole world, what this woman has done will also be spoken of”
(Matt. 26). The disciples knew that the message of Jesus was going
to go out into all the world!
So, you see, when Jesus gave the Great Commission, He HAD prepared His disciples for it. And He didn’t give the Great Commission just once; He repeated it several times - I count five:
Matthew
28:18-20 (Mountain in Galilee)
“And Jesus approached and
spoke to them saying, ‘Every authority in heaven and upon earth
was given to me, therefore once y’all have proceeded, start
discipling all the ethnicities, baptizing them into the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to
keep all of whatever I commanded y’all, and see, I myself am with
y’all all your days until the conclusion of the age.” (NAW)
John
20:21 (Upper Room – 10 disciples)
“Then Jesus said to
them again, ‘Peace to you! Just as the Father has commissioned me,
I also send y’all!’” (NAW)
Mark
16:15-16 (Upper Room in Jerusalem – 11 disciples)
“And
He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to
all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be
saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned.’” (NASB)
Luke
24:46-49 (Upper Room in Jerusalem – 11 disciples)
“and
He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer
and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for
forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the
nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these
things. And behold, I am sending forth the promise of My Father upon
you; but you are to stay in the city until you are clothed with
power from on high.’” (NASB)
Acts
1:6-8 (Mt. of Olives near Jerusalem)
“So when they had
come together, they were asking Him, saying, ‘Lord, is it at this
time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them,
‘It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has
fixed by His own authority; but you will receive power when the Holy
Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in
Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest
part of the earth.’” (NASB)
And they took all this seriously: We read in Acts of how
Paul preached the Gospel in all of Asia and made inroads into Europe.
Peter and Phillip converted masses of Samaritans.
There are communities of believers in India who trace their spiritual heritage to "Doubting" Thomas.
Matthew is said to have gone to Ethiopia (which became the first Christian nation),
Andrew went to Scythia - as far north as Russia.
Bartholomew evangelized Arabia.
John spent much time in Turkey and others took the Gospel to Syria and Persia.
In their lifetime, the apostles made tremendous headway in preaching the Gospel in all the world - by the time they died, there was a church in every province of the Roman empire, and one sixth of the population of the world had heard the Gospel!
The Great Commission was not at all an afterthought, nor were the disciples ill-prepared for it. It was the driving force of their lives. But is it still that way today? The Great Commission was given to the Apostles, not to us, right? Only a very small percentage of Christians has the kind of gifting it takes to be a missionary, and besides, hasn’t the Great Commission been pretty much fulfilled? Well, let’s look at it.
In Matthew 28, Jesus commanded His disciples to make disciples of all the nations... and to teach them everything He had commanded.
What was the last thing Jesus commanded? To go make disciples and teach them everything that Jesus commanded, Right? Which means that the disciples of the original apostles were also to be given the Great Commission to go make disciples of all the nations. Then those disciples in turn were to be given the Great Commission along with all of Jesus' commands.
You see, the very wording of the Great Commission creates an expectation of every generation of disciples to fulfill the Great Commission and pass it on to our disciples! So, the Great Commission, by it's very wording still applies to every Christian today!
Although there are churches now existing in every political nation in the world, the Great Commission was not given merely in terms of political nations. It was given in terms of all creation, all the ethnic groups, and every region of the earth.
If we look at it in terms of Mark's account of the Great Commission - preaching the Gospel to every creature, a third of the world’s population today has never heard the Gospel even once.
If you look at it in terms of ethnic groups, which is what the word "nations/peoples" means in the Great Commissions recorded by Matthew and Luke: The 2024 Status of World Evangelization Infographic estimates that there are 17,300 different ethnic groupings in the world that have a unique set of language and culture. Currently, 41.9% of them have not been evangelized much less made disciples of.
And of the 7,397 languages in the world, according to Wycliffe Bible Translators ProgressBible site, there are still 2,500 languages where nobody has even begun to translate the Bible into their language. Of the languages where translation work has begun, only 742 languages, or 10% of the world’s languages have a complete Bible, although ¾ of the world’s population does speak one of those 742 languages.
Now, I’m not God, so I can’t tell you for sure when the Great Commission will be fulfilled in God’s eyes, but I have studied missiology, and these statistics certainly indicate that there is a lot of work ahead of us. There is plenty for us to do yet to fulfill the Great Commission!
Even if we’re convinced that we are commanded to participate in spreading God’s glory to the ends of the earth and that there are great gaps still out there, it can still feel pretty overwhelming. You might feel like a kid trying to drive a car - maybe you have some idea of what to do, but you don't feel really equipped to drive the work of world missions.
However, I believe that if you look back through what God has done in your life you just may be surprised. The disciples may not have realized it at the time when they watched Jesus interact with foreigners that Jesus was preparing them to spread the Gospel to the nations, but when the time came, they looked back and realized that Jesus had prepared them after all. As I have thought back about this myself, here are some ways that I believe God has prepared us to fulfill the Great Commission:
He has prepared you by giving you the Holy Spirit. John 16:13 promises that “when He, the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all the truth.” We haven’t been left alone to fulfill the Great Commission. Jesus promised to be with us always in the Great Commission of Matthew 28, and He is doing that through His Spirit. You have the Holy Spirit in the driver's seat with you!
How many of you speak English? Guess what, you are all experts at the most sought-after language in the world! That’s quite a resource. You could teach English in just about any country in the world! In fact, you don’t even have to leave the country to teach English to foreigners – I know of people locally who have held English classes for foreigners who live in our town, and I know others who tutor English students all over the world over videoconferencing. Hmm, do you think you could use this as a textbook? (Hold up a Bible.)
Finances. You may not feel all that wealthy, but you are some of the wealthiest people in the world. God has uniquely blessed you with a great measure of financial resources. Invest them in God’s kingdom rather than in building your own kingdom. Support missionaries and mission projects!
How many of you have a complete Bible? You’re better off than most Christians! I’ve often read about Chinese evangelists who have nothing but a couple pages of hand-copied Bible verses, and that’s enough for them travel and preach from that little bit of the Bible that they have copied down! The thing I’ve heard consistently from Christian leaders in Asia is requests for Bibles and for theological training. America is fabulously wealthy in terms of theological knowledge. How can we share this?
What about your children? They are the most valuable resource you can share with the world! You have a golden opportunity while they are in your home to prepare them to be great missionaries! Ask God to help you dedicate at least one of your children – or grandchildren – to be a missionary!
You also know how to talk to God. Prayer is a tremendous resource you have to fulfill the Great Commission. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught us to pray for God’s kingdom to come on this earth, and in Paul’s epistles, he give all kinds of examples how to pray. Use these templates to pray and watch God move!
There may be other ways God has prepared you. Maybe you have a special interest in a certain area of the world, and when that country comes up on the news, your ears prick up. Maybe God placed that special interest in your heart because He wants you or your children to go there.
FUTURE CERTAINTY AS SEEN IN REVELATION
So, God has prepared you in a unique way to advance His kingdom among the nations! And you know what? He will see to it that the Great Commission gets fulfilled. He wouldn’t have given it if He didn’t expect it to get done. He gives glimpses of the fulfillment of the Great Commission at the end of time to the apostle John:
Rev. 5:9 - “And they sing a new song, saying, 'You are worthy to take the book, and to open its seals, for You were slain, and You purchased us for God with Your blood, out of every tribe and language and people and nation...'” And two chapters later, Rev. 7:9 “After these things I looked, and behold: a great crowd which no one would be able to count, from all nations and tribes and peoples and languages, standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, having been decked-out in white robes with palm branches in their hands.” (NAW)
We can engage in this enterprise with full confidence that God will make it successful. We’ve already seen the end. We have the sure hope that there will be believers from every tribe and tongue and nation before the throne of God worshiping Him. God has prepared and commissioned us just as Jesus sent His disciples, so let us “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations!”