Go ye into all the world

The Great Commission is foundational to biblical Christianity, yet the church's method in training up believers to fulfill it is often lackluster at best, and unbiblical at worst. If we are to be a local church that majors on what the bible calls important, we must take careful and calculated steps to teach and equip our people to see this glorious assignment realized among us. To that end, we come to our fifth commitment.

We are committed to equipping our people to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16), going forth into the world and fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20, Ephesians 4:12).

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Equipping or informing?

A common misunderstanding in the local church context is the assumption that the mere transfer of information regarding a certain subject is equivalent to properly training someone to do something with said information. To make it practical, it would be like giving someone a recipe without the instructions at the bottom. If you just give someone a picture of the finished product and a list of ingredients, you fall short of equipping the person to actually create the dish. We do the same thing with spiritual things, not the least of which being the Great Commission. In sermon after sermon and bible study after bible study, we hammer the need to be "Great Commission people," but we never move to the practical tools needed to see it actualized in daily life.

Jesus gave us these divine marching orders with the expectation that we would walk them out, not merely articulate their validity and necessity. We want to be obedient Christians, not just articulate Christians, so we need to be equipped, not merely informed.

The nature of salt and light

In Matthew 5, during Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount, he refers to his disciples as salt and light (Matt. 5:13-14). A proper biblical of the nature of the these two figures of speech does much in the way of showing us how we can move from knowledge to action.

Salt was traditionally seen as a preserving agent. It would be applied to various foods in order to keep them fresh in the heat of the day before modern refrigeration was invented. Jesus chose this metaphor specifically to describe the effect that Christians are to have on the world around them. With this preserving in mind, it illustrates how we are to bring a preservative action to all of our interactions with people in the world. We are the preserving agent of God's will in the physical world, and we bring that to bear by the way we communicate and behave. Everything we do is within the context of relationship, so we want to give our people the tools to bring the gospel to bear in the way they engage others in relationship.

Light, on the other hand, is more of an external element. If salt preserves relationally, light convicts publicly. When a person receives the Holy Spirit, they are given a source of light that is meant to emit from them no matter the circumstance. This isn't a light that is made to shine by means of personal effort, but should rather be viewed as something coming off of them just by the way they live. We all know people like this, the ones who live in such an otherworldly way that their presence seems to give off a glow that begs the question, "What is it that's different about them?" Our Lord expects this kind of radiant lifestyle to mark his disciples. While we don't create the light, we do practice disciplines of godliness and the rejection of worldliness that can set us up to shine without the dampening effect of a lampshade.

Taking these two metaphors in hand, we as a church can endeavor to take the Word of God and rightly divide it, giving practical ways to have godly interactions and lives that promote a Great Commission-shaped lifestyle.

Going forth in faith

The natural overflow of a life lived in pursuit of being salt and light will be what the bible calls "going forth." When we are properly equipped to do something with Jesus' commands, we will get out of bed every morning with a missional mindset and heart posture. That will begin to transform not only our daily lives, but also the lives of the people around us. Our everyday interactions with both friends and strangers will begin to leave people wanting to know the God who has so changed us that we would be willing to give of our time and attention for the sake of another, and our lifestyle of pursuing practical godliness will be a testimony to a lost and dying culture of the hollow end of worldliness and the unending and eternal joy of living for another world. This is how we fulfill the Great Commission, and it begins by bringing God's Word into the head and heart, and out of the hands, of our people.

This process, however, is not an overnight thing. You can't microwave the kingdoms of this world becoming the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. It takes having real relationships and doing the next right thing, over and over again, all the while believing, not doubting, that the gospel really is doing something through it all. This is who we are called to be, and by God's grace, it's who we will become.

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This series of articles is from our church's 8 Commitments. These are guiding declarations regarding faith and practice that shape how we do church, both now and in the future.