The Story Behind "147: What Jesus Told Us To Do"

How did this process begin and how were these commands of Christ chosen?

Dec 17, 2024

As I outlined in a previous article, I’m writing a devotional on each of the 147 commands of Jesus. These are the 147 “all time commands” of Christ, by all time I mean Jesus told his followers to do something and those commands apply for all Christians at all times.

So, how did I get to the 147? What choices were involved was used in arriving on this important list? Let me narrate that journey in seven stages:

Stage 1: Following Max’s Hunch

The story started when Max Lucado had a hunch. As I revealed in this article, I’ve been working as a researcher for Max for nearly two decades. He writes the books himself. I just do the nerd work, the kind of stuff that makes it into the footnotes to make sure everything is well cited and quoted appropriately.

I had a phone call with Max early on in our working relationship. He told me he was thinking about writing a book about fear. He said he wasn’t sure, but he thought it was possible that the most common command of Jesus was “do not fear.”

This sounded far fetched, and to make a bold claim like that required a whole lot of backing. Over the years I’ve learned to trust Max’s hunches, as his instincts and familiarity with the Bible are sharp. However, the motto of a researcher is the old Russian proverb: “trust; but verify.” So, I dove into the extensive process of figuring out how one might know what the most common command of Jesus is, and whether you could prove that it was to not fear.

Stage 2: All the Commands of Jesus?

First I had to locate every time Jesus gave a command in the Bible; a.k.a.: an imperative, which is defined as “giving an authoritative command.” Sometimes people call it “the imperative mood.” I know, for myself, I sometimes work myself into “an imperative mood” around the house and start giving orders. It doesn’t go well.

Maimonedes compiled a list of the commands of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), the famous 613 commands of the Jews. The prayer shawls of the Jews (tallit) are symbolically connected to the 613 commandments. Each tassel has eight threads, when doubled, and five sets of knots, making for 13. Added all up it makes 613 (they say… I for one have never counted them.)

It may be surprising for you to find out that there are in fact more commands in the New Testament than in the Torah, with 700 passages in the New Testament that could be construed as commands.

Stage 3: Isolating the All Time Commands

Next I needed to find just the commands of Jesus, and which of those commands were time-specific and only applicable to the situation at that time. These were the obvious ones, such as Jesus telling the crowd to “sit down” (Mark 8:6) or telling the disciples to “prepare the Passover feast” (Luke 22:8). They are imperatives, but are just giving directions for something specific for “that time” which could not be interpreted as applying to other disciples in “all times.” If there was a judgement call on these, I left them in the list, only removing the obviously situational commands.

By eliminating passages that were redundant (such as gospel accounts that were from the same story) I first narrowed it down to 334 commands that Jesus himself spoke, and then narrowed it down to just those that apply to all Christians at all times.

Stage 4: The Most Common Command of Jesus

In this process I was able to confirm that more than any other command, Jesus told us to not fear or worry and to have courage instead. Jesus gave this kind of command 21 total specific times to “not be afraid” or to “not fear” or to “have courage” which are often rendered as “take heart” or “be of good cheer” in some translations.

But if you want to get stringent and only use a one word restriction, the command to not fear is still the most common. There are exactly nine times that Jesus specifically commanded someone to “not fear” (phobia). So even if you press this issue right down into the original language with one word we find more times when Jesus told us to not fear (phobia) than he did to love (agapao). There are only eight instances of Jesus commanding us to love (whether it be each other or God or enemies, etc.)* To love is the most known command of Jesus but to not fear is the most common. So, Max’s hunch was right, the most common command of Jesus was to not fear.**

This data emphasizes that fear is a subject we should examine for frequency’s sake alone.** So that’s the story of how this research bolstered the content of Max’s NYT bestselling book, Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear which came out in 2009.

Stage 5: Comparison and Confirming

Even though my work on that specific project for Max was done in 2009, it was just the first half of this story. I became somewhat obsessed for many years about this list of the commands of Jesus, and I began to grow in my convictions about the “back half of the Great Commission.” I talked about this nuance in the introduction article to 147: What Jesus Told Us To Do.

Along the way in my search, I found two other authors had done some studies on the subject for their own work. One was a pastor in Rhode Island named Scott Finkbeiner who suggested in 1998 that there were some 500 commandments of Christ recorded in Scripture, with around 200 of them having, in his words, “universal application.” Another was Peter Wittstock who released a book in 2004 on the subject of the commands of Jesus. Wittstock found 400 commands of Jesus in the gospels, then narrowed those to 125 that parallel my definition of “all-time commands.” He did a lot of original language work evidenced in the text that was helpful as well.

In my estimation, the other parts of Wittstock’s book tilt too far into his own commentary and opinions on the church—but the large middle section of his book on those 125 commands is great and helped me cross reference a lot of the commands to confirm them. As I further refined my list, I ended up including more commands that I think could be interpreted as all time than Wittstock, but fewer than the 200 from Finkbeiner.

Stage 6: Thematic Compiling and Grouping

I enjoyed fine tuning my list through the years but I couldn’t seem to find a way to actually use it. To be honest, it just seemed like too much information to communicate to anyone else. So I sat on it, just tweaking it here and there.

Little did I know that a 100-year-old work would change things. I came across an attempt to grapple with the commands of Jesus by an Evangelist named J. S. McConnell all the way back in 1925. His best feature was grouping the commands of Jesus into different categories thematically. I didn’t use the exact same groupings and the titles given to each, since like most people back then he used older English terminology like “covetousness” and “brethren” that are not well used today. Also, many of the “commands” in McConnell’s list are not commands in fact. Sure, they are good lessons and truth that we can derive a “command-like” instruction; but in this effort I wanted to be as strict as possible and focus on the actual commands of Jesus.

However, McConnell’s work ended up giving me the idea and structure for how I could present the commands of Jesus in a way that would be digestible and applicable. So even though my 147 list is quite different than McConnell’s and more strictly aligned with the commands of Jesus, I did follow his example and reorganize my list of the commands of Jesus into twenty-one different groups of commands that are linked thematically to aid in remembering and reinforcing them.

Stage 7: Testing and Use

Now that I had something of a guide, I began to use it in a few settings. Since there were seven commands of Jesus in each of the twenty-one thematic categories, it seemed most logical to me to write it up as a disciple-making guide or daily devotional that would line up with the days of the week. Simple, right? Seven commands a week for twenty-one weeks.

When I lived in another country for part of 2023 I had a whole lot of alone time and so I dove into writing this as a daily devotional. I’ve decided to release it as 147: What Jesus Told Us To Do, a gift to paid subscribers to DruGroup (a paid subscription is just $36.50 a year, or ten cents a day.) I hope this will be a significant added value to your life, and compared to other Substack subscriptions it offers much more for a lot less. Perhaps you might enjoy it yourself or even get a paid subscription for someone you love this year for Christmas.

You should know that if you don’t get a paid subscription I am still offering my near-weekly regular writings to free subscribers. So don’t worry, you’re not losing anything you currently enjoy. But I thought even my free subscribers would like to hear about this project from time to time along the way.

I do all this and my regular writing with my usual intent of helping you in your faith and work. I hope they help you cultivate a deeper, more intimate relationship with Christ, one characterized by a consistent lifelong engagement in the things Jesus actually talked about and told us to center our discipleship around. May you continue to grow toward the light each and every day, adding some of the motivation of what Jesus told us to do along the way.

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