The first sentence in The Great Commission is the foundation upon which the rest of the mandate is based:

        “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (see Matthew 28:18).

          This was the core of the Lord’s entire message when He walked the earth and is the basic message of the kingdom. A kingdom is where a king’s authority is recognized. The kingdom of God is where the Lord’s authority is recognized.

          Grasping the depth of the Lord’s teaching and proclamations about His kingdom is the essence of understanding His purposes and thereby our purpose. For this reason, we are told in Ephesians 3:16-19:

         that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man;

         so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love,

         may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,

         and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

          We are going to seek to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God with the ultimate purpose of being filled with the fullness of God. This is a concept too awesome to comprehend on our own, so it is something that the Lord must “grant” to us as we are told in verse 16. It also requires that we are strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man so that Christ dwells in our hearts, and we are rooted and grounded in love.

          This might sum up the purpose of our discipleship. It is more than any earthly discipleship where we might be devoted to learning from a great master and becoming like the master, but here we are told that we are to be filled with our Master so that He dwells in us! This is such an awesome calling that even the angels marvel at it. The more we comprehend this, the more we must be compelled to seek it with all that is within us.

          There is no fairytale kingdom conceived in the imagination of any person as wonderful as the true kingdom is. There is no king ever to have reigned on the earth or imagined in any fiction as wonderful or as powerful as our King is. This is why the true Christian life is the greatest adventure any human being could ever live. There will never be anything more exciting than God or as boring as religion!

          Of course, there is a “true religion” declared in Scripture that is based on love and acts of love. Those who engage in this “true religion” find it to be one of the most wonderful things they can do in this life. There is no drug, no human experience, nor euphoria as wonderful as love, and this is the foundation of the true Christian life. There is also adventure, wonder, awe, and the most noble warfare to be waged for the sake of the kingdom.

          The true kingdom life is greater than any tale that has ever been woven by the mind of any man. This is what we are seeking not to just understand but to live. The Great Commission is the call to that greatest of adventures and the mandate to everyone who will hear the call to join us.