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Commands of Jesus: Introduction · The Bible in 3D

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Greetings. Welcome to the Bible in three d. This is your host, Andrew. Today, we are starting our second series and this is entitled the commands of Jesus. The commands of Jesus follows naturally after our first series which was the slaves of God.
• 0:28
  In that first series, we looked at the things that were required of a person who who was following Jesus, and one of those was to obey his commands. We didn't flesh it out too much, so that is what we're going to do in this series. What are the commands of Jesus? As an interesting exercise, you could sit down at a table with a piece of paper and a pen, and I would challenge you to write down as many of the commands of Jesus that you can remember. I expect most people will get three or four.
• 1:02
  Well, how can we obey the commands of Jesus if we don't know what they are? In fact, why even bother why is it important? Jesus states clearly that the only way to show that we love him is to obey his commands. Let me read some verses here to you. Jesus is in the upper room during the last supper.
• 1:28
  This is an important time. It's his last meal before the crucifixion. It's his last opportunity to talk before the crucifixion to teach his disciples, soon to be apostles. He does some graphic things like a demonstrative example of servant leadership by washing the feet of the disciples and saying, if you're gonna be a leader, you gotta serve. He gives them the ordinance of communion, the bread and the wine.
• 1:55
  And he spends a long time in chapter fourteen and fifteen, and this is in the Gospel of John, talking about the importance of obeying his commands. Let me read John fourteen fifteen. If you love me, you will obey what I command. John fourteen twenty one, whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my father and I too will love him and show myself to him.
• 2:26
  If anyone loves me, this is now John fourteen twenty three twenty four, if anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own, they belong to the father who sent me. We now go to John chapter 15 verses nine and ten.
• 2:52
  As the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love just as I have obeyed the father's command and remain in his love. We know that we come to him if we obey his commands. This is now one John chapter two verses three through six.
• 3:18
  We know that we have come to him if we obey his commands. The man who says I know him, Jesus, but does not do what Jesus commands is a liar and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him. Whoever claims to live in him, Jesus, must walk as Jesus did.
• 3:45
  Again, first John two three through six. Let's go to first John chapter five verse three. For this is love of God that we obey his commands and his commands are not burdensome. How many commands of Jesus are there? Obviously, we can't just say God wants our love more than our obedience because clearly that's not true.
• 4:09
  Jesus has said over and over and John of course echoes it in the epistles, the only way we can show we are in Jesus is if we obey his commands. I went and did a search online and found half a dozen people who had went in scripture and counted up the commands of Jesus. How many how many do you think there are? Well, most of the people that I looked at, they came up with a number that was somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty. There's one wits out there who comes up with more than 400, but this guy's double counting.
• 4:48
  So if Jesus gave a command and that command is repeated in all four gospels, the wit would count that as four. The rest of us say no, it's one command given four times. I decided that, you know, I had the time and the resources and I sat down and said I'm gonna do the same thing. Now, this is gonna take you some time if you wanna do it. I sat down in front of a computer with a word doc and a bible and a magic marker and I went through all the gospels, first few chapters of acts and of course parts of revelation where Jesus gives commands.
• 5:29
  And I wrote them down, and of course I wrote chapter and verse where to find them. Then I went through and just, you know, put all the the doubles together. And what did I come up with? Strangely enough, a number that was over 200, less than two fifty. Well, that's the easy part.
• 5:47
  How do you how do you study this? How do you study over 200 verses? Okay. You've got two or three memorized. You you got 240 to go.
• 5:59
  Is that doable? Well, it is if you get organized. There's a man, Dawson Troutman, and he started the Navigators Christian Ministry. I guess it was 1933, he died in 1956. He was trying to save a girl who was drowning and he drowned himself.
• 6:24
  Austin Troutman did something absolutely incredible. I I won't go through the event, but if you read about his life, what prompted him to get into starting the Navigators, and it is really a ministry to disciple people. Before Dawson Troutman, there really wasn't anything in in the Christian evangelical world to disciple people. The only way you got discipled is you went to church and Sunday school and you listened to pastor. And then over time, you know, you you would gather what you needed to do and and that's how you got discipled.
• 7:05
  The Catholics have had catechism for a long long time. I remember as a small child, elementary school Friday afternoon, all the Catholic kids left school, went next door to the Catholic church so they would go through their catechism class. I think it's the Baltimore or catechism. Maybe it's the Baltimore greater catechism. And so these are a series of statements and questions and, you know, and the Catholic kids would just go through all these things.
• 7:39
  And so you'd read it, somebody would read it to you. In fact, the baby boomers made a very disparaging play called, I think it's sister Mary Elizabeth explains it all to you. And it all had to do with trying to memorize the catechism. All of which to say discipleship is not easy. But this Dawson Troutman, he he was just a genius and he laid the groundwork which everybody has built on ever since.
• 8:11
  The navigators, at least in the beginning, and this is what I went through, my wife and I, after we got saved, was their primary discipling tool was the short form is DFDs, designed for discipleship. Now I believe that that has proved burdensome to people who don't really want to study or take the time and I think they may have some alternatives now, I don't know. But he went further. He he was into Bible memorizing. Well, Bible verses rather.
• 8:52
  And he used pictures. So he would start with okay. First one we're gonna look at is salvation, and he'd have a diagram. And then there were 12 verses that went with the diagram. Now if you've ever done any of the navigator stuff, they used a bridge diagram, and they had 12 verses, and basically they were they made six points, but there were two verses for each point and you would memorize the 12 verses, the picture helps you to put it together, You would answer questions.
• 9:27
  You had to do a little work before you showed up for this session, but somebody would lead a small group of people through. Now that was very useful on military basis because, hey, young people have to learn discipline. And so this this was easy compared to basic training, you know what I mean? This is a little harder to sell on college campuses and I think other Christian ministries have been a lot more popular on college universities and campuses. Having said that, my point here, again, we've got some 200 and some commands of Jesus that we really ought to know because how can we love Jesus if we don't know what they are and don't do them, right?
• 10:13
  These memory verses would come typically 60 at a time and you have five packs of 12. Well, got through the first, I got through 60. I think I got through maybe half of the next section. So I got through about 90 verses. Can I do them all today?
• 10:36
  No. I knew a professor at Talbot and he could do them all, but then he studied it at least once a week. So he had a, you know, a ring binder and and he had all the memory cards and they were all laminated and put behind plastic pages. And he would just go through maybe once a week or however often he did it. So it has to be a constant, you know, refreshing his mind.
• 11:04
  I say that because I realize that how do we get our hands around this? Now that brings me back to Dawson Troutman. His very interesting way of some bible memorizing, some pictures, you know, they've got well, you can take a look at the navigators, you can see all their different diagrams pictures. It was a very interesting way to put things together and help people to understand and get their arms around it. That's kind of what we need to do here.
• 11:41
  Fortunately, as a lawyer I witnessed when I was doing appellate work, I was writing appellate briefs for the juvenile court trial attorneys and I had a counterpart in San Diego who had been doing this for decades. And it was a pretty murky area of the law. And he had developed this index to put together statutes and case law and all these things. So the first thing you would do is go to this index and that helped you to find very quickly what you needed. So instead of, you know, spending hours doing research, this kind of honed you down and pointed you where you needed to go.
• 12:27
  I learned from that and then when I became counsel for the public pension fund, Again, there had a law called the 1937 act and it was terribly poorly written. It was first came out in 1937 and it was amended every year I swear. Since 1937 and the people today would amend it with no thought for how it conflicted with what came before it and conflicting court cases, you know, depending how woke people are or not. And so having saw the value of putting to systemizing something, I could see that that was important. So I've gone through at least three formal discipling programs and the first as I said was designed for discipleship by the navigators.
• 13:26
  And I've shared before if you heard any of my other work, yeah, got an MDiv and I was doing it at nights and weekends because I was a full time attorney. Took me nine years, three different seminaries. First seminary I went to, and I've shared this before, was ISOD, the International School of Theology which had been started by the organization formerly known as Campus Crusade, I think they call it CRU now. So I started taking classes there in the year 2000. And first class she had to take was she had to do all of her discipling program.
• 14:02
  Now it was very good. It was certainly not as rigorous as the navigators, but it was very very good. And of course, I guess it was the next year, Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade retired and the guy that took over for him, I think the first thing day, the first hour he shut down the seminary. I'm not quite sure on all those facts, but he shut it down very quickly after becoming the president. So I ended up somewhere else, said Talbot.
• 14:36
  The important thing is not only going through a second evangelism program excuse me, discipleship program, was that we had this project at the end, and I can't remember how many sets of discipling material, probably five or six. And so we had to go through these and see some commonalities, maybe what was different, but the idea is that yes, you need to go through our Campus Crusade discipling, but realize there are other resources and so, you know, always pick the best you can find, you know, here and there. Alright. I went through that one. I went through a discipleship program.
• 15:21
  It was only nine lessons. Again, very very good. And it was called one one to one discipling. It was by Al and Lorraine Bloom. And I don't imagine they're still around.
• 15:34
  Again, very good. I I've since used all of that stuff to do some discipling programs that I had taken people through. I had gone through the one to one discipling and I had taken a couple men, two or three men through that program as well. Now I lived shortly after we get back from England in a working class town. Everybody was in the construction trades by and large in our community, our church.
• 16:03
  Some of these programs were maybe just a little intimidating to people who maybe didn't do a lot of reading. Okay? People who didn't do a lot of memorizing. In fact, guys that really didn't like to be in school at all. And I like to teach, so I come up with some discipling programs myself As little as four classes.
• 16:26
  But, you know, get people started. Now with all of that as background, having a systematic way to study anything, The other point I wanted to make here is I noticed and I think everybody else in my class at eyesight, when we were looking at other discipling material, everything is laid on the bedrock that was planted by Dawson Troutman. Now, you go to a megachurch and I can guarantee you they will not lower themselves to use a discipling program from some Christian missionary because mean, I I've seen this so many times now. You go to a megachurch and well, we have our own. It's just as good.
• 17:12
  Well, I'm sure it's just as good, but in fact, they all come from the same roots. And it's just the genius of that man, Dawson Troutman, that has given us the discipling programs and they got all kinds of different colors and, you know, flavors, but they're teaching the same material. So I sat down with back to Commands of Jesus. I sat down with this list. I got all the doubles, put them together, and I said, okay.
• 17:46
  How can I systematize this? There's nobody I mean, I spent a lot of time getting through 90 verses. I can't imagine doing 200. Yeah. There'll be an exception out there, but but I don't know them.
• 18:01
  As I was looking at this, looking for commonalities, again having done this in my professional life, I said, let's start. Where are the common things? And I started grouping all of these Bible verses together in affinity groups. And strangely enough I came up with 12 groupings. I guess it's a magic number, right?
• 18:26
  Or maybe I forced it into 12. Well, we'll see. I am now going to read you the 12 groupings and we will have a separate episode on each one of these groupings. You could take each grouping. Let's well, I'll go through them first and we'll talk about it.
• 18:44
  The first is salvation. What are the commands of Jesus about salvation? Number two, evangelism. What did Jesus command about evangelism? And I'm sure most of us know the great commission and salvation, you know, John three sixteen.
• 19:03
  Number three, there's a whole group called dealing with others. You know, I don't think anybody's gonna memorize 200 and some commands. But these 12 are very easy and even if you don't remember them precisely, you're gonna say, gee, something has come up. Okay, didn't he didn't he have a grouping on dealing with others? What did Jesus command about that?
• 19:30
  There's number four, humility. Jesus speaks a lot about humility and gives us commands. How about his commands on how to pray? Number six. He gave us commands about the Lord's return.
• 19:47
  The faithful servant or slave, if you've been to my first series in this group, is watching and waiting, using the resources that God has given him to further the master's plan. Number seven. Oh, this is one that causes us trouble but it's there. Obeying civil authorities. I had a very interesting question from the Got Questions Ministry and it came from somebody in India who wanted to go out and protest the Hindu government for oppressing, you know, other people groups like Christians like him.
• 20:30
  Well, what does it say about what you can do and what you can't do? Number eight. Planning for life. How should you plan for life? Then there's a grouping and I don't know how to describe it other than to say, beware.
• 20:47
  Jesus gives these commands but the first word and all the commands are beware. So these are commands to be vigilant about danger that you are facing. You go through that and you go, yeah, I need to spend some time so that I can be wise in the world. Number 10. What we've just been talking about, what does Jesus say about obeying his commands?
• 21:14
  Well, we talked about several of those today. Number 11. What is our relationship with God and what does Jesus command about that relationship? And then the fourth grouping is called the blessings and woes. You know, woe to you who cause a little one to stumble.
• 21:39
  That's a command. Woe to you. You know, those who help the widow and the orphan blessings. These I think 12 categories will just take one at a time. And I have a one pager.
• 21:57
  And you can probably take you half an hour maybe at the most. You can even use these one pagers in a Bible study or Sunday school. You can say, hey, let's break the commands of Jesus down and we'll just talk about all the evangelism ones today. I was explaining this concept to an adult bible Sunday, Sunday school class, and had a guy in the back who was not happy. Turned out he was a senior pastor.
• 22:27
  He goes, oh, this is silly. We don't need to to know all this stuff. I said, well, why is that? He goes, I only need to know two commandments. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.
• 22:47
  So I don't need to study the rest of these. I said, what do you do with chapter fourteen and fifteen in John? Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he's the one who loves me. If you're not doing my commands, then you don't love me. Well, I love Jesus so I must be doing his commands.
• 23:08
  As you might guess, we didn't stay long in that. I showed respect for the guy. I'll tell you what I wanted to do. I actually saw a major do this. My flight commander do that.
• 23:19
  He got a flight check and the Czech pilot is asking him some questions and so he refers to his his book, you know, check by says, no no, you should have that memorized. Because I got a checklist, it's in the checklist, I don't have to memorize it. Well, I think you should memorize it. So the major just goes over, takes his checkbook out and he rips the page out of the checkbook, throws it on the floor. He goes, well, if I'm gonna memorize it, I guess I don't need this.
• 23:53
  Well, that was a little cheeky. But that went through my mind and of course I didn't do it, which was to go to this guy's bible and rip out John fourteen and fifteen and go, well, I guess you don't need this. I didn't, of course. When Jesus was asked by the older Pharisee teacher, what is the greatest commandment? Now in context, he was asking Jesus of the 10 commandments, which do you say is the greatest?
• 24:28
  And of course, Jesus answers the question but not in the way that was expected. He says, there are two great. And the greatest of course is loving God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and loving your neighbor as yourself. Because in this all of the law is encapsulated in these two commands. And you say, well, there you go.
• 24:49
  I don't need to know anything else. Yet when Jesus is teaching chapters five through seven, which is the sermon on the mount, he says, you have heard and he recites one of the 10 commandments, you know, thou shall not murder. You've heard that 10 commandment. Then Jesus says, but I tell you, I command you, do not even call your brother a fool because that is just like murdering him. Hey, clearly Jesus did give other commands that isn't gonna come to you easily by the greatest and second greatest command.
• 25:32
  Jesus said, you have heard do not commit adultery. One of the 10 commandments. But I tell you do not even look at a woman with lust because you've committed adultery with her in your heart. I was telling this to somebody, I was a cadet. And I was telling to this guy who was a cadet, I was telling him about this and he happened to be a wrong Catholic and he goes, oh no no no no.
• 25:59
  That's not in there. That's not in there. And he was shocked to hear that it was. That looking at a woman in lust is like committing adultery. Well, he was a smart guy and he did go on to become a four star general.
• 26:15
  So, you know, I guess he figured all those things out. Okay. I'm being a little flippy because I wanna keep you engaged with me as I go. Alright, let's get back to my pastor guy there. I think it's even more cheeky to say you don't have to study the commands of Jesus.
• 26:41
  I've come up with a systematic way that we can do this. Now as you go through with me, if you've got comments, you think I could do it better, I could change something, if you can come up with a diagram, all that would be helpful. Walk with me as we go through the commands of Jesus. This is one of those things where I think every every couple of years or so, you can just sit down and go through it and go, oh yeah. And it's so much easier to get your arms around them when you study them in affinity groups like all the ones on evangelism.
• 27:20
  Well friends, thank you for listening in and I hope you stay with me through the next 12 episodes. Let us go to prayer. Gracious father, we thank you that Jesus has given us these commands. Please help us. Give us power for patience and endurances as we go through these and open our hearts and our mind.
• 27:44
  We thank you and praise you in Jesus name, amen.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Bible in three d. We're so grateful for listeners like you. Your encouragement helps us create and share more transformative content that strengthens communities worldwide. If this episode inspired you, consider supporting our nonprofit mission with a donation at cogrewsmedia.org. Also, be sure to check out our other podcast, biblical reflections, for more faith insights.
• 28:18
  God bless.