In Matthew chapter twenty-eight, Jesus appeared to the eleven on a mountainside in the Galilee area. There, He gave them a little different perspective on His Commission—discipleship.
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (verses 18-20)
In order to unpack some of the principles of discipleship suggested in this passage, allow me to take you through my own spiritual pilgrimage since this verse is essentially my own personal calling.
As a child I used to watch the Jungle Book Adventures on TV every Saturday morning. Hosting the program was a rotund, old fellow. Sitting in his favorite chair, he would reach for a volume of Rudyard Kipling’s tales about India—the mystical, mysterious land of elephants, monkeys, tigers, and jungles. How I longed to step through the TV screen and find myself seated on top of one of those pachyderms! In my fascination with this wondrous land, I remember reading every word about India and every related topic in the World Book Encyclopedia. As my childish days gave way to maturity, the elephants and monkeys in my mind were replaced with knowledge of Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, the caste system, the Atman, confusion, poverty, and despair.
As my understanding of what life is really about matured, I realized that what God had placed in my heart as a young child was not just wanderlust to see the world of Jungle Book, but a desire that matched the desire of His own heart—that all the world should know His Son Jesus. Any love for India on my part would have to be expressed in terms of my helping to bring the gospel of Jesus to the precious people of that part of the world. Then the Holy Spirit began to confirm my inner thoughts through prophetic words, sometimes from total strangers who had no way of knowing what was inside my heart and sometimes by Christian leaders whom I greatly respected and trusted, but all proclaiming the same thing: a global ministry. There were also dreams that widened my vision beyond Jungle Book as I saw myself ministering to people of all different colors, dressed in their native attire from all over the world. Yet any actual participation on my part seemed less likely than my crawling through the television tube to join the Jungle Book Adventures.
Yet, as I mentioned, the desire that I had was only a reflection of the desire in God’s own heart. Just as the moon doesn’t have to be full of fire to produce light because it simply reflects the light emitted from the raging fire of the sun, I soon learned that I didn’t have to generate the resources to fulfill the vision because all the resources were actually in the One with whom the vision originated. As I reflected His desire, He also provided the resources to make the vision possible.
Before long, I found myself traveling to country after country to share the good news of the gospel. But there was one thing that I noticed that was different about the ministry that God was leading me into. Instead of building dorms at orphanages or holding evangelistic rallies like almost every other missionary I would hear of was doing, I found myself teaching in churches, retreats, and conferences. In fact, it was somewhat of a running joke that every time I would get home from a mission, my pastor would ask me how many souls got saved, and I’d have to respond, “None.” Then I’d have to remind him that I was speaking at a pastors’ conference and that all the pastors were already believers.
One thing that I quickly recognized as I traveled through countries in Asia and Africa was that I had to adjust my teaching style in order to communicate fully with my audience. I soon found out that they didn’t relate to messages about redemption and justification as readily as they did to the simple illustration of how an ugly caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly. To them the meaning of baptism was not found in Romans chapter six or Colossians chapter two; rather, it was in the simple stories of Jesus and John the Baptist on the shores of the Jordan or Philip and the eunuch at the pool in Gaza. The meaning of communion was not in I Corinthians, but in the Upper Room stories of the gospels.
At this point, allow me to share a little anecdote to illustrate what I discovered in those pastors’ conferences. The guard at the border crossing was terribly perplexed by the little old man who pushed a wheelbarrow full of sawdust through the checkpoint each morning. Certain that the man was smuggling some contraband into the country, he searched the sawdust thoroughly each time the man came through. After weeks of futile searches, his curiosity and frustration overwhelmed him, and the guard finally promised not to arrest the old guy if he would only tell him what he was slipping across the border. The old man replied, “Wheelbarrows.” What I discovered was that the vehicle I used to convey my message was actually the message itself. Therefore, I determined to use lots of illustrations as vehicles to convey my thoughts to the people. For example, I began to illustrate my message on how to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit by tossing out candy to the audience. Because they had no problem receiving the free candy, it was easy for them to make the transition to understanding that they could also receive God’s gifts just as freely. On one occasion, when I returned to the same area where I had used this illustration on my visit several years before, I was greeted as “the candy man” because of the impact of the illustration. Another sermon illustration I use to talk about the importance of what enters into our inner man through our eyes and ears and what comes out of our inner man through our mouths involves my Mister Potato Head toy that I have renamed as “Minister Potato Head.” Wherever I use that illustration, I get repeated questions about my friend when I come back to the area—even years later. I discovered that illustrations don’t have to be elaborate to be effective. When preaching about spiritual keys, I learned to simply pull my key ring out of my pocket and point to each key as I make the individual points. I learned to stop on the way into the church and pull a couple large leaves off a plant when ministering about Adam and Eve. For a lasting impression on the congregation, I would simply call up a couple from the audience to try to hide modestly behind these leaves. I discovered that messages about the armor of God were infinitely more effective if I brought in some army gear to hold up when I was talking. This may seem like a very simple point, but it made a world of difference in my ministry because I was beginning to move toward an important biblical teaching method: the use of illustrations demonstrated in so many of the Old Testament prophets (I Kings 11:30-40; II Kings 13:15-19; Isaiah 20:1-6; Jeremiah 13:1-11, 19:1, 25:15-36, 27:1-28, 43:6-13, 51:62-64, Ezekiel 3:2-3, 4:8-12, 5:1-17, 6:1-14, 12:1-16, 12:17-25, 24:1-27, 37:15-23, Hosea 1:1-11, 3:1-5) and the use of parables that dominated Jesus’ ministry.
Because of the burning desire in my heart to help develop solid leadership for the churches in nations of the world where it was difficult to obtain a good Christian education, I began to work tirelessly recruiting students from third-world countries to attend the Bible college in America where I taught and also served as dean. Finding willing and qualified candidates wasn’t a problem. The difficulties came with locating housing, finding scholarship funds, and raising living expenses for the students. It was a challenge, but I took it on because I really believed in the cause. Again, just as the sun provides all the illumination the moon needs, the Lord provided for these needs as well. Soon, our school blossomed into an international campus, with foreign students outnumbering the Americans. Unfortunately, there was a serious downside to the investment I was making.
These young African and Asian ministers became accustomed to living in American houses, driving American cars, and eating American food. Some even married American wives. And they weren’t willing to give up these “luxuries” to go back home and minister in their own nations. It was then that I realized that there was something missing in the equation. Certainly, they were getting an excellent education and were being taught the “meat the Word” as they sat under the instruction of some of the generation’s greatest ministers. Yet, they were missing something. It was not content they lacked; rather, it was connection they were missing. Without a doubt, they were getting the best Bible curriculum available, taught by the most qualified instructors available, but somehow they were failing to connect with the truth within the truths they were being taught. They were missing the lesson within their lessons, and they were not gasping the instruction in their instructors. As I faced disappointment after disappointment, I realized that the only solution was to train these developing leaders in their own environments so as to avoid the American distractions and allurements that could so easily deter, detain, detour, and derail them.
It was then that I understood the significance of the first word in the Great Commission—go. I could no longer expect the students to come to me if I was to accomplish what God had on His heart and had placed into my heart. I now realized that the dreams, visions, and prophecies of ministering to the nations meant more than simply training a few students from each nation and hoping that they would go back to their homes and impact their countries with what they learned in Bible school. Those visions, dreams, and prophetic words had to be taken literally that I was to go personally and bring the gospel to them. With that revelation, I began to organize my life for transition. Knowing that I would have to leave my full-time position at the Bible college, I began to get my finances and family arrangements in line for the “move”—one that I assumed would be a logical transition to the Jungle Book mission field of Nepal.
As a Hindu kingdom in the Himalayas, Nepal had been a closed country where Christian ministry was forbidden and conversion to the Christian faith was a criminal act. I had been heavily focusing my prayers toward that nation for several years asking the Lord to turn the heart of the king as He had promised in Proverbs 21:1. Then suddenly in 1990, with one stroke of the pen, Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev granted religious freedom to the people. I immediately began going into Nepal to help train and equip the emerging Christian leadership. Being one of the first international ministers to come to the country after this new freedom, I was able to make grassroots connections and to “get in on the ground floor,” as the expression would go. One area of involvement that the Lord directed my wife and me into was the building of a Bible school to train the upcoming leadership. With this school in place, it seemed only natural that my next step in fulfilling the destiny to which God had called me would be to move to Nepal to oversee the school. With so many years’ experience in teaching in and directing a Bible school, it seemed like a natural next step both for me and for the college in Nepal.
However, God is not interested in natural next steps; He is always working in the supernatural rather than the natural, and He often makes quantum leaps rather than next steps. Every time I would pray about making my move, the Lord would direct me to read Matthew 28:19, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…” I would respond, “Yes, Lord I’m ready to go to Nepal and teach. You just show me when.” He would then respond, “You haven’t read Matthew 28:19.” I would argue back that I had read it and that I was ready to go to Nepal as soon as He would release me to go. Again, the Lord would challenge me that I hadn’t read the passage, and, again, I would argue. Finally, one day I saw it—the passage said “all nations,” not “Nepal.” At that point, I remembered the one common thread that ran through all the dreams, visions, and prophecies I had received: I had to go to the nations all around the globe! Finally, I was beginning to grasp the meaning of another element in the Great Commission—all nations.
This new comprehension of what God wanted to do in, through, and for me—and any and every willing member of His Body—took me through three levels of thinking: individuals, nations, all nations. First, I had to understand that the focus had to shift from individuals to nations. Of course, everything that God does, He does through individuals. If we read through the New Testament, we see that there was always a key person who was reached as the gospel spread into any new area. The woman at the well opened up the whole of Samaria to the good news. Lydia was the connection for the gospel in Macedonia. Aquila and Priscilla were the prime movers in Corinth. Publius was the catalyst for the message to be received on Malta. But notice how little attention is actually given to these individuals in comparison to the weight of the story dedicated to the city, region, or nation they impacted. On the other hand, these individuals are not just faceless statistics. They and the roles they played are significant enough that their names are recorded for posterity and they seem personable enough that we feel a true flesh-and-blood connection with them even millennia later. The scriptures in no way discount the ministry to individuals; however, it is evident that God’s ultimate goal and the focus of His attention are upon eventually impacting the nation as a whole. Think of the stories that you’ve known since Sunday School: a young boy named Joseph was sold as a slave, yet he saved the whole nation of Egypt; one man named Daniel went into a the den of lions, yet his testimony was published through all the provinces of Babylon; one young lady won a beauty contest, yet she turned the entire destiny of Persia; one queen was stirred by the report of Solomon’s wealth and wisdom, yet she brought back the message to the entire nation of Sheba—and the list goes on and on.
What’s even more intriguing is that the scriptures confirm repeatedly that God not only deals with nations as a whole; but His true desire is for all nations—not isolated individuals within a nation or pockets of individuals within that nation, or even for a whole nation itself. Here is the next paradigm shift: from individuals to a whole nation and then from a nation to all the nations of the world. God wants all nations, and He repeatedly confirms it in His Word from Genesis to the Apocalypse.
Although we know Abraham as the father of the Jews, it would be good for us to revisit his story and take a look at the encounter with God in which he actually received the covenant that set him apart from other humans as God’s special man.
And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 12:2-3)
The end result of God’s calling upon Abraham and his descendants was that all the families of the human race would eventually be blessed because of their special covenant relationship with God. The New Testament confirmed this truth when the Apostle Paul was inspired to pen Galatians 3:8 where he defined the families spoken of in Genesis as all the nations of the earth.
Interestingly enough, Israel is repeatedly seen in the scriptures as being of special note among all the nations of the earth—sometimes in a positive light, and sometimes in a very negative light. When Israel was obedient and blessed, all the nations were drawn to it because of its unusual prosperity; but when Israel sinned against God, He scattered its people among all the nations of the earth, not just as judgment through removing them from their Promised Land but also as a way of giving the nations of the earth total exposure to these unique people of God. (Amos 9:9) Even when Israel was in rebellion against God and He had withdrawn His hand of blessing from them, the people of Israel were still a focal point of attention among all the nations of the earth because of the unusual calamity of such a prominent nation having come to such ruin. (Deuteronomy 26:19, 28:1, 28:37, 29:24; I Kings 4:31; I Chronicles 14:17, 16:24; II Chronicles 7:20, 32:23; Malachi 3:12) The ultimate goal of this curious fascination with this one nation is that all the nations of the earth would come to recognize the God of the people as well as the people of God. (Psalms 67:2, 72:11, 72:17) Jesus would later say of the church that we are the light and salt to the world (Matthew 5:13-16), but at this time Israel was like a candle on candlestick when they were showing forth God’s blessings and like salt scattered among the nations when they were under judgment.
With the advent of the church, the mandate of proclaiming the universal message to all nations was entrusted to these new representatives. (Matthew 24:14, 28:19; Mark 13:10; Luke 24:47; Romans 16:26) However, in His grace, God made the mandate of the church’s expose’ to the nations contingent upon their willingness to go voluntarily to the nations as opposed to the scattering He did with the disobedient Jews. Other than the one example given in Acts 8:1 where it seems that the persecution in Jerusalem precipitated the migration of the Christians, the gospel was spread by those who willingly surrendered to the Great Commission’s mandate to go into all the world with the divine message. Even in the case of the Apostle Paul who was taken as a prisoner to Rome, he made the volitional decision to go to Jerusalem, knowing that the end result would be his arrest. (Acts 21:13) He also exercised his right as a Roman citizen to be taken to Rome for trial rather than to subject himself to extradition to Jerusalem. (Acts 25:11)
It is only logical that God would be motivated to capture the attention of entire nations at a time and to ultimately motivate all nations together. Even though He is the God of all nations (Psalms 82:8, 86:9, 113:4), God’s archenemy has a plot to corrupt, pollute, and, therefore, destroy all these nations (Habakkuk 2:5; Revelation 14:8, 18:3, 18:23). Even though this diabolical plot has left all nations in line for the judgmental wrath of God (Isaiah 34:2, 40:17; Jeremiah 30:11; Joel 3:2; Zechariah 14:2; 14:19; Matthew 25:32; Revelation 12:5), God has an ultimate plan to bring all nations to redemption and grace (Isaiah 2:2, 25:7, 66:18, 66:20; Jeremiah 27:7; Revelation 7:9, 15:4).
The scriptures declare that God deals sovereignly with all nations (Acts 14:16, Romans 1:5) and that He ultimately sees all nations as equal and the same (Acts 17:26). God foreshadowed His plan of redemption for all nations under the old covenant by declaring that the temple in Jerusalem was not just a house of worship for the Jewish people, but that it was a house of prayer for all nations (Isaiah 56:7, Mark 11:17). When speaking of the coming of Jesus, He was not simply seen as the messiah for the Jews but as the very desire of all the nations. (Haggai 2:7)
But let’s get back to the story for now. Dr. Lester Sumrall used to say that there are three stages of life. He said that the first thirty years of a man’s life are for learning, the middle thirty years are for using what you have learned, and the final thirty years are for sharing all that you’ve learned through education and experience. I remember meditating on his words on my sixtieth birthday, reevaluating my first two thirty-year segments and wondering what the final phase would hold. Certainly, the first thirty years had been filled with learning—school, university, graduate school, and seminary. Interestingly enough, I had taken my position as dean of World Harvest Bible College when I was thirty years old as I was moving into those years when I was to use all that I had learned. For those next thirty years, I taught and administered in the school and church and eventually made a transition to a new chapter in my life in Colorado Springs. In Colorado, I took a part-time position teaching in a Bible school while focusing on doing mission work and getting into print a long list of books I had been working on during my career years. But still the question loomed in my mind as to how the final phase would be different from those middle thirty years I had spent as a teacher—was that not the sharing stage? It was only at the end of the sixty-first year that I was able to look back and realize that I had actually published seventeen books and Peggy had published her first book since our sixtieth birthdays. In addition, Peggy and I had entered into a new dimension of ministry of leading teams of Bible college students on mission trips to share with them what we have learned from our years of mission work. I had also been given the privilege of helping develop a whole new discipleship curriculum to be used by Every Home for Christ in their ministry around the world. One “chance meeting” thrust me into the sharing stage of my life and the final phase of the mission of discipling all nations.
It all began with a “bad hair day” that made us late for church one Sunday morning. As Peggy and I slipped into the sanctuary a bit tardy, our regular seats four rows in front of the sound booth in section one were already taken; so we wound up finding a spot in the back of the auditorium. A little later, two more latecomers took the empty seats on the row in front of us. These stragglers were Dick Eastman, the President of Every Home for Christ, and his wife Dee. Later in the service we had a chance to meet them, and we eventually asked them to join us for lunch. They graciously accepted our invitation and met us at a nearby restaurant where we shared about our connection with Every Home for Christ in Nepal. When Dick asked about our ministry, we told him about our call to go to developing nations and train the Christian leaders in some of the truths we had spent the last twenty-five years teaching in the Bible schools here in America. Immediately, he had his electronic organizer out of his pocket and was typing in our phone number and email address. Within a couple days, one of his top staff members contacted me and asked to set up a meeting. That meeting led to another and eventually to the request that I assist Every Home for Christ in a project that they were just initiating—a program for training Christian leaders in developing nations! We were late for church and not in our right seats, but we were in the right place at the right time to meet the right man just when he needed our help! The outcome of this divine appointment was a worldwide platform for helping to develop and launch a discipleship curriculum based on all the Great Commission principles I had begun to understand as I had journeyed beyond Jungle Book. I became part of an international team who was developing a discipleship method that we decided to name Be Fruitful and Multiply because we genuinely believe that the focus on the studying the Bible itself will produce fruit in the lives of the believers and the discovery process where the individual is allowed to find truths for himself rather than to have the principles handed to him by others will produce such excitement that the new convert can’t help but share his revelations with others.