You may be seated. It's a great privilege to be with you this morning. It's always a good thing to come back to Garden Grove. Do you know what I was doing 50 years ago? I was waiting for Dean to ask the people in the house across the parking lot to move out so I could move my family in. So we moved into the house, and I was taking the position here of the associate pastor, working with Reverend Charles Gerringer, and had four wonderful years here with First Baptist of Garden Grove. I learned so much. I learned how to handle a strawberry festival learned how to handle just great fellowship with a whole bunch of people. And as we think back, there are so many great memories to put together that I will not bore you with this morning. I will tell you that in Mexico, there are places where things are going wonderfully. We had the 40th anniversary this year of our Bible Institute in Mexicali that I helped to start, and they're in their 41st year. They have another 50 students, and God is blessing the church there in Mexicali. And our groups down in Ensenada, California, or Ensenada, Baja, California, they had over 3,000 people from churches all over the US and Canada come and helped them build 180 houses for poor people who were moving up into the area, and a real blessing. So many of them. who were not Christians before they got the house, after the testimonies of the people who were coming and building and sharing their faith, many of them have become Christians because of the love of Christ being shown to them down there. What a blessing it's been to watch God use so many things. I'm not sure what's going on with my throat. Thank you for the water. I still get to go down to Mexicali at least once a month and deliver support and gifts and just be encouraged and encouraging the pastors that I'm working with down there with them. And it's such a blessing to know that God is doing great things. not just in Mexico, but really all over the world. And we can see how he is working in so many different ways in our lives. And I had a little struggle deciding which direction I was gonna go this morning. I first thought, because my wife is heavy into genealogy, I thought, why don't we do the genealogy in Matthew? That would have been fun. But then Pastor Wade, a couple of weeks ago, talked about churches and what's going on with churches and how disappointing it is to have people all over the country who are called Christians who may not really understand what it is because they're not really being taught. And so I'm going a little bit different direction this morning. I want to talk about the absolute authority of Jesus Christ. And the way we find that is by going to a thing called the Great Commission. And my thought, while I was dealing with this on my own mind and spirit, I was looking at all these big congregations all over the country and wondering how many of those people could find the Great Commission if you ask them to look for it in the Bible? How many of them could quote even parts of the Great Commission? There's a lot of misunderstanding about what the Lord has told us to do. And I love the Great Commission in the book of Matthew. If you wanna turn there, you can find it in Matthew chapter 28. and discover that the Lord had some very specific things that he wanted his people to do. And as we're looking at this whole thing of the advent, Jesus coming to the earth as a baby with a real specific purpose in mind. I've just written about the fact that our God is a missionary God. And he's always cared about mission things. And that God sent his son to us to provide life for us. He sent his son to us, as we just heard, to provide the salvation that we all needed, the forgiveness for our sins, and how grateful we are for that. How grateful we are for what the Lord has done. But the question is, Those of us who have found life in Christ, do we really have any clue about what he wants us to do? I'm gonna go ahead and read it here, and you can read along with me. Matthew chapter 28, starting at verse 16. The 11 disciples proceeded to Galilee. Remember, there's 11 here, not 12. The one who betrayed Jesus is no longer around, no longer alive. So the 11 go to Galilee to the mountain which Jesus had designated. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some were doubtful. Jesus came up and spoke to them saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Did you know that verse 18 is a fulfillment of a prophecy? And you don't need to turn there, but if you'd like to turn to the book of Daniel, I'm just gonna read two verses there. In the book of Daniel chapter 7, Daniel is seeing a vision and he's amazed by what he sees. Verse 13, in chapter 7 of Daniel, I kept looking in the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven one like a son of man was coming. And he came up to the ancient of days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that all the peoples, nations, and men of every language might serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which will not pass away." I've never connected that before with Matthew 28. But in Matthew 28 verse 18, he says, all authority has been given to me. All authority has been given to Jesus Christ. The one who was the baby in the manger is now the authority one, the authoritarian one who has the right to tell us what we ought to do. He's telling his disciples, look, now it's completed. Now that death is defeated and I have come to give you an assignment, I've come to give you a commission. He has the right to do this because he has all authority. The word therefore in verse 19, is there for a reason. It's there because he said, look, I'm now your boss. I'm now your leader. And I have the right to tell you what to do now. And I'm giving you an assignment. It says go therefore. Now, I'd like to give you a little Greek lesson, okay? It'd be for free. I wouldn't charge any extra to get a little Greek, okay? But the word go is not an imperative. The word go is a participle. Do you know what that is? If you were to translate it literally, you would say going. Therefore, going, Make disciples of all the nations. In your going, where you're going, while you're going, wherever I send you is what's in the idea of go. Now, it does have a command sense to it because it's connected with the command to make disciples. And he didn't say just make disciples of your children. Make disciples of your neighbors, make disciples of all the nations. And it's helpful there to know that the word nations there could be translated ethnic groups. Make disciples of all the ethnic groups. Now what's a disciple? A disciple I'm sorry, another Greek one, okay. The word disciple comes from the word math, mathete, okay. A disciple is a learner. And a learner is a person who has been fed information, that information is helping him to understand what reality is. And so Jesus is saying, I want you to help people understand. Anybody with a King James Bible? It says, teach all nations. Go therefore and teach all nations is because that's what the idea of a learner is, somebody who's being taught. And we're teaching people to be disciples. One of my problems today is that we've got churches filled with people who have no idea what it is to be a disciple. I'm afraid, I'm starting to write a paper about all this. The Lord's been dealing with this for a couple of months because I've seen the need for people to be taught more about what it is to follow the Great Commission. I'm starting to write it and I think I'm gonna call it Out of My Mind 2.0. Would that be okay? The problem, my question is, what kind of disciples are we making? Are we really making disciples who are real followers of Jesus? Or are we making theater goers? Are we causing people to think that really what church is all about is you go and maybe participate and get entertained, right? Let's make sure that the music and the program is all really exciting and fun and make it so that people just love to be there. And I love going there because I come away feeling so good. What kind of disciples are we making? When you do a full study of the term disciple all the way through the Gospels, you're going to find out that a disciple of Jesus Christ is one who understands what Jesus says, and they're willing and committed to do what he says, to obey what he says. And I'm afraid that so many people who are attending churches today don't have a clue about what Jesus has taught. They know that they have a lot of good things going on. In fact, I know there are a lot of good TV evangelists. But I'm afraid that they're getting less than the full message. They're not really helping people understand the whole concept of what it is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. And I don't have time this morning to give you all of the possible things that would help you to understand that. Let's continue on with the passage here. Go therefore make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now baptism here is more than, than just the water baptism. It's an important thing to understand. And I love being a Baptist because I like the picture of immersion baptism because you are being raised to new life. And that's the whole thing that's going on with your life when you're becoming a follower of Jesus, a real disciple. You're raised to a new life and a life that makes a difference in the world and following him. But it's not just that. You'll find it in 1 Corinthians 12 that we've been baptized into one body. So really baptizing people is getting them into the body of Christ so that they know they have a place to learn and to serve and to become more and more like Christ in the presence of other people. And then in verse 20, he says, I don't want to skip over the singular name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is one of those proofs that tell us that there's a great triune God that we serve. And it's the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit that we're helping people to understand and get involved in serving the great God of the universe. Verse 20, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you. I have never seen a good study on all the things that Jesus commanded. And I could probably get you to participate with me. And you could remember that Jesus commanded, there are a lot of different places where he commanded. I mean, he commanded the demons to go into the pigs. That's really not the thing that we're learning here. But the point is that his commandments are critical. And when we learn who Jesus is and learn what he says, then we become a true follower of Christ. Now, remember he said there are two great commandments, love God and love your neighbor. Those are the two great commandments. And I said that to a Sunday school class and a little girl said, yeah, I love your enemies. Okay, your enemies are probably your neighbors anyway. So love God, love your neighbor. And then he says, I'm giving you a new commandment. which is love one another. And that's what the church is all about, is learning to love one another, learning to do what we can do to help one another in growing in Christ and whatever our other needs are in our life. There's one other command that I'm afraid that we have not done a good job of getting it across. Now, I need to let you recognize that I've been in missions most of my life. After four years here at First Baptist Church, the Lord said, I want you to direct a program in Mexico. And so it's interesting when I think about the work that God gave me to do in Mexico. I did not go to Mexico as an evangelist. I went as an administrator and a teacher. I helped develop a Bible Institute, but I also helped organize groups. Over 300,000 went into Mexico because of our organization administration. And all those people were out there helping to plant churches and lead people to Christ and learn what it is to serve on a foreign field. What an exciting thing that was to see all that develop. So here we are learning to be missionaries. I don't know if you've ever heard of Greg Livingston. Greg Livingston was in a Bible study in Wheaton College. And a man named George Verwer says, we're having a prayer meeting tonight for the world. Come and pray with us. And so Greg goes into the prayer meeting and he says, what are we doing here? Well, we're praying for nations around the world. Well, who do you want to pray for? He says, I don't know. And Greg says, no, George says to Greg, you got Libya. And so this college student is praying for Libya. He knew nothing about Libya, and yet he was given the assignment, okay, I want you to pray for that country. And what happened there was God used that to start a program called Frontiers International. And now Greg has 2,000 missionaries working with Muslim groups all over the world. And Greg says, you know, after all that, all that stuff, I can count on one hand the number of people I've led to Christ personally. And I'm thinking, you know, that's kind of my testimony. I haven't led a lot of individuals to Christ. But boy, I've seen a lot of people receive Christ because of the administrative things that God gave me to do, and the challenge I was able to give to all those young people through the years across the border. And it's exciting to be involved in that. But here we are, wanting to fulfill the Great Commission, and yet we all have a place. We all have a position in it. This command, this commission was not given just to 11 disciples. It was given to all those who would become disciples through their ministry. And so we all have this as our commission, our role. We are to follow the great commission and we're to do the things that he said to do. And it says here, teach them to observe all the things that I've commanded you to do. So we commanded you to love God, love your neighbor, love one another. But there's one other that I really want to focus on for the rest of my time here, and that's in chapter nine of Matthew. Chapter nine of Matthew. Here we see the great compassion of the Lord Jesus Christ for the people who were distressed and downcast like sheep without a shepherd. Matthew chapter nine, the last two verses, 37, 38. Then he said to his disciples, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray the Lord of the harvest. I like what they've done with the new American standard here because it says beseech. And me gusta mucho el espanol. In Spanish it says, rogar. It's almost beg, beseech, plead with God. Plead with God that he would send out laborers into his harvest. Okay, you can participate on this one. How often should we love God? Every day. How often should we love our neighbor? Every day. How often should we love one another? Every Sunday. No, every day. How often should we pray for laborers for the harvest? Whenever there's a mission speaker. Yeah. Whenever there's a missions conference. I don't know. I think it should be every day. Could it be every day? Is that a little bit bold to think, yeah, maybe we should? Let's back up a little bit. Loving God is loving, is being jealous for his glory. When people are not giving glory to God, we care about that because we care about his glory and we want him to be glorified. When we love him, we love seeing him glorified. And when he's not glorified, we care about that. Someone has said, I think it was John Piper, missions exist because worship doesn't. where there are people who are not worshiping God, they need to be reached with the gospel. They need to be reached with the glory of God so they see how amazing he is, how he is worthy of all of our worship. He's worthy of the worship of every human being on the planet. That's one of the reasons why he says, go make disciples of all the nations All the people groups are going to be represented in the hereafter, but we need to be those who are helping to reach out to them. Loving your neighbor and your church is praying for them. Praying for them, maybe that God would send laborers to the harvest. and in the church praying for each other often. And I don't know, sometimes I think that we have difficulty praying. You ever thought of why it's hard to pray? I've come up with a three-letter organization that is against you as a Christian. You know, we've got all the big three-letter organizations in the governments, but there's this three-letter organization that's against us. And I call it the world, the flesh, and the devil. The world, the flesh, and the devil do not want us to pray. And therefore, even our old nature doesn't want us to pray. Somebody wrote, you know what happened when Jesus was born and everybody's excited and these three, I'm gonna say three wise men. How many wise men were there? The wise men come to Herod and they said, Herod, somebody here has been born King of the Jews. And he says, go find him so I can worship him too. And you know what Herod was gonna do. After the angel told Joseph to take Jesus and flee, Herod sent people to kill all the little kids around Bethlehem because Herod didn't want another king. How about this statement? There's a little Herod inside each one of our hearts that doesn't want Jesus to be king. And we have to fight this old sin nature that's in each one of us in order to pray. We have to fight the world because the world doesn't want anything to do with spiritual things. And Satan will do anything he can to distract you from praying. He loves distracting us. putting a little toy thing in front of us so that we have to think about that thing instead of the thing that we're trying to do, which is obey the command of the Lord Jesus Christ to pray for laborers for the harvest, to pray for one another and to give God the glory. The world, the flesh, and the devil are all against us. There are so many distractions. Realize that prayer is part of the battle, right? And we're in a battle every day for that kind of the thing that we want to do to glorify Christ. And the battle is, yeah, follow through, do it, pray, pray for all the things that he's laid on your heart. And don't forget to pray for laborers for the harvest because there's a need for laborers for the harvest. So many distractions. Jesus said, go into your prayer closet, go into the private place and spend the time in prayer. Do what you can to find a way to shut out the distractions. Some people find that shutting out the distractions is easier if they've got a special room where they can go, or a special chair at a place in the house, or even who is John Wesley's mother, 12 kids. And she would get her place in her big chair and she would take her apron and pull it up and put it over her head to tell everybody, don't bother me, I'm praying. It's a private thing. And there are different ways of doing that. And God will direct you to do the thing you need to do in order to spend the time doing what he wants you to do. Ask the Holy Spirit to motivate you. And I know that not all of us are prayer warriors. I know that not all of us can do like Jesus spent all night in prayer. I've never, ever done that. I can't imagine doing that. Somebody said, I can't do that because when I start praying, I just fall asleep. And I said, isn't it a neat thing to have a little kid fall asleep in your arms? Maybe God doesn't care if you fall asleep in his arms. It's a wonderful thing to pray and to recognize that what you're doing is important. We have a lot of different reasons why we wouldn't pray for laborers for the harvest. One of them is I don't really know any needs for the harvest. I know, where should I pray for? Should I just pray for all the missionaries around the world? Should I just pray for all the fields? Should I get a globe and point to countries like Libya? God will direct each one of us into the kind of prayer that he wants us to be doing, and he'll give us encouragement in doing that. If we'll resist the devil, he'll flee. If we resist the world, we can shut it out. And if we fight against the old sin nature, we can defeat it because we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us and helping us to understand. Ask the Holy Spirit to motivate you how to pray. So many people wonder, I don't really have a list. I don't have a prayer list. And maybe you should. Just write out a list. Or take your bulletin home and use your church bulletin as a guide to pray for things that are there. How about listening to the news? If you're hearing or watching the news and you see, oh man, 15 more Palestinians were killed, what should I pray for? God, send them workers. Send them people to show them the love of Christ. I've just heard recently that there are messianic fellowships all over Israel now that are growing because people don't like war and they want to do something different. And they're finding that Jesus brings them peace and they want that peace. And so we can be praying for them. Here's a good one. Tell me if this is right. Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also. That sound right? It's wrong. It says, Jesus says, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. And therefore, if you're investing in something, you care about it. The only people who ever care about looking at a stock page in the newspaper or what's happening with the Dow is people who have money there. Otherwise, they don't care. If you invest in a mission work, then you care about what's going on there. And your heart is tied to the cash that you've sent to that project, whatever it is. And there's so many different projects to invest in. You care about the church because you invest in it, right? You care about the church because this is where you are blessed. But we care about those mission stations that we're invested in. One of the favorite things that I have is I get an email every day from a place called the Joshua Project. And the Joshua Project has a different unreached people group every day that you can pray for. And if you want to do that, you can go to that website. You can go to Open Doors or Voice of the Martyrs. There are different ways of praying for people on a regular basis. But then consider your own street address. There are people on your street that you could get to know and pray that God would send them a laborer. I heard this a long time ago. You got to watch out when you start praying this prayer. When you're praying, when you're beseeching, begging God to send laborers to the harvest, he tends to work on your own heart. He tends to say, well, what about you? Would you be willing to go? Would you be willing to go to the other side of the world? Would you be willing to go across the street? Would you be willing to be his ambassador? What an exciting title that we all have. We are ambassadors for Christ. And I'm grateful that I have the opportunity now to say, God, I would like to see a difference made on the other side of the world. Please send laborers. We've had a number go out from our little organization. We had a couple that met, one from Redding, California, one from LA, they met. We ended up going to Bible school and they ended up in Kashmir, India. And God used them there to start a ministry among nomads. What an exciting thing to have going on. What a neat thing to see that God is using people and blessing people by the fact that they want to obey. They want to do the thing that God wants them to do. And what an exciting thing it is to have a role in that. Your prayers can make a difference on the other side of the world. I'll close with this. A number of years ago, there was a song that said, what if you go to heaven? And somebody comes up to you and says, I want to thank you for giving to the Lord. Anybody remember that song? Thank you for giving the Lord. I'm a life that was changed. Well, I want to change it. And I want to see if there are going to be people from other tongues, tribes, and nations come up and say, I want to thank you for praying to the Lord. Because you prayed, he sent. from my new friend to me. And because you prayed, I've been set free. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for the wonderful things that you do in our lives. Thank you for blessing us. Thank you for giving us a commission that each one of us can take, and we can be your servants. We can be your prayer warriors, whatever you want us to be. Father, guide us, lead us, put in our hearts the thing you want us to do. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.