All That Jesus Taught : Bible Study Part 6 | Zac Poonen

We continue our study today on ‘All that Jesus Taught’ based on Matthew 28:20 where in the great commission Jesus said “After making disciples of all nations, and baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, we then have to go on from there to teach them to do all that he had commanded and taught” So this as I have said in our previous sessions is the neglected half of the great commission. The first part of the great commission Mark 16:15 is generally being done more by Christians than the second part because when we think of this phrase “All that I have commanded you” It covers a wide range of subjects, wide range of areas where we need to first of all do what Jesus commanded us in our own lives and then teach others also to do it. Otherwise the great commission remains incomplete.

Jesus was a carpenter for the first part of his life up to the age of 30 and I want to use an illustration from a carpenters shop. Supposing Jesus was a master carpenter. He gets an order from some business that wants 100 tables to be made and Jesus employs a lot of carpenters, let’s say 10 carpenters. 9 of them spend all their time making just the legs of those tables. Now legs are very important, you can’t have a table without 4 legs for each of them. So at the end of a number of weeks you have multitudes of legs there and supposing there’s just 1 man making the table tops, we’re going to have a tremendous disproportion of the number of legs to the number of table tops, and very few completed tables. You may have 100 of legs and perhaps 3 or 4 tables. So if you were employed now as a carpenter to go in to that shop, what would you do? What would the Lord tell you to do? I think he would tell you to forgot about the legs now and make some table tops so that we can have completed tables. This is a picture of what is happening to a lot of Christendom today. Many are being converted, praise the lord for that. Many are going to unreached areas with the gospel, a great sacrifice.

Many are laying down their lives for preaching the gospel, we respect them, we appreciate them, and I believe their reward will be great, they have fulfilled their calling. But there are other parts of the body that needs to carry on from there and complete the work, and that is the second part of the great commission. To make these converts into disciples and teach them every single thing that Jesus commanded. Is that something we can ignore? For example Jesus said that no man can serve 2 masters. He said that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:24. No one can serve 2 masters. Those 2 masters are not God and Satan. Now, I know Satan is the master of many people but that’s not the one Jesus was referring to because no Christian believes that he can serve God and Satan, and no one attempts to do that. Christian does not do that but here the 2 masters mentioned in Matthew 6:24 are God and Mammon. Mammon means money, material wealth, material possessions, real estate, stocks and shares, houses, lands, cars, etc. He said “You cannot serve both of these” but there are a lot of Christians who feels they can serve God and Material wealth. Jesus said that you have to have a radical attitude towards one or the other if you want to serve. You got to hate one and love the other or hold on to one and despise the other.