to really understand the purpose of your living. You say, well, Bill, I've lived most of my life. Well, you're still here and so am I. So that means that I can change the way I think to line up with what the Lord is sharing with us. And if I change the way I think, it'll change the way I live. And so, allow me to read the text. Matthew 28, verses 16 through 20. But the 11 disciples proceeded to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had designated. And when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some were doubtful. And 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 the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you, and lo, I am with you all the days, even to the end of the age. And I shared with you that when you look at the entire Gospel of Matthew, starting in the opening chapter, and you read the entire Gospel of Matthew in one setting, If you've never done that, I encourage you to do that. The best way to read your Bible is not this. And the best way to read your Bible is not to just jump into it, catch a few verses, and start your day. It's really not. understand your Bible and read it is to read entire books, entire sections in one setting. And you'll begin to get a gist of what the book is all about. And as you read the book of Matthew, you do discover that his intention is to take everyone to the final words of Jesus here in the end of his book. He doesn't even talk about the ascension of Christ. But he ends with this commissioning by the Lord on this mountain in the regions of Galilee. He ends the book so that you and I would focus on this. Are you understanding what I'm saying here? And then you'll discover in this structure that talks about the Lord's having authority. And by the way, I mentioned to you that you can structure this entire text using the little word, all. The Lord is the one that has all the authority, and it's on that authority that he says, therefore, make disciples. I've got all of the authority, so make disciples. And then we discovered that it's for who? It's for the entire world. It's for all the nations. Discipleship is for all people. And we also discovered the text says, all authority, all the nations, but it says, all that I command you. And we are going to discover that that is the very essence of what discipleship is. And the promise of the Lord is He's with us all the days, literally in the language. I'm with you all the days. Doesn't matter what the days look like, doesn't matter the day in which we live, He's with us. The Lord is here and He has never abandoned His people for the past 2,000 years. But then I also pointed out to you that the central commanding word from the Lord. There's a command in this section, and it is the command found in verse 19, make disciples. So that is a command for you. That is a command for me. It is the final word of Christ recorded in Matthew's gospel to talk about his commission. He's the one that has all authority. And so, you'll find that in Matthew's gospel. He is the one who began his ministry in Galilee. And so, Matthew begins his ministry in Galilee, focuses on Galilee all the way to take us to the mountain in Galilee. And I'm not going to re-preach that section of that study. But the teaching, the Lord says, teach them all that I've commanded them. Matthew structures his entire gospel around the teaching of Jesus, followed by a section that deal with the deeds of Jesus. And then he returns to the teaching of Jesus, the deeds of Jesus, the teaching. Five pillars in Matthew's gospel of major teaching sections. We read the opening verses earlier in our service from his first sermon. The first teaching section. And my intention in this study on discipleship is to look at that first section in Jesus' teaching in the weeks ahead to dive deep in the Sermon on the Mount. For part of me discipling you is to take you to the teaching that the Lord has commanded in that section. And you're going to have to understand that teaching and master that teaching because he has commanded you too to be a disciple maker. That is not just my job. I'm to help equip you so that you can do the work of ministry. And that's very important. So the teaching of the Lord is Matthew's structure. And then his abiding presence, lo, I'm with you all the days, he opens up this book with, Jesus is supposed to be known as Immanuel, which means what? God with us. And then we see how the presence of the Lord is throughout Matthew's gospel to take us right to those end words where the Lord says, I am with you. Making more efforts in my life right now to practice the presence of the Lord. What do I mean by that? If my wife and I are in the same room together, give it a little bit of time and we'll be talking to each other. Isn't that true? You came into this room today and there were people around you and what did you do? You talked to them, right? When the scripture promises us that the Lord is with us all the days, that means he's here. He's with me when no one else is. And if he's in the room with me, then I'm going to talk to him, and I'm going to take the time to get into his words and understand what he has commanded me to do. All of that. He's present. He's with me right now. Because he knows that we are spending these moments together to look at the last thing that he wants to be our first commitment to, the making of disciples. And that's the central command. And I mentioned to you, and we'll go in deeper in the weeks ahead, that surrounding that main command are three participles. They're in the original language, and a participle is a word that ends in an I-N-G. Three of them, and I've highlighted them. The first one is translated as go. It could have been translated going. It is a participle. Because I have all the authority in heaven and earth, therefore, make disciples. How do you do it? You do it by going. We'll talk about that in greater detail in the weeks ahead. And having gone, you are going doing something. You are sharing God's gospel. You are sharing the good news of the kingdom of God. You are coming face-to-face with people that don't know the Lord. And your passion is that they would know who the Lord is, they would put their trust in the Lord, they'd become a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. And those that receive that message in repentance and faith, you therefore baptize them. For baptism in the word of God is always to teach us of our identification with Christ. That we are identified with him in his death, in his burial, and in his resurrection. And our identity with Him is expressed publicly, unashamedly, in front of people that have never known that we've repented and put our faith in Christ. And we announce it. And that rite speaks of cleansing, for our great Lord of glory has cleansed us. And so baptism must be a part, public baptism of born-again people must be the ingredient of discipleship. And so I'm going to spend an entire Sunday on baptism. You can get a head start, get out of concordance, and look at every single reference to baptism in the New Testament to discover what it is. And so now you've gone, you've shared the gospel, people have repented and put their faith in Christ, and they have been publicly baptized, then what do we do? We spend a balance in that person's life teaching them to observe all that the Lord commands them, teaching obedience to God. And so that is why those three participles surround this main verb, to make a disciple. And we'll dig deeper in the weeks ahead. So there is definitely, all the way through Matthew's gospel, reinforcing deeds and teaching to bring us to this fact. that the responsibility of his people now in the age they live. I didn't live in the first century or the second or the third, fourth, fifth. I live in this century. And the sovereign God of glory determined that I would be born at this time and you would be born in this time. And things are starting to look a little worse and more nasty. Matter of fact, if you really want to know what it's going to look like, the Bible says that in the time of the end, there will be perilous time. And then you need to look at every word in the text that describes the perilous times. And you'll see they're in this age. So many of them blatant and in our face. This is the age that we live in. And the responsibility is for this generation. And so we've got to understand this. You've got to understand your purpose for being here. And we noted as we started to go to this text that there were four things to prepare the people of God to be disciple makers. And apart from them, we won't move forward. And we noted that they met with the Lord. They went to Galilee to meet with him. And we will never take to heart his final words unless we're willing to spend time with him, acknowledging his presence, developing a relationship. Say, well, Bill, you mean I'm just talking to the Lord out there and I don't see him? Sure, I do all the time. I know he sees me. So we've got to meet with the Lord. And then we discovered that you have to worship the Lord. And then we discovered that we need to grow in our faith. He deals with the doubters. He comes right alongside of us. But we're going to have to grow in our faith if we're ever going to make disciples. We saw that in the text. And then we also saw that final thing, and that is the determination that we're going to submit to his authority, all authority. So that is the background. You say, Bill, with as long an introduction as that, when are we going to get out of here? Soon. Because today, I just want to address what is a disciple. There are better than 200 references in the New Testament to the word disciple. And all of those references are found in the Gospels and the book of Acts. has the second most references to the word disciple than any of the Gospels. John has the most. And both Matthew and John were personally apostles and disciples of Jesus Christ. So it's worthy of our study. And when you read the book of Acts, you discover that Luke, in writing that His gospel and the history of that gospel going around the world in his day references that early believers were called disciples. And yet, when you get out of the book of Acts and you read the epistles, you don't find that word. But you find complementary terms to help describe the people of God. Probably one of the ones that you know most frequently is the word believer. They were believers. Or another one that's mentioned many times is the word saint. We are saints. Do you know that we don't have to wait till a church canonizes us as a saint? That's not found in the Bible. I'll tell you what's found in the Bible. He is calling all of those who have believed saints. Now, my wife knows I'm not a saint, but she is. The word saint means holy, that's all. Do you realize that the early believers were called the holy ones? That ought to tell us how we're supposed to live. Would anybody ever give us that designation? Those are the holy ones. But the term we use most frequently today is what? Christian. And yet, you realize that that term is only found a few times in the New Testament? So what does it mean, that word itself, disciple? Well, the Greek word behind our English translation, disciple, mathētes, you know what it means in the Greek? It means a learner, one who learns. And it has come to us in the English language as disciple from the old Latin language. In Latin, disciples, disciples, was a pupil or a learner. So, the Greek means one who learns. The old Latin, disciples, means to learn. And from the old Latin, it came into the English, disciple. It was even influenced by old French, disciple. So now we have it. The word itself means a person that is committed to learn, committed to sit at the feet of a teacher. And this is what you see in the New Testament. The Lord called men to come and follow Him. And these 12 followed the Lord everywhere He went. They heard the sound of His voice, the tone that He spoke in, the look of His eyes. They saw the mannerism of His teaching. They heard everything that He taught. They had an advantage. Follow Me. And they sat and they learned. They were 12. learners, disciples who would follow Him. And the very concept of having disciples comes right out of the Old Testament. It is mentioned in Isaiah's prophecy, the teacher and the disciple. Not too frequently the concept in the Old Testament, but I'll tell you the main thing that you pull out of the Old Testament is that the Lord redeemed a people from Egypt, yes? the book of Exodus. And he brought them to Mount Sinai after he redeemed them, and he entered into a covenant of obedience. And he told them that they were a particular people, a chosen people that were to be a kingdom of priests. with a responsibility, and what was it? It was to take the message of the name of God to the nations of the world. That is what God commissioned Israel to do. And that same commissioning that you see in picture form, in prophetic form, in shadow form in the Old Testament is exactly setting us up to understand that we who have been redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus Christ have entered into a new covenant. And that new covenant is a new covenant of obedience to the Lord. And what is our responsibility? Our responsibility is the same one that God gave the redeemed in the nation of Israel, and that is to take the knowledge of His name to the nations of the world. So do you understand that the concept is right back in the Old Testament? So the Lord chose those 12. They were his disciples. The Pharisees had their disciples, right? New Testament talks about that. Those that would come and sit at the feet of the Pharisees and learn their teaching and commit to that teaching, they were the disciples of the Pharisees. Matter of fact, John the Baptist had some disciples too. Did you know that? And they were people that had repented and believed as he preached. And he said, believe on the one who's coming. I can baptize you with water, but he can baptize you with fire and the Spirit of God. And he had some...he was kind of an...something like that. What am I...is this the word I'm trying to think to come up with? Yeah, out there in the desert. I mean, camel, hare. Vegetarian, eating locusts. I didn't want to say eccentric. I didn't want to use that word. But he had disciples too. They followed his teaching. And some of them had yet to believe on the one that they'd never known the Lord to come. They're off in a region and Paul goes there and he discovers all they know is the baptism of John. He said, no, Jesus is coming, you can put your faith and trust in him, he's here. And they did. Disciples of John, well, the Lord had them too. I wonder if you consider yourself to be one of the disciples of Jesus. You see, for there were more than 12, and even in the New Testament, there was at least a body of 70 called as disciples. And then there were even more that were his disciples. And I would suggest that the people that came to this mountain in Galilee were probably the 500 that Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 15, and they're disciples of the Lord too. So do you consider yourself to be a disciple? Well, if so, If you have repented and believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you've followed him in a believer's baptism, then now you are ready to follow his teaching. And a characteristic of your life will be, number one, I can say, Lord, I have received you as my personal Savior. Number two, Lord, I have publicly identified with you in water baptism. Number three, Lord, you will be my teacher and I will be the learner. Number four. Lord, I will submit to your teaching and your authority in my life. And your word will shape my thinking and my behavior. And Lord, I will follow in your footsteps and I will imitate your example. And Lord, I'll change my thinking and I'll change my behavior so that I will be more and more like you. Lord, I will give you exclusive loyalty, whatever the cost. Lord, I trust you. Lord, I will confess you and your name before other people. Lord, I will deny you. Lord, I'll deny myself and not you. Lord, I'll treat all the other believers as family. Lord, I'm going to be active in the world, but I'm going to be distinct from it. And Lord, I'm going to help other people follow you. I'm going to make disciples. And Lord, I'm going to do this. without respecting anyone, this person. Is the Lord a respecter of persons? Absolutely not. And so this gospel that we have been charged with, this commissioning to make disciples, you know, he didn't just ask us to meet today. We've gotten a habit over the years. We love to come. We love to be with other people. We love to sing, worship the Lord. We love to study the Bible. We love cake and cookies and coffee. We love prayer together. We love all these things. And if we leave these doors thinking that we have done everything God wants us to do, we've miserably failed. That's true. We've got to reshape our thinking. This is not what it's just about. It's just a piece of it. It's a discipleship-making. It's teaching people to obey the Lord. But we've got to leave this place, and we've got to go and share the gospel. And once people have responded, we're to baptize them. And then we're supposed to invite them to come to the local assembly where they can hear what? The Word of God and learn. And not only that, you can take them alongside of yourself and have a personal Bible study with them. Teach them everything the Lord's taught you. Or take them to a small Bible study. You see, we've got to see the whole picture. And if you're not involved in all of those things, your thinking needs to change. And your behavior needs to change. We're to disciple the nations. God is not a respecter of person. And I love the gospel because it unites people while the world seeks to divide people. Have you noticed that? The gospel is the great uniter as we all come to sit at the feet of the Lord. And our age needs this. We need discipleship. And I want to close with this. We need discipleship in this current culture. We really do. The secular progressive culture is squeezing the church. Do you even know what the secular progressive culture is? They don't want you to know. It just sounds good. You know, the progressive side, we want to progress. Who doesn't want progress? But you better tell me what the progress looks like, say. They have an agenda. And that secular progressive culture has a goal. Do you know what the goal is? I mean, do you know? I'm serious. Their stated goal. Absolute of God, secular. Don't miss that. It is to remove religion from the public's sphere. Remove it. And yet, it has its own religious flavor and character. I think it's become our state's religion. And it is promoted with a missionary zeal and funded by global billionaires. They do have an agenda. And it is to remove every single religious thing out of the public sphere, push it out of the way so that their religion is forefront. And they become the intolerant ones, and the ones that are full of hate for anybody and everybody that would pursue God, and the agenda of God, and the name of God, and the gospel of God, and the word of God, and the truth of God. No, they will have none of that, but with zeal, they will cancel you. so that you cannot promote your religion publicly. You say, well, how could you possibly say that? Well, listen, there are examples, legions of examples about what is happening in this nation that most of us have never heard about. But you can Google these things, you can find them. In 2014, a fire chief in Atlanta, he's a fire chief in Atlanta, was fired, why? for self-publishing a Bible study, book for men. Published it himself, wrote it himself. And he included in that book that his belief that is that marriage should be between one man and one woman. It was in his book. And he got fired for it. Google it, read it. You'll find it online that quickly. In 2015, the city of Houston, Texas, the city issued subpoenas to four or five pastors demanding them that they were to turn over any sermons that they had that mentioned homosexuality, gender identity, or any sermons that they mentioned the current mayor at the time, Annise Parker, who was a lesbian, if you mentioned her in the sermon, you've got to turn over that sermon and we are going to pursue you as a hate crime terrorist. It was in 2015. Google it. You'll find it. Military chaplains have been forced out of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, what? For quoting the scripture and praying in Jesus' name. When President Obama was going to be installed as president in his second term, they had invited a Christian pastor from Atlanta who was renowned for, taking a stand against human trafficking, Louis Giglio. He was to do the benediction at a swearing-in ceremony. And yet, a day after, progressive secular activist posted a sermon that the pastor had preached in 1990. That was 30 years ago. It wasn't 30 years from when President Obama was in his second term. But he, in that sermon, lovingly tells the believers the same thing I'm saying to you today, is that we're to speak truth to this generation, but we're supposed to be doing it in a loving way. He challenged his congregation. to lovingly and firmly, truthfully resist a non-traditional marriage. I do think the Bible is pretty clear on what is marriage, how God has defined it, and yet now in our nation, That definition has just gone out the window. Why? Well, because God defines it a certain way and man doesn't like the truth of God. We don't like to have a public voice about God and morality. No, we want a secular society. We'll have none of this, none of what God says, no submission to God in any area. And so he just tells his people, you know, lovingly, lovingly speak truth. The activist had his name withdrawn from praying at the benediction. Not too long ago, a visitor went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. You know what she had on her lapel? A pro-life sticker. And she was ordered, ordered to remove that pro-life sticker from her lapel because it was, quote, religious symbol. And don't you know in the public square, in secular, progressive America, you must not have anything religious in the public domain. And if you do, we are going to cancel you. And you know who the new demons are in this new religion? Conservative Christians. and they aren't the demons. Did you know that? That's what they call us. These are the demons in the new religion. It's all those Christian people that are bringing biblical values into the culture and just begging us to acknowledge a creator who's spoken to us and we're responsible to and we're gonna answer to him. They would dare tell the world that and to repent and believe and follow Jesus They're the demons. We must deal with the demons. And there is a non-negotiable ritual in the secular progressive religion, and it is abortion. Do not touch that. And now we are watching the gender war. And just like years ago in the Spanish Inquisition, We have the inquisitors today, but they're witch hunts. And anyone who would not embrace the agenda of the new religion, if you will not embrace that, then we will pursue you. We will call you a hater, a bigot. You'll be shamed online. And you'll be driven out of the public life. And it should not come as any surprise that the secular progressive religion today, like most ardent religionists, would promote their religion with zeal. And they do. They celebrate it. They celebrate it. They celebrate a defiance against God. I wash with horror when the state legislature in New York State jumped up, stood up, and loudly clapped celebrating that a governor with a stroke of a pen made abortion the law of the land in New York State. We celebrate that. My friends, you've got to understand something. We've got a calling. We really do. And if you name the name of Christ, you do too. And that is with great love and grace and tenderness, we must speak the truth to this generation. It's the one we're in. And the Lord's people have been doing this for 2,000 years. And our passion is to just get them to follow the Lord, follow Jesus, learn from him, sit at his feet, be like him. That's our calling. God help us, God help us to be able to touch our generation, our community with the grace of God, the love of God, the mercy of God, the gospel of God. And that's our calling. Let's pray. Father, I know that every one of us in this room need to reshape our thinking about a lot of things, but I pray that you'll begin with this thought of our commitment to be disciples of Christ and then to help other people be disciples of Christ. Now, just help us to understand that's what you've called us to, Lord. And we'll submit to that in our thinking and that each one of us and then collectively, we as a group, we'll make real decisions that help us accomplish this. And then, Father, if there is someone here who cannot really say, I've been born again, I have a new way of thinking, obedience to you, Lord. I have the presence of your spirit. Oh, Lord, I pray that you'll just draw them to Jesus. And that maybe even today they would become a follower of Jesus Christ. So may your spirit just do what your spirit does. And that's just to convict us of our own sin and lack of righteousness and draw us to Christ. We need you, Lord. Help me to help lead these people, Lord, so that a year from now, To be your will, we'll look back and we'll say as a congregation and as individuals that our lives are changing to follow the Lord more closely and seek for others to follow him too. Please do that work. I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.