The Great Commission

If you turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 28, Matthew chapter 28 and the last section verses 16 through 20, Matthew 28, 16 through 20 in the text reads this way. Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.

And when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth have been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. Father, we ask that you will give us help to understand your words this morning and that they could be applied to Providence Baptist Church in order that the church would become healthier in the days to come.

For the only way, Lord, for your church to be healthy is for her to be obedient. We pray these things this morning by your spirit, in Christ's name, amen. Briefly, I began to preach when I was 16 years old.

I didn't come from a line of preachers. My dad was unconverted, my brothers were unconverted, but my dad took me to church. Every time the doors were open, he just wasn't saved. But I'm thankful that my dad at least had the sense to take me to church.

And it was because of that that I came to conversion. I believed upon the Lord Jesus Christ. I was baptized when I was eight years old. And I've been in church for 55 years. But I started preaching when I was 16.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition. I was a part of a typical Southern Baptist church. I knew nothing else. I was never a part of anything else. And so it was ingrained into me that we have to get people to profess faith in Christ.

We have to do whatever it takes to get people to make a profession. And so that's what I grew up in. And the way you did that in church and the preaching perspective of it was as you preach the message and at the end, you did anything that you could possibly do to get people to acknowledge Christ.

To the degree that you would get people to raise their hand to acknowledge Christ. You could even get people to wink their eye. You could even get people that have their heads bowed to look up and make eye contact with the preacher.

There was all types of ways you could get. And it even got to the point that we would even count those. That every person who looked me in the eye, I would count. And every hand that was raised, I would count.

And I would profess that we had 15 saved during the service because they were able to look me in the eye or raise their hand. I even preached funerals. And I would ask people not to be ashamed of the gospel, that if they wanted to respond to Christ, they needed to stand up in the midst of the funeral.

And I would have people stand up and I would acknowledge four or five people got saved in the midst of the funeral. I'm just telling you, that's what I grew up in. That's what I did. As a result, I became an evangelist.

I traveled around preaching these types of things. In my heart, I think it was genuine. My motive was genuine. And I wanted to see people converted. I wasn't trying to be deceptive. I didn't have an intention to be deceptive.

In my heart, I wanted people to be saved. I think that's right. I think that's good. I just think some of the mechanics were out of order. Nevertheless, I continued on and in some sense, you know, preached in a lot of places.

And then God did the strangest of things. He called me to pastor a church. Boy, it got complicated then. I was never going to pastor a church. I thought pastors were worthless. I thought they had no faith.

I mean, the guys get paid every week. I mean, how much faith does that take? As an evangelist, I never knew if I was ever going to get paid. These pastors got it easy. Get paid every week. They got a house to live in.

It's all great. I'm just flying by the seat of my pants hoping God would give me some bread to eat, right? I had no clue how difficult pastoring was. I had no idea what I was talking about. I became a pastor.

And then it got really hard. Now, I'm not exaggerating or making up numbers. I'm not trying to impress you. I'm not actually all that excited about the number, but in my first year, we baptized about a hundred people.

A little bitty church. I mean, it's not a big church. I mean, it's a church like this and you baptize a hundred people. Everybody says, amen. Yeah, that's great. It wasn't all that great. Why was it not great?

Well, it got complicated because the hundred people I baptized, I spent every waking moment, six days a week, going to their houses, trying to get them to come back to church. What is going on here? A hundred people profess faith, they get baptized into baptismal waters, and they never come to church.

They never sing. They never worship. They never read the Bible. They never go on missions. They never evangelize. As a matter of fact, they just never come back until they die and I preach their funeral.

And then I'm supposed to say they're in a better place. I started wondering, what am I doing? What am I doing as a pastor? How am I helping people in any way? So just to be clear, I made the primary of my ministry to go.

To the degree that I didn't have a secondary. Everything was go. Go win. Go preach. Go, go evangelize. Go, go, go, go, go. That was the totality of the ministry. That's the primary I had, but that's not the primary of the text.

There are churches that don't do any evangelism. There are some churches that do quite a lot of evangelism. There are some, maybe even in this room, that are quite neutral. A few members do some evangelism and a few do nothing and a few more don't really care either way.

Now, I'll be fair. I think a lot of the blame lies upon the pastor because he's the leader. And so when the pastor doesn't do evangelism, the church usually doesn't do evangelism. When the pastor leads in evangelism, there's at least more opportunity that people will follow that example.

Pastors are the example. They should exposit the scripture. They should lead by example in order to fulfill the command that Christ, our Savior, has given us. Now, in history, there's a man by the name of Saul in the Old Testament.

He's the king of Israel. And I'm just going to pull a couple of verses in an excerpt to make my point as I go into this message. Saul received a clear command from the Lord. It's not hard to understand.

You may not like the command. I personally don't like the command, but it is clear. You didn't have to go to seminary to figure out what the command means. And here's the command that Saul received. Now, go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all they have.

Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. I don't like the command, but that's the command. When he was later confronted by the prophet Samuel, he says, blessed be you to the Lord.

I have performed the commandment of the Lord. So I have done what God commanded. That's what he tells the prophet. Samuel replies, what then is this bleeding of the sheep I hear? You remember the command, kill the sheep, but there's sheep bleeding.

Obviously you have not fulfilled the command. Later Samuel says, the Lord sent you on a mission. And this is what he said to you, Saul, go, that's in my text this morning, go, devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites, fight against them until they are consumed.

Why then did you not obey the command? Notice, you'll get it as we get there, he went, but he didn't obey. He went, but he didn't obey. The obedience to the command was not fulfilled, even though he went.

Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord? Saul responds, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the mission that the Lord sent me on. And this is what Samuel says, has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord?

Behold, listen, to obey, to obey, to obey is better. To obey is better than sacrifice. To listen than the fight of rams. For rebellion, rebellion to what? The command. For rebellion is the sin of divination.

And here's the wickedness of sin, it's presumption upon the goodness or the favor of God. God is going to be okay with me doing the secondary, even if I don't fulfill the primary. God's good, God's kind, and we'll just keep going and keep ignoring the primary, and we'll keep doing the secondary, and God will just overlook the fact that we're not obeying the primary.

That's what Saul says. And presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king. When God gives a clear command, it is imperative that full obedience becomes the goal.

The message to the church, Christ gives a command. Our responsibility is how can we fulfill the command that is given unto us. Partial obedience or preferred obedience. Partial or preferred is still, at the end of the day, disobedience.

This is what I like doing. I like to preach. Right? You pastors in here, I like to preach. We went out here on the street, stood up on the hill, up on that rock, me and Cody, got the half-mile hailer up there, just preaching John 3, 16.

I like to preach. I preach right on the hollow, I love it. We went down, we got on the square right by the stop sign, we preached right in front of the grocery store. It's just preach. I love to make Christ known.

I prefer that. Partial to that. But what is the clear primary command that the Lord has given? And I would submit to you that disobedience to the primary command must be repented of and corrected. And I hope that you can do that here.

My text is fairly simple. In verses 16 and 17, there is an appointment with the teacher. Look again at your text. It's not going to be anything profound here, but simply set it before you, 16 and 17. Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee.

Just note 11. Judas is no more. This is important because of something that sometimes we miss, and I'll show it to you. There's the 11 with the teacher in Galilee. And they went to the mountain, to the place which Jesus had directed them.

They saw him. When they saw him, they worshiped him. And then there's that lingering little contrast. But some of these 11 still have some doubts. Pastor, you have to get this and hear it. It's going to be very important for you in a moment.

He said, out of these 11, they're worshiping, but even amongst those 11, some are still doubting a bit. It's the doubters that bother us. It's those that are not fully committed that wear us out. It's the doubters that cause us to lose sleep at night.

Jesus understands this. There are some who are doubting. Very simply, I say to you this. In this text, verse 16 and 17, there is a teacher. There is a teacher. Who is the teacher? It's not complicated.

The teacher is Jesus. So I'm the one preaching, but I'm not the teacher. In this text, Christ, the Lord Jesus, is the teacher. He has students. He has a church of 11. At this point, that's what the text says.

There's 11. He preached for three years perfectly. He never sinned. He did everything right. Not one error. He preached to masses, crowds. He fed thousands. He's got 11. Let it sink in. You're not that great of a preacher.

I'm not that great of a preacher. Christ was perfect. Three years of ministry, of perfection, and he's got 11. And some of them doubt. What is a disciple? Someone who follows Christ. Someone who is learning.

Someone who is growing. Someone who is producing fruit. This is what a disciple is. They've fallen in love with Christ, and they're following him wherever he leads. We used to sing, I will go. I'm going to grow.

I'm going to read my Bible. A disciple is, let's put it this way, one that's becoming like Christ. I don't know if you're disciples. I don't know you. I don't know where you're at. But I know what a disciple is, is a person who's becoming like Christ.

And I know what it takes to become like Christ. You have to be born again. You have to be in a local church. You have to be fed the word of God. You have to be strengthened on the faith of doctrine and theology.

You have to live these things out in obedience. And then over time, I think that guy's a disciple. There was a place, and the place was designated by the teacher. Meet me on this mountain. Some worshiped, some doubted.

It's always going to be the case in church life. It's never going to change. There's always going to be some who get it and some who do not. And I will even tell you this, there will be many who will deceive you, even after years, because you think they're disciples when they're not.

Now look, I've been in ministry a long time. And I've walked with brothers on the mission field. I've done evangelism with brothers. I've served side by side in so many situations to see guys apostatize and never come back.

It breaks your heart, but it's not going to change. But what do you do with it? What do you do with this reality? You don't know Jesus's ministry? Do you want to go too? You want to leave also? All of these have left.

All of these have turned away, thousands and thousands and thousands. Are you going to go too? I stood up on the hill with Cody. I said, Cody, I don't know what you're doing here, but you better not depart.

Jeff, you better not depart. Don't apostatize. Just because we're doing ministry together in Perryville community doesn't mean you're a disciple. You're a disciple if you make it to the end. You got to stay through.

But what do you do when you try to do ministry to people who apostatize? You appoint a place and you sit down and you teach. That's what Jesus did. After all these people departed, there's Jesus opening his mouth and teaching the 11 that remained.

First Baptist Church of the Mountain. We must continue to teach disciples at an agreed location, even if some of them are doubtful. Your teacher in bodily form is Alan Nelson. Your disciples, whoever you may be, are the ones who are trying to become like Christ.

The place you meet is Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas in this building. And you hear the teaching where you can grow and be a faithful disciple. Faithfulness is required in order to obey the command that Christ has given.

Number two, verse 18, look at your text, verse 18. Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Translate maybe this way. Jesus having come, spoke to them saying, authority, all authority.

What authority? The right to control, the right to command, absolute power. If you need that in a visual form, his authority is of such surpassing magnitude that he could tell the wind to stop blowing.

He can tell the waves to stop rolling. He can tell the blind to look. He can tell the deaf to hear. He can tell the man with the withered hand, stretch forth your hand. He can tell the man who is lame, take up your mat and walk.

He can tell the dead man, come out of the grave. This is authority that we know not of. This is the authority that is possessed by Christ. All authority. You remember early in another gospel, Mark, I think it's in Matthew as well, but they ask him, the religious people ask Jesus, by what authority are you doing these things?

Who gave you this authority? The error is in the question. They thought his authority came from someone else. Who gave you your authority? If you follow that passage, he never answers them. You don't have to answer them.

His authority is inherent. He's always had authority. He never received it. He's always possessed it. Well, what kind of authority is this? It's the kind that extends above the heavens. It's the kind that extends all the way around the entire globe.

There is no place on planet Earth or any other planet or any other star or any other galaxy or any other universe where Christ does not have authority. If he says, come, you come. If he says, go, you go.

Even a centurion would understand this. Look, you don't have to come. Just say the word. Just say the word and he'll be healed. I understand authority. I tell this man, go, he goes. I tell this man, come, he comes.

I get it. Jesus, just speak. This is the authority that we have in our text. And so here's Jesus on the mountain with these 11 with all authority that's been given to him over all of heaven and over all of Earth and he's giving a clear command.

Those under authority are responsible to submit to that authority. The whole church must submit. Not to me. I'm leaving tomorrow. I really don't even care if you want me to or not. I'm leaving tomorrow.

The whole church must submit to the command of Jesus' teaching. There's no option. If we don't submit, we're in disobedience. The church that doesn't submit is rebellious. The church, it's like, it seems safer if we just take it in a collective sense.

The church must submit. The church is made up of individuals. You must submit. You hear the command today, it's applied to you. You say, well, my church. No, no, he's talking to you individually in this text.

And you hear the command from the one with all of authority. The response is, yes, sir. You've spoken, you're right, I'm a slave, you're the master, and I gladly and delightfully follow what you have commanded me to do.

Verses 19 and 20. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. I do not want to bore you with some kind of grammar lesson, but grammar is important. But at least let me make the point where we don't miss it.

I know this grammatically from the Greek language. I know that a participle cannot be the main verb. I'm not smart, and I'm not trying to impress you with smartness, I just know that a participle cannot ever be the main verb.

There is a main verb here, and as you look in your English text, you get four choices, and you're struggling as you look because you got the word go, you got the word make, you got the word baptize, and you got the word teach.

And you look at those four words, and you're like, which one is the main one? Well, go is a participle. Baptize is a participle. In English, they helped you, they put baptizing. Teaching is a participle.

They put ing on their teaching. So I know that go and baptize and teach are all participles. That leaves me with only one option left, and that's this word make. Make is the main verb of the passage. The command is emphasizing that the responsibility of the church is to make something, a disciple.

They have gone into the world, they've been sent out. They've gone on several missions already that Christ has sent them on. But the main point of the command is to make disciples. Now, try to bring some clarity.

If you match this passage with the Gospel of Mark, now hear me well, what I'm gonna say does not exclude going, but we must understand the main emphasis of the text. In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 16, the parallel passage, you have a similar word, go.

Again, a participle. Going into all the world, what are we gonna do? We're gonna proclaim the Gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

You've got going, but instead of making disciples, you have the word proclamation. We're commanded to make a disciple, we're commanded to proclaim a Gospel. Those are the commands in Matthew and Mark.

Make a disciple, proclaim the Gospel. They're not battling each other. There's no war between making a disciple and proclaiming the Gospel. They are both working together to fulfill the teaching of what the teacher has taught.

It is in a right proclamation of the Gospel that disciples are made. It is the faithful preaching of the word of God week in, week out, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, that disciples are made.

Now, bear with me just a little bit. You don't have to believe all of this next section, but just bear with me a little bit. Because the Southern Baptist, for centuries, has missed making disciples, what we have done in this era of growing up and getting all of these professions of faith and getting all of these numbers on the mission field, on these mission trips for one week here and one week there, and we come back, 75 people got saved, 80 people got saved, 90 people got saved, and then we started building churches in towns.

There's 100 churches in my town, and all these people are professing faith, and almost every church in my town has got about 40 capacity. All these people that have made professions, but they're not actively involved in the church, and then whatever's remaining in these churches under all these numbers game, when a faithful pastor comes, when a faithful pastor comes, and he opens up this book, and he moves beyond the surface mentality of going and just doing stuff to get a profession, and he starts digging and mining out the word of God, word by word, phrase by phrase, line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, and book by book, here's what happens.

They fire him, and if they don't have the ability to fire him, they leave the church and tell everybody in town how terrible he is. Why? Because they were never made to be a disciple. They just made a profession in the midst of the hubbub of all the going.

Raised a hand, winked the eye, attended the church, but now we got this pastor who's trying to act like everything in the Bible matters. They get uncomfortable. They start calling names, writing stuff on farce book stuff, how bad that church is.

Now they got some stinking tent out there. What are they doing? Right? He said, when the word starts coming, look, I know, I understand what I'm talking about. They had a church of 168 people and they all left but seven.

Look, I understand. Yeah, when you start trying to make disciples of those who are just professors, things get very complicated. The command to proclaim does not negate or minimize the command to make disciples.

The commands must be linked in harmony. We proclaim and we make disciples. The two are wed together. Just like in Leviticus, they're the warp and woof of the command. One without the other or one to the detriment of the other destroys the very heart of what Jesus is commanding.

Now, I don't know if you know what I'm doing, but I know what I'm doing. I'm setting you up and I'm gonna put you in a position that you got to deal with something. Let me try to do something like this way.

Here's some problems that happen when we prioritize the wrong thing of the command. What if, as I've already stated, we make all the priority on going? Let's say we decide that that's the main thing we're supposed to do in this command.

Here's what's gonna happen. There will be a lot of activity with no defined purpose and we'll just glory in the activity. Some people might go with the gospel. Others will go with humanitarian aids. Others will go with some kind of personal agenda like to make everybody a family integrated church or to make everybody an abortion church or to make everybody some political persuasion of their liking.

Or some may try to make everybody swallow some eschatological pill like the one they're serving. They just go and they generate their activity and at least they're busy. Some will go and dig wells. Others will take food.

It'll look much like the Red Cross. Others will build buildings. Others will go and will do dental missions. Fix teeth. It's in Hezekiah chapter 22. Others are gonna bring clothes and shoes. I'm not going and say, hey man, I'm going to Mexico.

I'm gonna go out here by San Luis Potosi out here and they don't have no shoes. And you know what the Americans did? They gave me all the shoes they didn't want. Two boxes, they had old shoes that nobody wants to wear and they felt good because they gave their old shoes to a bunch of people they're never gonna meet.

Others, we go out with the IMB in Mexico and we went house to house to find a strong man. What is a strong man? If you find a strong man, we'll start a Bible study with him. I'm like, I don't even know what this means.

I'm not making that up. It really happened. To go without submission to the command to make disciples inevitably produces humanistic results. Listen to the lingo. I went to the abortion clinic and I'm supposed to be impressed?

I went out and preached on the streets. Okay. I filmed it on Facebook. Whoop-de-doo. I don't have Facebook so I'm never gonna see it. Well, I did this and I did this and I did this and I did this and all these phrases are being said by these overactive, overzealous people traveling all around the country doing all of this stuff and I'm sitting here looking at this text and I'm going, but have you ever in your entire life made one disciple?

Have you ever invested and cried and wept and worked side by side with somebody to make them a disciple? Well, I do a lot of going. Whoop-de-doo. What if we put all the emphasis on the word baptizing?

We can have baptismal events. Hey, I know we could get a fire truck and we could spray water and all the people come into the water, we'll pronounce them saved. That really happened. We could go out on the West Coast with some of the evangelistic meetings and out there on the coast, we could have a baptismal service with thousands.

This recently in our history and all these people are baptized and I'm thinking, do you know one of those people by name? Have you spent even one cup of coffee with any of the thousand you baptized today?

Do you actually know anything about their conversion? No, but bless God, we're baptizing. Baptized without counsel, baptized without understanding, baptized without personal convictions, baptized without the fruit of genuine conversion.

I've been teaching new members classes for over 20 years in my church and every single class I go through, I find out that the person in the class doesn't even understand why they got baptized. I just baptized Matthew Jones and he's there in my church.

We're going through the new membership class, just one guy in the church. He's like, I think I need to be baptized. Why is that? Because when they baptized me, he said, I don't have the foggiest clue what I did.

I didn't know nothing. He just got dumped. And then when he's discipled and shown, he's like, oh, that's what I want to do. Then he stands in the waters and he reads out his testimony, how the gospel was preached out of Acts 2 and he was cut to the heart and he needed Christ.

And when he received Christ, now he wants to be baptized in a church and profess his faith to everybody. That's different. When a disciple is made, then he can be baptized with great rejoicing. What if all the emphasis is on teaching?

The teaching would be subject to a wide variety of sources. Some would teach from sources that are weak or anemic. Some would teach from personal opinion. Some would simply regurgitate things that they were taught in the past, which is much of what the church does is just regurgitation of things they've said over and over and over and over without ever actually examining the text.

Some would teach in a way that just perpetuates the heresies that continually float around in the church. Some would miss the very point of the passage. The teaching to be done is that they, they. Who's the they?

The disciples that were made. The teaching to be done is that the disciples who were made would keep the command Jesus gave, and what he commanded was to make disciples. Ah, now we're somewhere. What are you doing?

What are you doing? Exactly how many disciples have you made? Who are you individually? Who are you discipling? Who? Look, let's make it simple. It's not hard. You're a father in this church. Are you discipling your own son?

Are you discipling your own daughter? In your home, it's your home. It's your living room. In your living room, are you opening the Bible and reading the Bible to your child, showing them the gospel and discipling their soul?

That, sir, is your responsibility. Not going, not baptizing, not teaching in that extent, but making disciples out of your own children, your own grandchildren. Are you discipling them? Let me ask you another way, man.

There's a lot of men in this church. Let me ask you this. Are you discipling your wife? Well, I preach over here, I preach over here. I went to the jail, I went to the abortion clinic. I went out there and I did this and I did that.

Yeah, and your wife is starving to death and it's your fault. You are responsible for your wife. Look, I don't care if you ever preach to thousands. If you don't disciple your own wife, you are a hypocrite.

Your wife is valuable. Look, take it from somebody that knows. I know what it means to preach every night. I know what it means to be gone all the time. I know what it means to leave my wife at home to raise the kids while I'm out doing these grand old things while she's at home laboring to make ends meet.

And I finally realized I must repent. My responsibility primary is to make a disciple and my wife is a disciple. It's my responsibility. What about in the church? You know, you got a friend? I keep hearing people say turkey, turkey hunting or something.

I thought they was talking about me, but they kept saying turkey. You can turkey hunt together? Is that, can you do that in Arkansas? You can, two guys can get together and go turkey hunting? Can you not get together and read a chapter of the Bible?

Talk about it? Could you get together and work on Deuteronomy 6, four through nine? And hold each other accountable to memorize the text? Could we have a cup of coffee every Tuesday morning, weekly in order to discuss what we're reading in order that we can grow?

I just care about your soul more than I care about your turkey. Could we just do that? Could we just meet down at the local restaurant and let's read the Bible together where we can be better disciples?

That is what the church is supposed to be doing. You say, I thought we supposed to win the world. If you can't disciple people, you're never gonna win anybody. We must make the main thing the main thing.

And let me say another word, at least to the ladies here. Look, it's hard to cook. It's hard to do the laundry. It's hard to clean the house, especially when you're married to a jerk. I get it, it's difficult and you labor and there's no appreciation, there's no thanks, there's no accolades.

They never put you in front of the church and clap for a great job that you did. They don't do any of that. And it's almost like sometimes women feel like they're forgotten. Dear lady, you have a valuable ministry.

Those babies that you have birthed are under your care, disciple them. Show them Christ, pray over them, read the scriptures to them, model what a godly woman is in order that they can follow Christ. And I assure you, when you get to heaven, the Lord will bring all things into being and he will reward you for faithful service.

So precisely why we must make the main thing the main thing. The church, having gone, produces a membership that is made up of true disciples. It takes decades. It's not gonna happen in five years. I'm not sure that it'll ever happen in 10 years.

It's gonna take longer than that to find out who disciples are. The church baptizing exhibits baptismal candidates who can give the testimony to the saving work of Christ as all disciples ought to be able to do.

All these years, do you believe Christ? Do you wanna get baptized? That's not disciple making. They need to be able to say, I came under conviction of my sin. I knew that without Christ, I was gonna go to hell.

I repented of my sin. I've trusted Christ. Christ is the perfect substitute. They need to be able to say something. You say, people don't know that kind of stuff. Teach them. Well, you use that word propitiation.

It's big, not big as Mississippi. Explain stuff, teach, in order that people can grow. Look, my five-year-old daughter could tell you the definition of propitiation when she was five. She'd say, Daddy, that's the removal of wrath.

How'd she know that? I taught her. It's what we do. The church teaching generates a culture among the membership of people who put a high priority on the word of God because true disciples are bound to a book.