Pilgrim Soldier

I’ve been thinking a bit about what it means to be a witness of Jesus Christ. This is hardly a surprise as it is the root of the sessional name for next years intake of Salvation Army Cadets. In an earlier post it is mentioned that the idea comes from Acts 1:8, but I’ve been thinking more about what Jesus meant when He said that.

I’ve noticed that we seem to concentrate on 2 passages when we talk about Jesus’ final words to his disciples. Firstly, there is the most obvious Matthew 28:18-20. We call it the Great Commission and I’m pretty certain that most Christian’s can recite it verbatim from which ever version of the Bible is their favourite. The second is the one I mentioned in Acts. That we should be Jesus’ witnesses.

The problem though is that I’m beginning to wonder whether we have limited the Great Commission. Now I’m not talking about the Baptism bit, although I suppose I could from a Salvationist point of view, but instead I’m talking about the “teaching them all I have commanded you” bit. We seem to concentrate mainly on the passages in Mark 16:15-20 and Luke 24:46-49 when it comes to our actual witnessing. Is it possible that we have fallen into a trap of limiting Jesus’ teaching to the bits that are about individual salvation, and concentrating on this?

Maybe this emphasis is not wrong, but it seems like it fails to communicate the whole of Jesus’ teaching. He didn’t only teach on forgiveness and repentance. The majority of his teaching seems to be more about the way we should live as citizens of the Kingdom of God, than about the way we become citizens.