This article first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 edition of In Touch Magazine. For reprint permission contact the Director of Public Relations at 1-800-251-6227.

By Jim Holm

In the Old Testament book of Isaiah (49:1-6) God gives his Servant the responsibility to teach all the nations of the earth the salvation of God. In the Great Commission in Matthew 28, Jesus gives the same charge to his followers: “Go and make disciples of all the nations.” In elaborating that assignment, Jesus instructs his followers to teach these new disciples to “obey everything I have commanded you.”

That phrase strikes me as a powerful mission statement, for a church and for a seminary: “Teach people to obey everything I have commanded, and expect that it is possible to do this.”

I’ve wondered if those words of Jesus could serve as an effective mission statement for Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary as we enter our fiftieth year of ministry. The seminary is a place where students come from the nations. Each of these students is seeking training that will enable them to teach or influence other people. Our students will scatter throughout the nations of the world. If they learn to obey all the commands of Jesus, then they can teach others to do the same, thus fulfilling the Great Commission. However, many people act as if they don’t really believe that Jesus meant what he said here. How could Jesus have expected us to obey everything he commanded? What he probably meant, many assume, was that we should make a good effort at it. We should try to reach this high standard, but recognize that we will fall short again and again.

I assume, however, that Jesus meant what he said here – that he believed it was possible to obey all of his commandments. It must also be possible to do so naturally, without becoming either a legalist, in which I try to prove how good I am by keeping sore of how many commandments I have obeyed; or a Pharisee, in which I judge my performance in comparison to yours and decide that I may not be perfect in this obedience thing but at least I am better than you are. I believe that Jesus meant that we could live in obedience to him naturally, so rather than trying to be good we would become the kind of people from which goodness would naturally flow.

If that is true, how does one obey the commandments of Jesus? First, we need to understand that Jesus himself said there were only two great commandments, and that if they were obeyed, all the rest would flow from them. The two commandments, he said, were to love God with everything we have, and to love our neighbors in the same way. Both commandments are about love. If we learn to love God and to love people, and to do both of those things naturally, we will be fulfilling Jesus' mandate to obey his commandments, and we will be able to teach others how to do it too.

Stop and float around that word “naturally” for a moment. How does something become natural? Something becomes natural when it becomes a habit. Habits, in turn, are formed by practice. So, if we could begin to practice some things until they became habits, we would learn to do them naturally, so they flowed from us.

Now, what habits could lead us into obeying these two great commandments of Jesus? The best answer to that question is to look at Jesus himself. What did he do that indicated he was obeying each of these commandments?

Take the first one. Jesus said the first command was to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength. So what did Jesus do? If we look at the life of Jesus, we notice that he spent extended periods of time alone with God. Perhaps that is a clue to his relationship with the Father. We leave our work behind and we go off somewhere to be with God. We tell God that we are a little awkward at this because we have never done it consistently, but we are available and if he wants us to know something, he should figure out how to tell us.

Or we may notice that Jesus spent time in fasting, and we assume that may have contributed to his relationship with God. So we start to fast, asking the Spirit of God to teach us as we go along. Further, we may notice that Jesus memorized scripture so that he had it in his mind and could bring it up any time he needed it. So we begin to memorize scripture.

All these are things Jesus did. We can do them. Not one of them is impossible. If Jesus did these things so that they became habits, perhaps if we do the same things we will begin to have the same kind of relationship with God that Jesus had, and we will find ourselves obeying the first commandment without really trying. It will be natural.

Then we ask ourselves how Jesus obeyed the second command, to love one’s neighbor. We notice that he entered into a small group of people with whom he shared his life intimately and he invited the others in his group to share their lives with him. So we decide to find a small group and begin to love and pray for the members of that group.
Or, in another way, we may notice that Jesus forgave his enemies, even when they were nailing him to the cross. We decide that we will attempt to do that, because Jesus did it. As we get better at it we find that it comes more naturally. In the third place, we may find
that Jesus prayed for people, and so we decide to pray regularly for them too, asking God to do what God wants to do in their lives.

If we do these things consistently, until they become habits, we will find that we are becoming more and more like Jesus, and we will be like him naturally, without trying and trying and trying to be good.

At Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary, we are teaching the teachers of the nations to obey everything Jesus commanded. Then they can teach the nations to which they will go in ministry. That’s a noble mission, one into which we can pour our lives.