#249 | Exploring the Depths of Scripture: The Importance of the Whole Story with Christopher J.H. Wright, Pt. 2

Welcome to those who Serve the Lord, a podcast for those at the front lines of ministry. You've given your life to serve, but what happens when the well runs dry?

If you've felt the weight of leadership, the tension between tradition and change, or the challenge of staying faithful while engaging culture, you're not alone. I'm Travis Michael Fleming, founder and executive director of Apollo's Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

I've been at the front lines for over 25 years, leading churches to become thriving testimonies of God's grace. I've wrestled with the same questions you're facing, and I've seen how God brings renewal even in the hardest seasons.

Each week we have conversations with pastors, theologians and cultural thinkers as we seek to equip you to lead well and stay rooted in Christ amid shifting cultural tides. So grab your coffee and listen in because your faith matters, your work is not in vain, and the Lord is still with you every step of the way.

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Welcome back to those who Serve the Lord. I'm your host Travis Michael Fleming, and today we are diving into my second conversation with none other than Christopher J.H. wright.

I want to address two things that happened in this conversation. First up, we had this conversation last summer just before world evangelical leaders gathered together at Lausanne 4 in Seoul, Korea.

Chris will refer to it as upcoming, but don't get confused by that. It is now past. Secondly, there's this idea circulating that we could potentially see the Great Commission completed in our lifetime.

While that is an inspiring and ambitious thought, and our God is a supernatural God who can do more than we could ever ask or imagine, it also raises some very important questions that we need to wrestle with. Consider this there are approximately 2 billion Muslims in the world, 1.2 to 1.3 billion Hindus, and 500 million Buddhists together.

That's about 46.3% of the global population. And here's the sobering reality, 87% of those individuals don't even know a single Christian. Not one.

That's nearly 40% of the entire world's population without any personal connection to someone who can share the hope of Jesus with them.

So while it is a noble and worthy aspiration to see the Great Commission expanding to all the world in our lifetime, perhaps it's something we should rethink before making such lofty declarations. The mission is far from over and it calls for faithful long term commitment from all of us.

If you did miss our first conversation, I recommend going back and listening to that one first. Simply because much of what we talk about in this conversation builds upon that one.

I did really enjoy this conversation, and it is an extremely vital one that you need to hear because he challenges us to see the Great Commission not as a task simply to be completed, but an ongoing invitation to participate in God's unfolding story of redemption. So grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and join me as we continue the conversation with Christopher J.H. wright. Let's get to it.

In talking about it, you, you mentioned when you've taught this, you ask people to find themselves where they're at in the story. Why is that such an important exercise for people to do?

Well, it's important because it's easy for us to imagine that, you know, this book is just an object, that it's just something that I have to somehow apply to my life. You know, it's just, this is the Bible and I need to have a biblical view. So the Bible becomes somewhat adjectival to me.

I'm the center of the universe now. I've got the Bible, I've got God in my life.

I think seeing it the other way around is actually important to say, gosh, did you know that you're in the Bible? No, I'm not.

Well, yes, you are, because you are living in that part of the Bible story that comes between the resurrection of Christ and the return of Christ. That's still in the Bible. The Bible accounts for that by saying, yes, things were going to get worse, but the kingdom of God has come.

The kingdom of God is here. God is at work through His Holy Spirit. And God has called his church to be co workers with God in his vineyard, as Paul puts it.

And so we are participants with God in this story. And that's why I ask people, where do you see yourself in this story?

Because the very idea that we are in the story for many people is quite a new idea.

But to me, it was quite transformative because it did help me to say I was always brought up as a young Christian to want to apply the Bible to my life. It's a very good thing to do to read the Bible and how does it apply to me?

But it can end up, as I say, with the Bible simply becoming an adjunct to my life, rather than my life being a tiny, infinitesimal part of the Bible's whole story. This is God's story. This is what God is about and how amazing it is that I get to be part of God's story.

So that's one reason why I think it's A good question to ask. And indeed I also ask it sometimes with younger people, like university students and so on, when they come up with an ethical issue.

What do we think about this? How are we supposed to do that? Sexual ethics or business ethics or whatever.

And one of the questions I say to people, I say, what story are you living in if you're living as a Christian with this sort of idea? Well, I got saved, I became a Christian, then I gave my life to Jesus. So that's wonderful. And I'm going to go to heaven when I die. That's wonderful.

But in between, I just have to live life according to the story of the people around me. You know, business life, marriage, home, etc. We have to live in the world. Of course we do. Jesus says, so you are still in the world.

But we're not living by the world story, whatever that might happen to be. Whether it's sort of Western secularism or a Hindu worldview or an atheistic scientific world. It doesn't matter what the other worldview is.

We are to live in the world. But by God's story, this is the story we are in. This is where it's headed.

Therefore, this is how we should live with what God has taught us in the Scriptures. It's quite a good orienting kind of question.

What story do you think you're living in and how does that then affect the choices and decisions that you make and the attitudes and relationships that you have and the way you live your life?

So you're seeing then that the story aspect of it, with the different movements, the different chapters in it, while we are all are in the mission part of that story, that number five chapter, but we also see ourselves being played out in those other pieces. Well, without the consummation yet. I mean, of course we have these tendency to tell ourselves these certain stories and how we live out of them.

But going into the fifth chapter, where we are a part of that story and we are participants within that divine drama of redemption, as Mike, as Kevin Van Hooser and others have talked about, we all know about the Great Commission. Now, what I found fascinating and, and you actually alluded to this in your book.

Really? I didn't know that.

Yeah. And. And part of it, and Alan Yay. In his work, Polycentric Missiology, he, he actually mentions that it wasn't until.

And you talk about this William Carey that was considered to be for everyone. So then the question becomes if it's such the motivating verse. Now as a matter of fact, some people say we're going to fulfill the Great Commission.

And you mention this, that rather than trying to have the Great Commission be a launch for some thing in the end times, but to actually see it as one of the motivating verses within the full council of God, while we do believe every aspect of the Great Commission, why is it so important to keep it within its base of other motivating verses of mission, to give us a holistic idea? And what happens if we just isolate it at the exclusion of the others?

Yes, I think it is important. It's important exegetically simply because this is the way Matthew chooses to close his Gospel. But it's not all he had to say.

I mean, it is the climax of a whole scroll, the scroll of Matthew, which clearly has shown who Jesus is. The son of Abraham, the son of David, so he's the man for all nations, Abraham, he's this king David's son, so he's the Messiah king.

And then you get all the life and works and teaching of Jesus.

So if Jesus says, go and make disciples, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you, you'd have to look back through Matthew's Gospel and say, well, what did Jesus command his disciples? And he didn't only command them to go out and evangelize the world.

He commanded them to be those who would be works of compassion and love and forgiveness and healing.

You know, there's so much in just Matthew alone, apart from the rest of the New Testament, about the way Christians are supposed to be living, rather than simply about what we're saying.

That to treat the Great Commission as simply to do with the preaching of the gospel or even just the teaching of the doctrines or something seems to me to be illogical. Because Jesus didn't just say teach them all that I taught you as if it was just transfer my teaching to their heads from your head.

He says, teaching them to obey all that I commanded you.

Which brings it right down to practical living, to actually living out the gospel, becoming the gospel, to use the phrase that Michael Gorman has used as a title of one of his books. So therefore I think that is one reason why the Great Commission, even just in Matthew.

But the other thing I would say about the, as I say in my book, is that the phraseology that Jesus uses in these closing words are thoroughly Deuteronomic. That's to say, they're rooted in the book of Deuteronomy at several levels.

First of all, the opening gambit, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. For any human being to say that is basically adopting the Yahweh position.

Because in Deuteronomy, Moses says to Israel, israel, you need to know that Yahweh, the Lord your God, is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath, and there is no other. And here's Jesus saying, guys, you know who I am now? I'm the Lord of heaven and earth, the God of all creation.

So that is a cosmic reality which has to do with God's whole purposes for all creation, if you see what I mean. In other words, it's a connection right back to the creational language of Deuteronomy and indeed of Genesis.

And when he says, teach them to observe all that I've commanded you, that again, is pure Deuteronomy. It's what Moses or God say again and again, be careful, O Israel, to obey all that I, the Lord your God, am commanding you this day.

And that whole scriptural element of the commands of God have massive amounts of what kind of people they were to be in their social, economic, political, legal, family life.

And so if Jesus is, in a sense passing on, transmuting, as it were, the ethics of the Old Testament Scriptures, he's effectively saying to his disciples, I want you to be what Israel was really supposed to be according to God's law. And then I want you to create replicating communities of obedience, which is why Paul talks about the obedience of faith.

So that profoundly transformative life element is intrinsic to the Great Commission. It's not just something that comes afterwards. Get people saved first, and then we'll see what happens.

Which is one reason why I agree with you that I think the language of, quote, fulfilling the Great Commission suggests that it's a kind of ticking clock to do with the people we happen to have reached with the gospel.

Now, again, I don't want to be misunderstood here for anybody who's listening, because I do not want to be heard, to be disparaging those whose passion it is from God, that the Christian church is way behind where we ought to be in terms of reaching to people who have never yet heard the Gospel, that there is a reality in our world of peoples and groups and languages and who have no connection with the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is wrong. And scandalous. So yes, we should be doing that.

But to make the Great Commission in a sense refer only to that, as if to say Jesus is sort of waiting until we've reached the last people on earth and then it can come back is not really even what Jesus, he didn't say just evangelizing. He says disciple, the nations, make disciples.

And so when I think of my own country here, Britain, you know, Britain was reached with the gospel within the first century. But does that mean that Britain is discipled? Of course not. I mean, you know that even the church in this country needs to be pre discipled.

So to turn the Great Commission into a sort of a mechanism for human effort in order to somehow accomplish something for God, I think is diminishing its impact in terms of what God is calling his whole community of disciples to be and to do in the world.

What if I told you that the Christian life isn't just about what we believe, but about how we love, live and lead in the world? Too often we separate our faith into categories. There's loving God over here, making disciples, building community.

And we don't often see how they all fit together.

Well, that's why I wrote Blueprint Kingdom Living in the Modern World to show how the Great Commandment, the Great Commission and the Great Community are meant to be woven together into a single powerful way of life.

This book is a roadmap for living out God's full vision, where loving God and neighbor fuels our mission, discipleship leads to deep community and the church becomes the living picture of God's kingdom on earth.

If you're tired of fragmented faith and ready to live with clarity, purpose and impact, grab your copy of Blueprint Kingdom Living in the Modern World Today, it's time to stop compartmentalizing and start moving. Living the Whole Gospel. Available now on Amazon.

Recent conversation I had with some good friends from Lausanne. And of course, as you know, Lausanne 4 is coming up in, in Seoul in South Korea in September this year. And I'm, I'll be going.

I'm not involved particularly in any way, but I was asked to, to, to comment on the big document that has been prepared for Lausanne, which has the title the State of the Great Commission. And I struggle a bit with that phrase because it suggests that the Great Commission is again, somehow a management task that we have to accomplish.

And what is the state of it? How far have we got in accomplishing this?

But it also made me think of, well, if Jesus says, teaching them to obey all that I've commanded you, what's the state of that in the global church. We can't just ask what's the state of the Great Commission in terms of how many more peoples are still to be reached with the gospel?

How many people have we reached with the gospel since the last Lausanne Congress or something like that? In other words, simply a kind of metric of evangelistic success and so on, which is important. It can't just be about that.

If the Great Commission actually includes the language of teaching to obey what Jesus has commanded, how well are we obeying Jesus?

You know what's happening in some countries in the world today where evangelical Christians are divided politically who are going after all kinds of idolatries. What sort of obedience is that, what one would call about the state of the obedience to the Great Commission?

When you look at some forms of evangelical Christianity, especially in the West. Now that is a question that I don't think the state of the Great Commission as a phrase is asking.

So I don't know whether you can see where I'm, what I'm trying to say.

Oh no, I resonate. We're actually working on a thing now we call American Idol, how virtues became vices and have corrupted the church.

Because in some respect, of course, we've seen how the Bible and Christianity have actually shaped Western civilization.

But how many of those have been detached, almost like a river where it's overflowing the banks and then they get cut off and then they try to reattach, but they've been polluted. And so what happens then is that it actually corrupts the church and the Gospel message and it diminishes the glory of God.

So I am fully in agreement where you're at because I've seen the extreme forms. I'm living in the American Southeast right now, really at the bottom end of the Bible Belt.

And I've seen cultural Christianity up close and I've seen, I would call the best of American evangelicalism, but also the very worst because it is isolated, the Great Commission at the expense of the others.

And what I've seen as I've interacted is that the, the, the these well meaning leaders that are all sold out in the Great Commission have no idea about the obedience aspect that's there. Their personal lives are a complete mess. And I, and I look at it and I go, well, I think you're missing something.

But they're like, well, we have to evangelize. We have to. Yes, but you're also offer a better humanity in doing so.

And you're not right now you're you're looking at it as a propositional truth that must be understood or accepted, cognitively developed, but not understood in the disciple, the apprentice aspect, which is largely lost. And so that's one of the questions we've been asking ourselves.

When I see people talking about the Great Commission, I'm sitting there going, okay, that's great.

Majority world culture is growing like crazy, but are they taking in the Christianity that the Western world has developed, which in some respect doesn't have a long shelf life?

Talking we've had Philip Jenkins on the show and looking at the lost history of Christianity and of course, Leslie Newbegin, where he coming back from India to see. I mean, when he's traveling to Turkey and he sees that there's no Christians that are there or gets back to the west, it's post Christian.

Is the Enlightenment Christianity that we've been disseminating to the, to the remaining world, is it just a matter of time before they go back into what we're at now?

That would be scary, wouldn't it? I mean, I think, yes, West, Western, Western, post Enlightenment Christianity has sadly become, in some quarters.

I mean, one doesn't want to generalize completely, but certainly there are great swathes of Western Christianity which have become very syncretized with idolatry, in other words, going after the gods of the people around us.

So we syncretize with the gods of materialism, consumerism, patriotism, nationalism, whatever it happens to be all the various ideologies, and we assume that's that's what it is.

And which, which is, by the way, one reason why I also struggle with Western missiologists who want to presume to decide on what God may be doing in other cultures, in other.

In the context of other religious faiths where people are turning to Jesus but not necessarily adopting the Christian church language in what are sometimes so called insider movements. I'm sure people have heard of that within an Islamic context, but also in Hindu contexts in North India and in some Buddhist contexts as well.

And the big worry is, well, if these people are putting their faith in Jesus, but they haven't really thrown off all the aspects of their Islamic culture, whatever, isn't this syncretism? And I want to say, well, you know, maybe let the Holy Spirit help them to discern and decide what is idolatrous and what is not.

Let, let God be the judge of that.

We, in a highly idolatrous syncretized Christianity in the west, really have the leverage and the platform to dictate to other places where God is at work. What constitutes syncretism. We may have an opinion. We may want to help them.

We may want to come alongside and read the Bible together and say, well, you know, let's look. Is this consistent with what, you know, the Old and New Testament say? But we don't decide from our position what looks like synchronism or not.

So that's a kind of offshoot of the point you are making.

And of course, you know, Leslie Newbiggin was very strong on this, that because he observed the idolatry of Western culture, having come from years, decades of his life, lived in an idolatrous country of India, and saw that there, the only way to make the gospel plausible was not just to preach and teach it, but to live it. There had to be a community that was visibly transformed by the gospel in some way.

It was actually living out the gospel, which I rather like the book by Michael Gorman becoming the Gospel because he. As you may know, there's been a debate among biblical missiologists for some years. Why does Paul not tell all his churches, go out and evangelize?

Well, he doesn't use it in quite so many words. He doesn't tell them to go all out and do what he'd been doing, you know, evangelizing and planting churches.

Mind your own business. Work with your hands.

Yeah, I mean, that's not total because he does say, for example, in Philippians, that they should be holding forth the word of truth. I mean, the word of light. You're shining light in the world. So Paul does expect Christians, I think, to be bearing witness to their faith.

But the point is Michael Gorman is making is that he expected that when communities in that Roman pagan, highly imperialistic, very religious, very idolatrous and very immoral world, when there are communities of men and women who are just living a different way, that they would be demonstrating the truth of the gospel in such a way that the lordship of Christ in the kingdom of God and the need for forgiveness and all of those things would then become the topic of a conversation in which the gospel would be shared. So I think there's a lot in what he says in that, of course, in many ways goes back to Leslie New Begin as well, goes back to Jesus, doesn't it?

Jesus says, let your light so shine that people will see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven, not hear your great testimony, but see the way you live. So I just can't.

Yeah, I really can't understand those who want to separate, you know, the preaching of the word, the explicit bearing witness to the truth, which we have to do.

There is a message to be shared, you know, all for evangelism, but it has to be rooted in authentic Christian living, which is then taught to others, teaching them to obey all that I've taught you or I've commanded you.

There's so many pieces to that, and time doesn't permit because I know we.

Could go on and on and on and on and on.

One of the things that we like to do for our audience is to give them a concluding water bottle. We are Apollos watered. And you actually talked about our namesake in the book, so I was thrilled.

Apollos.

Oh, yeah, I love that. I can't wait to.

We're actually writing a book right now and been working with Baker on Apollos just for that reason alone, because he's such a wonderful figure that I think has been so often misunderstood. And I was reading your book and reading the Apollo account to my wife last night. She said, he stole your thunder. No, he didn't steal.

Sorry about that. Sorry.

No, not at all.

You did your. I mean, it's your. It's yours. But what's a concluding water bottle? A spiritual truth that we can nourish our people with in the week to come.

Well, interesting that you use the word watered. And of course. Yeah, I mean, if I can just go back to Apollos again, a wee story at the.

And by the way, if anybody wants to find out, just google langham.org org and you'll find out what Langham does all around the world. But we had a seminar at Cape Town to which we gave the title Every Paul Needs an Apollos.

And it was based on the, you know, the Corinthians thing where Paul says, yeah, I planted the church. He was the church evangelist. He was a great founder of the church. But Apollos, we know from Acts 18, had watered the church with his teaching.

And his teaching included, you know, proving in public debate from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Messiah. He's engaged in apologetics in Old Testament hermeneutics and Christology, if we were giving it theological terms.

And so Paul says in Corinthians that the one who waters, the one who plants, and the one who waters are one. He says literally, that's the Greek. They are one. They have the same mission.

They're both doing great commission work because Jesus says, You know, make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them. So there's no mythological distinction between the work of preaching the gospel and doing teaching, including theological education.

And I remember once with the Langham Partnership, I was trying to explain in a church what we do, talking about, you know, we provide books for pastors, we provide scholarships for people doing PhDs and training to teach in seminaries, and we train people in biblical preaching. And says, also, you're not really a missionary organization then, are you? And I felt quite cross inside because I thought. I almost felt that.

I didn't say this, but I felt like, haven't you actually read the Great Commission, you know, line three and teaching them?

We're not sending missionaries to other parts of the world, but we are engaged in the work of systematic theological teaching and education, and that is Great Commission work, as Jesus said. So where were we? Apollos and a water bottle. Well, I could keep coming back to.

I think the more we can help people to get into the story, and if people are pastors, it is possible to preach the whole Bible in one sermon. Try it. You know, you can help people to understand. Look, what is this book all about? Well, there's a big story.

And some people don't like the word story, by the way, because story sounds like, oh, it's all just made up, you know, oh, that's just a load of stories.

We're using the word in its technical sense of a grand narrative, a sequence, you know, a good beginning, a problem, a struggle, a solution, a climax and a resolution. So in that sense, the Bible is a narrative. And I think to help people see here is. Here's the whole Bible literally on the back of an envelope.

That's one thing.

And then the other thing that I try to do again in my own preaching at All Souls Church, Langham Place, is that wherever I am preaching in the Bible, if at all possible to locate that text within the story somehow, it doesn't need to be terribly long, but it can help. So, for example, I was preaching on Joshua chapter one one Sunday. That's passage I was asked to preach on.

And you could just go straight there and talk about, be strong, be courageous, don't be afraid, the Lord will be with you. You've got a big task. All the usual spiritual, come moral, come therapeutic kind of lessons you can bring out of Joshua 1.

But what I did was the opening verses say, you know, Joshua, the servant of the Lord was dead. Well, where does that throw you back? That throws you back to the previous chapter, which is Deuteronomy 34, where he dies.

But look in Deuteronomy 34 and you see that that refers to the great promises, that not one of the promises that God had made had failed. Well, what did God promise that throws you back to Abraham?

Because God was promising that through this people God would bring blessing to all the nations on the earth. So here we are now at the boundary of the River Jordan. So what's going to happen next is Israel is going to go into the land.

This is going to be the beginning of the next step on the road of obedience, which is ultimately going to lead us to the Lord Jesus Christ and indeed to the new creation.

Now, it only took a few minutes, but it was just trying to locate this chapter within the overarching biblical narrative and then to help us to see something of how that then affects us. So I think some sort of regular attempt to give people an orientation to the story we are in and then to keep on drawing the implications.

So then how should we then live?

If this is our story, if this is where we've come from, if these are our people and this is our God and this is his promise and that is our future, then how should we be living now? As disciples of Christ.

So I think that's maybe a wee bit of a water bottle, something that people could think about and build into their regular Sunday services, their preaching and their teaching.

Thank you so much for coming on. Those who serve the Lord, thank you for your time. Thank you for your ministry and God bless you in everything that you're doing.

It's been a pleasure and a privilege. Thanks, Travis. And God bless everybody who's been listening. Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining the this conversation with Christopher J.H. wright. I hope it challenged you, encouraged you, and maybe even reshaped the way you think about the Great Commission. I know that it did that for me.

But before you go, I want to leave you with a few action steps to consider. One, pray with purpose. Start by praying for the billions of people who don't yet know a Christian.

Ask God to raise up laborers for the harvest and to open doors for the Gospel. Two, Learn and engage. Take some time to learn about the cultures and religions that make up the majority of those who have yet to hear about Jesus.

Understanding their worldviews will help you engage more meaningfully. Third, support mission efforts, whether through your church, a missionary organization, or a local outreach.

Consider how you can financially or practically support those who are on the front lines of sharing the gospel. Number four, be a witness. You may not need to travel across the world to live out the Great Commission.

Many people from unreached backgrounds are in our neighborhoods, workplaces and schools now. Start by building relationships, show hospitality and be a reflection of Christ where you are. And number five, keep the conversation going.

If this conversation stirred something in you, share it with others. Discuss it in your small group or Bible study. Let's encourage one another to stay committed to God's mission.

Finally, if you haven't checked out the book yet, be sure to do it. It's a great book. It's not very long.

His book the Great Story and the Great Commission is a powerful resource that will help further equip you on this journey. Thanks again for tuning in to those who Serve the Lord, a Podcast of Apollos Watered.

Until next time, let's keep watering our faith so that it can grow and overflow to those around us. Be blessed.

Thank you for joining us on today's episode of those who Serve the Lord, a podcast of Apollo's Watered the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics. We trust the what you've heard has inspired and encouraged you in your walk of faith. Remember, serving the Lord isn't just about what we do.

It's about who we are becoming in Him. Whether in the small moments or the grand gestures, each step of service brings us closer to his heart.

If you found today's discussion meaningful, we invite you to share it with others who might be encouraged. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. It helps spread the message to those who know need to hear it most.

Until next time, may you continue to serve the Lord with joy, humility, and a heart full of his love. God bless you. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off. Stay watered, everybody.