The Gospel Commission: Recovering God's Strategy for Making Disciples by Michael Horton

Author:Michael Horton [Horton, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christian Ministry, Discipleship, Evangelism, Missions, Christian Theology, General
ISBN: 9780801013904
Google: OQ1DuAAACAAJ
Amazon: B00B1KIIXY
Barnesnoble: B00B1KIIXY
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

Spiritual Gifts, Personal Prayer, and Evangelism:

Means of Gratitude

In addition to the public means of grace, there are instructions in Scripture for personal disciplines of prayer, meditation on Scripture, and evangelism. The means of grace—preaching and sacrament—are God’s strategies for delivering Christ to us and to the world. The arrow points downward, from God to us. We do not go and get it; God comes and gives it. Yet Scripture mandates a variety of spiritual disciplines for our proper response to this grace. As we see in the covenant that Israel made with God at Sinai, the appropriate response to the terrifying command “Do this and you shall live!” is “All this we will do” (see Exod. 24:7). However, the appropriate response to a free gift is gratitude. The Heidelberg Catechism calls prayer “the chief means of gratitude.” In addition to corporate prayer in the public service and in family worship, we follow Christ’s example of regular times of communion with our Father through the mediation of Christ and the indwelling power of the Spirit. Through the means of grace, the Spirit delivers Christ and gives us the faith to answer back, “Amen!”

Through the means of gratitude, we grow in our response. A baby begins to communicate by crying. Later, parents instruct, “Use your words.” Jesus even gave us a model for these appropriate words in the Lord’s Prayer. If it is true that one cannot have a personal relationship without knowing certain things about the other person, it is also true that a genuine relationship involves regular conversation. God speaks to us through his Word, and we speak to him in prayer. Even here we are not just left on our own. In the Bible (especially the Psalms) we find not only God’s Word—his lines in the script—but our own. Silenced by the fall, we are given our voice back by grace. Learning to pray properly is included in the “all things” that we are to teach to everyone. We don’t need more clever strategies for communicating with God: prayer labyrinths, rosary beads, icons, and video clips. We need to meditate on God’s Word and pour out our hearts to him in prayer.

For the formal ministry of preaching, sacrament, the prayers, teaching, and discipline, Christ instituted offices. Nevertheless, all believers share in Christ’s anointing and are therefore called to address the Father in the name of Christ, without any other mediator, and to witness to Christ with their neighbors.

At various points throughout this book I have suggested that we need to recover important distinctions without letting them turn into oppositions. This is just as true when we consider the relationship between the gifts that Christ gives for the public ministry and the gifts that he gives to all the saints. The New Testament does not allow us either to collapse the distinction between ordained ministry and the wider exchange of gifts in the body of Christ or to create a hierarchical model that separates the servants from the served. Christ

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