WorshipCentral

Jesus’ great commission to ‘go’ is first and foremost a call to passionate worship...

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I love a great story and all great stories have great endings. Recently I’ve been fascinated by how the gospel writers choose to end their stories.

Like rival news channels, they report one story from four different camera angles: John closes with the scene where Peter is restored and commissioned to build the church. Matthew and Mark close by recording Jesus’ command to go: go make disciples, go preach the good news. Two thousand years later this ‘Great Commission’ still echoes in our ears like the crack of a starter’s pistol.

But Luke, interestingly, chooses his closing scene like this:

“When he had led them out into the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.” (Luke 24:50-52)

Luke bookends his story with worship. He starts with a great Jewish temple worship scene: Zechariah the priest is prostrate in the temple, while outside the crowd worship (Luke 1:9-10). He ends with the disciples returning to that same temple, to worship.

Luke’s point is this: the Great Commission is first foremost a call to live out what Jesus called the Great Commandment. Jesus said:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30)

Jesus commissions us first and foremost to be a people who are passionately worshipping him, a people whose first love is to be lost in wonder, love and praise. Everything else flows from this one overriding calling. John Stott writes:

“The highest of missionary motives is neither obedience to the Great Commission (important as it is), not love for sinners who are alienated and perishing (strong as that incentive is, especially when we contemplate the wrath of God…), but rather zeal – burning and passionate zeal – for the glory of Jesus Christ.”

The Great Commandment first, the Great Commission second. We also need to avoid two Great Confusions: firstly, to ignore the great commission entirely.

Had those early disciples stayed in the temple forever, you and i would never have heard about Jesus. But, as they worshipped and waited in Jerusalem, something extra-ordinary happened. So extraordinary that Luke ended up writing a sequel and the rest is church history. The more we worship, the more we encounter Jesus. The more we encounter Jesus, the more we can’t stay silent about the one we love.

Then secondly, we need to avoid the confusion of replacing the Great Commandment with the Great Commission and therefore getting the order all wrong. John Piper writes:

“Worship is the fuel and goal of missions. Worship is the goal of missions because in missions we aim to bring the nations into white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory. It is the fuel of missions because we can’t commend what we don’t cherish… Missions begins and ends in worship.”

Jonathan Meades, the social commentator, wrote recently criticizing the church’s “persistent tendency in the latter 20th century towards self-secularisation, a tendency wrought partly by intimations of schism but more by public admissions of ecclesiastical doubt, theological ambiguity and doctrinal wavering.”

To the rest of the world, the church is busy bickering, wavering and reducing their view of God. Our culture is longing for is a fresh vision of the glory and grandeur of God. The most powerful witness to this is a passionate church who are mindful of the greatest commandment, blazing bright their passion for all the world to see.

So, if we want to learn to be better evangelists, we had better learn to spend more time worshipping.