Job One
I’ve been getting some push-back lately from a friend on what we call “the Great Commission,” Christ’s mandate to make disciples. My friend commented that he feels that we focus too much on evangelism.
Hmmm… never heard anyone say that before.
He explained: We call it “the Great Commission” and try to shape all our efforts toward that goal of making disciples. But that command isn’t actually the first priority for Christ-followers.
This brings to mind an intriguing question: what is our first priority?
What is Job One?
That depends on how you ask the question.
If we word the question as a philosophical query or existential quest, as we find it in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Job One looks like this:
Q. “What is the chief end of man?”
A. “Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
So according to that historic doctrinal source, Job One for God’s people is two-fold: to take pleasure in knowing God and to honor Him by our lives.
And if we ask what Job One is for the church, we will probably find ourselves in that familiar territory, looking to Jesus’s last command to the apostles, the closing words of Matthew’s gospel. “And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:18-20).
This would mean that our chief task as believers is, as our church documents put it, “to give voice and hands to the gospel of Christ as His Spirit transforms those without hope into fully equipped followers of Christ.”
If “Jesus’s last command is our first concern” (as I’ve often heard it said), our primary task, Job One, is to make disciples – fully committed Christ-followers – out of unbelievers.
But my friend insists that none of these actually constitute Job One for the people of God. And his point is a good one: Jesus told us what Job One is when he answered the question of the expert in the Law of Moses: “What is the first and greatest commandment?” (Matt 22:34-40).
There are two remarkable things about Jesus’s answer to that question:
1. Jesus didn’t quote any of the Ten Commandments, the ten-fold mandate that lies at the heart of Jewish ethics. Jesus announced that there was a command from God that is even more important than that Top Ten list given through Moses: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt 22:37).
Here Jesus quotes not from the Ten Commandments but from Deut 6:5. Love for God is the north-star, the starting point. What God wants from us is more than compliance, even more than sincere obedience. What God wants most from us is our love.
Let’s just let that sink in: loving God is Job One.
Everything else is details.
2. But there’s another remarkable thing about Jesus’s answer: he answered an unasked question.
Even though he was asked what is the (single) greatest commandment, he went on to answer a question that hadn’t been asked: what is the second greatest commandment?
His answer to that unasked question: “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (v. 39).
Why did Jesus feel he needed to add that second mandate? He goes on to explain that these two commandments, taken together, constitute the whole of God’s expectations for us: that we would love Him supremely and love others to the extent that we love ourselves. As Jesus put it, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (v. 40).
Jesus added that second commandment because we needed additional guidance. Jesus knew our hearts. He knew that we are more than capable – likely even – to do awful things to one another in the name of God. Without that second guard rail, love for others, we are the kind of heart-corrupt people who can weaponize love for God and hurt one another.
So Jesus says that Job One is not the Great Commission. Our primary and deepest obligation before God is to love Him holistically and love one another selflessly.
And this, says my friend, is the reason he thinks we harp too much on evangelism. Our primary obligation before God is not disciple-making but loving God and loving one another.
He’s right. If I focus so narrowly on the process and methods of evangelism that I fail to love my neighbor – that is, if my evangelism is driven not by neighbor-love but by some other motive (a dreary sense of obligation, a drive to be a high achiever, a compulsion to check the box on the list) – and especially if my evangelism doesn’t make me more loving, I am failing miserably at my primary task.
This means that if I am negligent about obeying God in this primary matter, it doesn’t matter how conscientious I am about obedience in every other matter.
As Paul so famously put it, I can “speak in the tongues of men and of angels” and “have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and… have all faith, so as to remove mountains” and “give away all I have, and… deliver up my body to be burned” and still live in profound disobedience to God’s great Command (1 Cor 13:1-3).
That is a sobering thought: that I could work tirelessly to win and baptize and teach people, that I could conscientiously align my life habits to maximize God’s glory in my life, that I could do all that in all sincerity and with great effort and sacrifice, and – if I am not acting in love – be living in stubborn disobedience to God’s first command.
This re-frames the Great Commission for me. I see now that making disciples isn’t so much the mandate as it is the method.
In other words, the Great Commission answers the follow-up question: How can I love God and my neighbor?
Love for God and love for neighbor will compel me to engage in acts of kindness and service for the people around me, in my workplace, in my neighborhood, in my church. And it is in that context, in my loving and serving others well, that I will naturally and organically create the depth and space to engage in the spiritual conversation about the Good News.
And I will discover that it is the loving man, not the zealous one, who will find his friends open to hearing about Jesus.
Persevere.
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor