Though unrelated, it reminded me of the movie Quo Vadis where the Christians who were martyred and eaten by lions in the Roman collosseums simply because they refused to denounce Christ. Their glorious testimony was that when their mangled and half eaten bodies were assembled for burial, their faces would be smiling in peace, which horrified the Romans!
When thinking about Matt 28:19 (make disciples) individualistically, we Christians tend to dichotomize our Christian lives. We regard all activities directly related to “disciple making” (preaching, Bible teaching) as of greater value than all other activities of life, such as our secular professions, loving and spending time with our own families and friends, etc. I think that this unnatural dichotomization makes Christians look weird and sectarian, while Jesus, the ultimate Christan was loved by the worldly and the irreligious (prostitutes), but hated by the moral and the religious (Bible studying Pharisees).
]]>