As we have been covering, “all authority in heaven and earth” has been given to Jesus, but He has not taken that authority over the earth yet. His kingdom is going to come, and His will is going to be done on earth as it is in heaven. All of heaven lives under the domain of the King. Only Satan and the angels who followed him have rebelled from the heavenly realm and were cast down to the earth when mankind rebelled against God. Now the only rebellion against God in all of creation, the physical or spiritual realms,...

          Our God is so big and so wonderful we will be marveling at Him for all of eternity, so it is good to get started! Because the first commandment is to love Him above all things, the ultimate issue by which it will be determined if we are successful human beings or not will be by how much we love God. Therefore, this should be the greatest devotion of our lives.

          Because God is the most lovable Being in all of creation, I am convinced that we cannot see Him or learn anything about Him without loving Him...

          Last week we began to consider the first sentence of “The Great Commission”: “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (see Matthew 28:18). This is probably much more than we can even comprehend in this life. Even so, it is the foundation upon which the rest of the mandate is based, so we should seek to not only understand it, but to let it be a guiding principle of our lives. As we begin to comprehend this, we begin to understand the Apostle Paul’s statement in Romans 8:38-39:

          For I am...

         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...

           As we began to cover last week, our basic mandate as Christians is recorded in Matthew 28:18-20:

“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 always, even to the end of the age.”

          One of the tragic failures of Christianity has been the devotion to making converts...