First Baptist Arlington Sermons

If you’ve ever read a book, watched a movie, or followed a TV series from start to finish, then you know that endings matter. A bad ending can ruin an otherwise great story.

I’m going to spoil some endings for you now, just to prove my point.

The town at the end of Little House on the Prairie blows up – an ending that elicited strong and mixed reactions.

The show Alf ended with Alf being caught by the Alien Task Force, leaving viewers with an indefinite cliffhanger.

I’ll confess, I never watched Alf or Little House on the Prairie, but they’re frequently rated as some of the worst television endings of all time – both of these shows are a bit before my time.

And after nine long years of Ted Mosby telling his kids how he met their mother, the show ended unsatisfyingly with the Mother dying and Ted ending up with Robin.

We’re not always good at pulling the end of a story together. The finale that should have tied up every loose end or reminded us of all the significant themes falls flat.

Sometimes though, we read or watch a spectacular ending that strikes all the right notes. I think about how The Office ended so well, or the ending of The Lord of The Rings. Good endings stick with us.

Thankfully, it turns out that the divinely inspired writers of the Bible were also literary geniuses.

Matthew’s ending to his Gospel sticks the landing in every possible way. Today, we’re in Matthew 28:16-20, which I’ll read for you now, and as is the tradition in our church, we stand together when we read from the Gospels.

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Lots of important things happen on mountains in Matthew’s Gospel. I think you should pay attention to the whole book of Matthew, but if you’re ever reading it and you come to a scene where Jesus goes up on a mountain, that’s a pretty good signal to pay close attention to what’s coming next.

I find it interesting that even though they all worshipped him, some doubted. The word for ‘doubted’ here could also be translated as hesitated. N.T. Wright points out that what they doubt, or what’s causing them to hesitate isn’t really clear. Do they doubt if it’s really Jesus, or, as good Jewish monotheists, are they unsure if they should worship anyone other than YHWH? Matthew doesn’t explain, and while it’s an interesting discussion, it’s not where I think our time together needs to go this morning.

While we won’t go back and review all of Matthew’s Gospel, I want to draw out some of Matthew’s themes, because they’re important for how we read, and more importantly, live these verses.

Matthew wants us (his readers) to understand three VERY important things about Jesus.

Jesus is the promised Anointed King from the Line of David (anointed = Messiah)

Jesus is the new Moses, an even better teacher and prophet than Moses was

Jesus is God with Us (Emmanuel!)

Whether you’re familiar with Matthew or not, I’ll pull some examples just so these are clear.

Jesus is the promised and anointed King. Even in Matthew’s recounting of Jesus’ birth, Matthew shows us how Jesus fulfills these kingly promises of the prophets, like in Micah 5, when Micah prophesies to Bethlehem, small among Judah, that out of it will come the one who will be the ruler over all of Israel.

Jesus is the New Moses. Think about what Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5-8 – Jesus takes the Law that God spoke to Moses, and throughout those chapters says, “You have heard it said, but I say to you…”

And Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. In Isaiah 7, Isaiah prophesies that a virgin will give birth and name the child Immanuel, literally, God with us and Matthew quotes this in the story of Jesus’ birth.

Matthew wants us to understand Jesus’ authority as king, that the good life comes from following and sharing Jesus’ teachings, and that Jesus is God’s very presence with us.

This is a call, an invitation to a way of life.

We hear Jesus say, “All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me.”

Jesus is King – there’s not one thing He does not have authority over. Matthew has been showing us this since the minute Jesus was born.

Because Jesus is King, the only response to his authority for those who have recognized His rule, or his followers, both then and now is to ‘go.’ And this is not a simple, imperative ‘go.’ It’s an ongoing, infinitive verb – it is action with no end. This is going.

It’s passive. That means that the action of this verb is not caused by the subject of the sentence. It implies that the action comes from another source. The source of this action is Jesus. Jesus causes us to be going.

This verse could’ve just as easily been translated as “As I’ve already caused you to be going.”

Jesus is the King and He is sending us into the world to make disciples, to baptize them, and to teach them to obey everything Jesus taught us to do, and from beginning to end with the promise that we haven’t been left alone in this task, but that Jesus’ presence goes with us always and forever, sending you out, not to watch others do the work, but to participate from the power of God’s presence working in your life.

For the last couple of hundred years, we’ve applied these verses specifically to people who feel called to cross cultural or geopolitical boundaries to share the Gospel. I’ve heard a lot of sermons (not here) that have made it seem like the only way to live out what Jesus is saying to his people is to drop everything and move somewhere else around the world.

And that DOES happen. God does call some of us to live that life, and I’m thankful for the legacy of faithfulness that missionaries and cross-cultural workers have left us.

But that’s not the only option. This passage is not just for those of us that God leads to move overseas for the sake of the Good News. You don’t have to have a passport to be obedient to what God is calling you to do here.

This passage is for everyone who says, “Jesus is Lord.” It’s for everyone who has become a disciple of Jesus and is following the Jesus way.

This passage is about our response to the Kingship of Jesus in our lives as the people of God. God is up to nothing less than the reconciliation and redemption of the entire cosmos, and you’re invited, not as a spectator, but as a fully empowered participant.

This is an incredible invitation.

So what is your role? What do you do? How do you do it?

Empowering Presence

The key to following through on what Jesus is inviting us to do is a life empowered by His presence.

In our daily Bible readings this week, we’re in Acts 1.

In Acts 1:8, Jesus says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

The power that Jesus promises to us in Acts 1:8 is the very presence of God in our lives, sending us out as Jesus’ witnesses around the street and around the world.

Jesus’ invitation to us at the end of Matthew 28 comes with the promise of the powerful presence of God coming upon our lives. I love the language that the Gospel writer Luke uses at the end of his Gospel to describe this – Luke writes that Jesus promises his followers that they will be ‘clothed with power from on high.’

In his book on the Holy Spirit, The Familiar Stranger, pastor Tyler Staton reminds us that Jesus commissions and sends his “followers out with the very presence and power that they had seen in him, not as a comforting theory or a poetic metaphor but in actual practice. Just as Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, acted as a living temple, so now he commissions his disciples to be filled with the Spirit and act in this world as living temples – indwelled by the presence of God. The rest of the Bible is essentially a bunch of ordinary people ‘tabernacling.’ Ordinary people filled with the Holy Spirit and carrying the ministry of Jesus forward.”

The Great Commission isn’t a text for spiritual superheroes. It’s for ordinary people who have recognized that Jesus is King and have decided to live in his Kingdom. This passage is for ordinary people to live as fully empowered participants in God’s reign.

That’s a great theological idea – but what do we do with it?

We ask God, “Show me today how to live in the power of your Holy Spirit.”

Every morning as you put on your physical clothes, pray the words Jesus said in Luke 24:49 – “Jesus, clothe me with your power from on high.”

Then pay attention for God’s presence at work in you and in the world.

Making

As you keep living into the promise of Jesus’ empowering presence through the Holy Spirit, make disciples.

As I was thinking through this sermon, I stumbled across an article in Christianity Today called, “The Gospel Comes for a Neo-Nazi.” Provacative title.

The author, Caleb Campbell tells the story of falling in with a group of skinheads as a teenager in the 90s and the slow process of indoctrination into ideology that left him warped and disillusioned. Finally he broke with his group of neo-Nazis, was alone, angry, and bitter.

Caleb writes:

I had a good job and spent much of my time outside of work playing the drums, which I’d picked up in high school. While I still had a sense that God existed, I was resistant to religion in general and Christianity in particular. I didn’t want anything to do with what I perceived to be a hypocritical, self-righteous movement.

At the same time, I knew I couldn’t keep going about my life in isolation. Through that tiny crack in my armor, God began to pursue me—through a phone call from some place called Desert Springs Bible Church.

The lady on the phone had seen my number in the musician section of the local classifieds. She asked if I could fill in as a drummer for the worship team the upcoming Sunday. I thought, Why not? I guess I should do something good.

I expected it to feel unbearably awkward to step back inside a church after all those years, but I was surprised at how the worship team welcomed me without judgment or pretense and how natural it felt to be there. One Sunday became two, then three, and soon I was a part of the regular rotation.

After a time, one of the guys, Seth, invited me over for dinner at his house. I accepted, half expecting him to back out. But when I showed up, he and his wife, Jayme, served me a meal and even had a cold beer ready. That was not what I was expecting. We spent the evening talking and laughing.

They invited me back the next week and the week after that, until these dinners became a weekly ritual. There was no agenda, no pressure—just warm hospitality.

One evening, Seth said, “How about after dinner we talk about what makes you angry about Christianity?”

Oh, I was all in on this. I had a lot of rage and was ready to share it.

He patiently listened as I vented all my frustrations—the hypocrisy of Christians, the failures of pastors, and the shallow faith I’d seen in others. To my surprise, he wasn’t defensive. He nodded and said, “I share some of your concerns. I think Jesus does too.”

Sometimes he’d pull out his Bible and ask me to read a section of the Gospels, asking, “What do you think Jesus would say about this?”

I didn’t know it at the time, but he was discipling me—connecting me to the living Jesus. Gradually, I found that my heart had softened to the message of the gospel.

My anger and resentment lingered, but they began to fade in the light of something new dawning in my life. I found myself liking this Jesus, and I wanted to know more. And the more I knew him, the more I wanted to follow him and be a part of what he was doing in the world.

The story continues with Caleb eventually joining the church’s staff, and then becoming its senior pastor. He talks about how God has changed and transformed his heart, leading Caleb to wrestle the bigotry, racism, and hatred of his neo-Nazi ideology out of his heart and be transformed along the Jesus way. Caleb concludes his article with this:

This transformation—slow but real—began unexpectedly at a table. Seth and Jayme embraced me and modeled Jesus’ love week after week. They honored me by treating me as a friend and showing me how safe it could be to reconsider long-held beliefs and explore who Jesus really was. At their table, I put down my armor and began to take up my cross.

This worship team member Seth and his wife Jayme made a disciple. They lived intentionally and on purpose with Caleb. I love how Caleb reflects on his experience of being discipled – he recognizes that Seth and Jayme were connecting him to the living Jesus.

Who do you know who needs to be connected to the living Jesus? Who is God calling you to? Who keeps popping up in your life?

How do you think you can engage in a relationship with them in such a way that they “put down their armor and take up their cross?”

Baptizing

We don’t just connect people to the Living Jesus though.

We’re called to bring them into the family of faith to join with Jesus in his death and resurrection.

Jesus tells us that after making disciples, we’re to baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Baptism matters. Here’s what we read in Romans 6:3-4:

Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

In our baptisms, we physically act out a spiritual reality. We’re showing that we’ve died to our old ways of life where we lived in ignorance of King Jesus, that we’ve joined with him in his death, and that we’ll join with Him in his resurrected life.

In our baptisms we receive a new identity as Jesus’ people, and we become unified with the family of God. We read this in Galatians 3:26-28:

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Our new identity as one in Christ supersedes all other identities. We go down into the water and come up again, leaving our old labels behind, dead in the water as we rise clothed with a new identity in Christ and united by the Spirt of God with all those who have passed through those waters before us. After all, if anyone is in Christ, they’re a new creation – the old has gone and the new has come.

Jesus is inviting us to connect people to Him. We show and tell people, “Jesus is King. Do you want in?” Then we lead them to the waters of baptism where they put on a new identity in Christ and join in this new people that God is making out of all the families of the earth.

Teaching

We don’t stop there though.

Jesus has given us, all of us, a call to teach these people that we’ve connected with Christ, and journeyed with into new life to obey everything that Jesus has commanded of us.

I think it’s really important that Jesus does not say “teaching them to know everything I have commanded you,” but instead says, “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

The teaching that King Jesus is charging us with is teaching for the sake of transformation. Knowledge is great, and I love to learn, and I love to know new things. You’re never going to find me arguing against that. Knowledge is not the goal – obedience is.

We teach people how to follow the Jesus way.

We teach people to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

We teach them to love their neighbors as themselves.

To love one another.

To forgive others.

To love their enemies.

To deny themselves.

To be a servant.

To make disciples, baptizing them, and teaching them to follow the Jesus way.

It’s in this life of following and serving King Jesus that we discover our joy and purpose, even in the midst of pain and suffering. I’m not promising that this road is easy, but I do believe in Jesus’ promise that He is with us to the very end of the age.

The life of being a disciple is being someone who makes disciples. The South African missiologist David Bosch wrote:

To become a disciple means a decisive and irrevocable turning to both God and neighbor. What follows from there is a journey which, in fact, never ends in this life, a journey of continually discovering new dimensions of loving God and neighbor, as ‘the reign of God and his justice are increasingly revealed in the life of the disciple.

This is the journey. This is life on the Jesus way.

You’re not going to find the life you’re looking for in consuming religious goods and services. More knowledge isn’t going to scratch the itch, more emotional experiences in worship won’t take you deeper. If you feel like you’re craving depth and you’re not finding it, then the depth that you are looking for is going to be found in living out the words in Matthew 28:16-20. Submit yourself in obedience to the life Jesus is calling you into here. A life spent in the pursuit of God’s empowering presence and carrying Jesus’ ministry forward into the world by teaching others to follow the way of Jesus will provide you more depth and fulfillment than you could ever hope for.

When I was first learning to preach a pastor told me that you should write, “so what?” at the top of every page of your sermon, and as we near the end, I hope we can answer, “So what?”

Matthew’s good ending, reminding his readers of Jesus’ kingship, his teaching, and his presence, is a jumping off point for us.

If you are a follower of Jesus you’ve been commissioned. You’ve been empowered. The very presence of Jesus the King is with you always. Your commissioning is not a matter of qualification, skill, or ability. This is about your availability. Are you open? Are you available? Are you willing to be an ordinary person that God uses to make disciples? You have been given a supernatural ministry – and isn’t that amazing?

Pastor Tyler Staton wrote:

“Here is where you start your supernatural ministry: Every day, ask God to open your eyes to his invisible but invading Kingdom. ‘Open my eyes today at the office, at school, at book club tonight, at daycare pickup this afternoon, at the dog park with my neighbors this morning.’ Show up to your ordinary life supernaturally, by which I mean living by the laws that govern the Kingdom of heaven.”

Show up. Ask God to help you pay attention, and remember that you’ve been clothed with power from on high. You have everything you need to follow Jesus in this way. Remember: you’re called to this way of life, not as a spectator, but as a fully empowered participant.

Look for people who need to be connected to the living Jesus in your neighborhoods. Pray for yourself, that you’ll be awake to what God’s up to in your neighborhood. Pray for your neighbors and opportunities to learn their stories and inject the hope you have in Jesus into your conversations. Invite people to sit around your table, and do it with a warmth and hospitality that makes it safe for them to take off their armor and take up their cross. Invite people to discover Jesus. Start practicing at home and around the neighborhood, and then take it elsewhere – to your office, to the grocery store, to the library, and to school. Look for the signs of God’s advancing kingdom everywhere you go, and participate in its unfolding.

Maybe you’re here and you’ve never been connected to the Living Jesus. You feel curious, but skeptical. If you’re here, and you want to learn more about following the Jesus way, we’d love to talk and pray with you, and connect you to the Good King.

Maybe your next step is your own baptism. Maybe you’re here today, and you’ve been connected to the Living Jesus, but you haven’t acted out the spiritual reality that you’ve experienced in dying to your old self and rising with Christ. If that’s you, we’ll have ministers at the front who would love to talk with you and help you start that process with us.

Or maybe you are beginning to sense that God may be sending you to another place and another people. Maybe you are a person or a family whom God has been working in or speaking to, you feel like it’s time to surrender to that call and to be obedient to wherever Jesus is sending you, and you’re ready to take that next step of discerning that call in the context of your church community. If you’re one of those people or one of those families, Ashley Berryhill is down here at the front to pray with you and talk with you.