The Great Commission and Disciple Making

This is the end of the final completion of what Matthew is trying to get to us. And the book of Matthew, from the very beginning all the way to this, is focused on this single section of the Bible. It's this single section of Matthew's writing. So it's a very important and strategic book. And this passage is very important and strategic to the whole book. So what Matthew is doing is sort of bringing the culmination. Now all the Gospels end differently. Matthew's ends this way. And it's because he has in his mind an addressing Christ to the Jewish community. And he's using this method to be able to help them understand the great picture about what God is trying to accomplish through the life of Christ and what his ministry is about and what their role is. Jesus called his disciples earlier in the book. I think chapter 4 is an indication of his call for them. And in this very beginning he was letting them know what he wanted. And this is kind of the beginning of the theme of this book. In Matthew 4, verse 18, As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. Come, follow me, Jesus said, and I will make you fishers of men. And once they left their nets and followed him. Now when you read through the book of Matthew, you do not find anywhere that Jesus held a fishing seminar for these disciples. He never mentions this pattern again. But we see when you get to the end of the book what he meant by making them fishers of men. He uses this language to describe, to discuss with them because they are fishermen. But he uses it to talk about what he's trying to do with his kingdom service. Now, as Jesus was working with his disciples in chapter 10 of the book of Matthew, he called the disciples. He's begun to teach them what he wants them to do. And in chapter 10 of this book, beginning with verse 16, Jesus begins to practice what he's talking about in the final chapter. He says, I'm sending you out like sheaves among wolves. Therefore, be shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard against men. They will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues. On my account, you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. But when they arrest you, do not worry about what you are to say or how you are to say it. At that time, you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the spirit of your father speaking through you. Now skip to verse 26 of the same chapter. So do not be afraid of them. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed or hidden that will not be made known. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight. And what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the housetops. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your father. Even the very hairs of your head are numbered. So don't be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows. Jesus, in this second section, He told them He was going to make them fishers of men. In this second section, chapter 10, He is showing what the mission is. I want you to go out into the community and I want you to tell them the kingdom of God has come. It's near you in your own mind and mouth. This was what He meant by being fishers of men. They were to announce that the kingdom of God was now available and present with them. So whenever He gets to the end of this book, this is what He comes to show us is the primary conclusion of what's taking place. Beginning with verse 18 of chapter 28. Then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Now when Jesus is talking about this position of authority, He'd already had a long time in His ministry the authority of the Father over His own life. He knew what the Father wanted for Him. He knew the direction the Father had planned for Him. And He had been given authority in this world. In chapter 11, verse 27, Matthew records what was said about to Jesus. He says what Jesus said to the people. All things have been committed to be by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father. And no one knows the Father except the Son. And those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. Now you'll notice in this passage that there is a connection of responsibility. All things have been committed to me. It sounds very much like all authority has been given to me. In this last chapter, Matthew is not telling us that now that the resurrection has taken place, Jesus has all authority. He had that in His own ministry from the very beginning. All authority is given to me. What He's doing here is reminding us that He has all authority. Authority in the world is shared by many different levels. People who are in government leadership, kings, rulers. People in lower government relationships, people in church. There are all kinds of levels of authority. But what He lets us know is that in Him resides the very authority of God Himself. God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Son are all wrapped up in Jesus' power and authority. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. I have the right to say to you what I want you to do. Now He draws the same conclusion as what He had said in these earlier chapters in asking the disciples to go out and proclaim that the kingdom of God was at hand. If I have this authority, I have this authority over the world, I have this authority over you, here is my command to you. I think one of the big confusions that we oftentimes have when we try to talk about reaching people for Christ and leading them into the kingdom of God is we don't make it very clear to them what is expected of them. This is what's expected of all people who become followers of Christ. We are to build in them this capacity to be able to do the work that God has given them to do. This is the command and the charge that He gives. Because I have all this authority in heaven and on earth and over you, go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. Jesus' basis on which He gives this command to His disciples is His position of authority. Now He is the ruler of the world, the Lord of all that is in the universe. And these people have said to Him, we give ourselves to you. There is a personal commitment to the disciples who were there because they had said in obedience to what Jesus did that they were prepared to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Him. This is the salvation message. It's not simply believing that there is a God. It's not simply praying a prayer. It is saying to God, I am prepared to give you my life with no strings attached. I am prepared to deny whatever I want in my own life in whatever direction I have. I'm prepared to serve you regardless of the cost. I'm denying myself and I'm taking up the cross. And now what I want to do is live like you. What Jesus was asking His disciples to do is to do for others what He had been doing for them the three years that they had been together. They had been through the schooling. They had seen what Jesus did. And now they were prepared to take on other disciples and train them as God had trained them. There is kind of a disconnect, I think, in many churches in thinking that the task of making disciples has to do with people that are pastors or have much training. But that's not the way the Bible sees this position. Every person is to be involved in this task of making disciples. Under the authority that I have, here's what I tell you I expect of you. Because I have this authority, I tell you, you're to go and make disciples. Now, the word go here oftentimes causes people to think, well, you have to sell your house and move to China or somewhere else in the world to be able to do this. He's not talking about that. He's really talking about in the process of your going, whatever you do, the process of your life, you are to be involved in disciple making. Every believer is to be involved in disciple making. Whether you go to the field and you meet people there. Whether you go to the co-op and you meet people there. Whether you go to the store where you buy your fertilizer. Whether you go out to do an adjustment on insurance policies. Wherever you go, your primary task is to be a disciple maker. Now, what you earn your living doing provides the means whereby you are a full-time servant of God. That's the way God views this. It's not a task for missionaries who are going to leave and go overseas, as challenging as that may be, and some are called to do that. He's telling all these disciples, remember there are about 400 of them here. We don't even know their names, but they were ordinary, what we would call church people, who'd committed their life to Christ. I want you, as you're going about the activities of your life, for you to be involved in this task of disciple making. Now, the word disciples here, make disciples, is a rare kind of word. The two words in our Bible are really one Greek word, and it's used only in Matthew a couple of times. It's used of describing how the scribes in the Old Testament were trained to know the law and dispense the law. And it's used another place to describe what Jesus was doing with His own disciples. So He was saying to them, what I have been doing with you over these three years period of time, I now say it's your responsibility to turn around and do that to the people you lead into the kingdom of God. You are to make disciples of them. This is not a charge to missionaries or pastors, it's a charge to every person who receives Christ as the Lord of his life. And it's the primary task that we have in this world, secondary to nothing. Your job, your family, your life are all secondary to this. It takes the place of precedence. Because the one with all authority said, here is the charge I give to you. You are to make disciples. And how He says this, you are to make disciples of all nations. Now, if you'll remember, when Jesus started His ministry, He was telling His disciples about what they were supposed to do. I think that that was maybe in the fourth chapter too. I'm not absolutely positive about that, Matthew. He charged His disciples when He was sending them out that they were to go out and to proclaim the kingdom of God as it was at hand. But He said to them, and this may be chapter 10, but He said to them that they were not to go to the Gentiles at all. In Jesus' first mission of sending them away, He told them that their mission was limited to only the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Now, Jesus changes what He was talking about. And now He includes in this, yes, in chapter 10, verse 5, the 12 Jesus sent out with the following instructions. Do not go among the Gentiles. The word Gentiles in the Bible, in the Greek language, is the word that we get our word ethnic from. It can mean all people, all different kinds of people, like we would say all languages of people. Or it can simply mean all Gentiles, anybody that was not a Jew. So He says to them in this situation, do not go among these people who are not Jews or enter the town of Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel and preach this message. The kingdom of heaven is near. Now, Jesus makes the same declaration, but instead of limiting this to the Jewish community, now He opens it up to all different groups of people. We would say all races of people, all cultures of people, all kinds of people. So now a new level of the mission of God has taken place. Beginning in the Old Testament, God embraced the Jewish nation. He said these are my people and I'm going to bring through them the message that I want to the whole world. And all the way through the Old Testament that was true. Then Jesus came as the Messiah, and even His mission was limited to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Now, after His resurrection, He comes to say a whole new venue is out before us. No longer are you to look only at the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but this mission I'm giving to you is for all peoples, all nations, all around the world. The new step in which the gospel is taken is demonstrated here. Jesus sees His own work as limited to this nation. Now He sees those of us who are followers of His that it's not to be limited. Instead it's to be opened up to the entire world in what's taking place. Go therefore and make disciples. The end result is everywhere we go we're to be looking for disciples. No one is off limits for us. Everyone is open to this mission that we're given. Now He describes exactly how disciple making is given. Baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We know what the disciple making was. It was teaching them what Jesus had taught these disciples that He had. They were to be taught exactly what Jesus had taught them. And here's the method by which He describes it. This baptism event is new. It wasn't the baptism of John. We don't even know if Jesus did any baptizing at all. He says at one time that His disciples did the baptizing. So it wasn't necessarily the baptism of John that Jesus experienced Himself. But this new life that they were to have is to be reflected in this act of baptism. Now the word baptized in the Bible, transliterated into English in our Bibles, is a new word created. What Jesus really wrote, what He really was given here in the Greek language, was the word, that's a Greek word for taking your donut and dunking it in your coffee. Or taking something that's dirty and a dish and sticking it in the water and washing it. It means to immerse or to dip or to plunge something into liquid. What Jesus was saying to them was, I want you to go out and I want you to tell people to start their life over again with Me. And this is the picture of what takes place. Your old life has passed away and your new life has started. They didn't hear this word baptized. It was a created word. When the King James Version of the Bible was made, the Church of England did not immerse. They didn't know what to do when they translated the Bible. What should we tell people? Tell them to start immersing when after many years we've never done that? So they transliterated this word. Taking the beta from the Greek to make to a B. Make the alpha from the Greek A for our A. And so on until the word was remade. Now this word stands in all of the different groups for whatever formula you use to initiate new believers. But the picture that was given here is, you are to start your life over again. Now that you've entered the Kingdom of Heaven, your old life has passed and your new life has started. This is the picture that's to take place. Now he tells us, you are to do this in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you. The baptism is to be done in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. There are some people who say that there's no such thing as a Trinity. The Bible doesn't teach there a Trinity. But throughout the book of Matthew, Jesus talks to the Father, and He makes it clear that there is a Father and He is the Son. And then when He starts to leave, He tells His disciples, I'm going to leave you, but when I leave, I'm going to send the Holy Spirit. So Jesus talked about all three dimensions of this Trinity, but here He specifically, concretely announces that there is a Trinitarian God. But you will notice something. Baptizing them in the name, not in the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but it's singular. There is one name, three persons. That's where the doctrine of the Trinity comes from. It's clearly spelled out in Jesus' final affirmation of the mission that He's given to these people. The Father has a role. The Son has a role. The Spirit has a role. But they are one God. Now, some people use this as a hard and fast slogan that you have to use when you're baptized. I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There are some denominations that baptize three times. I baptize you in the name of the Father. I baptize you in the name of the Son. And I baptize you in the name of the Holy Spirit to get the Trinitarian command that Jesus gave. In some of these passages, you'll find, for example, in the book of Acts, when that book is written by Luke, he talks about baptism as baptizing in the name of Jesus Christ. He doesn't use this Trinitarian formula in the book of Acts. When Paul writes about baptism, when he's talking about the Jews in Romans chapter 6, he says that they are to be baptized into Christ Jesus. He uses even a different formula that's found here. Now, what that lets us know is these formulas are not magic. For when you baptize someone in the name of God even, you baptize, since they're all one, you baptize them in the name of all these people. This name simply means the character. When you have the character of God, the Father, it's the same as the character of Christ, and it's the same as the character of the Spirit. He's talking about the word name in the Bible almost always refers to what marks that person as an individual person from all the other persons around. So you're talking about a person that you know, and you say, this is Dan Bonine. This will represent who he is, the way he thinks and acts and lives. So the name of a person in the Bible is to represent that fullness of their character. So what he's talking about here is baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, not as a formula, but as a way of letting us know that our baptism is to be a reflection of being absorbed into God's lifestyle. The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. There's no distinction between their character. That means their name. There's only a distinction in the functions that they serve with us. So he announces that this baptism is to bring us out of our fleshly world and lifestyle where our human nature controls our thoughts and minds and behavior, and we're to be absorbed then into the life of God. He comes into our life and then takes control of us so that no longer are we flesh driven, but we are now guided by the Spirit of God, by the character of God, by the character of Christ, by the character of the Spirit. But the Spirit is the one who now controls or now lives within us for guidance. He is implanted in us to be able to guide us, empower us, teach us, and help us to do this work that God has given us to do. The Spirit of God is the very Spirit that guided Jesus, the human on this earth, to the work that he did. Now you, when you surrender your life to God, the very Spirit that guided Jesus will come now to reside inside you. All his wisdom, all his power, all his authority now resides inside of you. If you learn to listen to the Spirit in your life, you will learn how to be able to be connected to God, to have insight into the Scripture. You don't have to go to school to learn all these things. All these Spirits inside of you being able to give you insight into the Scriptures. Helping you to be able to know what you are to say. He said earlier to his disciples, you don't have to worry about what to say. Don't be afraid. For when you get to that place, the Spirit will give you what you need to say. God wants us to be able to do the work that he has given us. And so he gives us the presence of the Spirit that guided his life successfully that it would guide us too. So they are baptized to show this new life has started in the character of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. Now, they have been surrendered to the will of God. They have been surrendered to the purpose God has for them. And now they are filled with the Spirit of God. And now when you go to teach them, they will absorb it and take it. One of the great problems we have, so many people in our churches are not really surrendered to the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God inside of a person motivates people to do what they should do. So when you start teaching, like Jesus was teaching his disciples, there were 11 of them that whatever he taught said, look at that. There was one that said, ah, I'm not buying all that. The greatest teacher in the world could not get Judas to see the truth of what he was teaching. It wasn't because the teaching was bad or faulty. It was because the heart was closed to the truth. The Spirit of God did not reside in Judas. The Spirit of God was not there to be able to help him understand what he should do. He had closed his heart to God. So when you have a person who is in church and they want to learn the great spiritual truths of the Scripture, and their life is not surrendered to God so that the Holy Spirit resides within them, it's like water off a duck's back. It just doesn't take. And no matter how simple you make it or how many times you say it over and over again, if the Spirit is not there, it doesn't come inside their heart. They can't help that. They can't absorb something that doesn't make sense to them. And the Spirit does not come into people's lives except in that instance to help them understand what you need to do is to surrender yourself to God. That's all that they can know at that point about this great task God has. Because the fleshly person, the spiritual things of life just don't make sense to them. You may have discovered when you try to talk to people about what God has done in your life or how you see things or what's important to you that they look at you like, what are you talking about? They don't get it and they can't help it. All they can do is come to the place to say, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Lord of all and I want to surrender my life to His authority and control. Once that happens and the Spirit of God comes in them, and they can learn. They can learn. I've learned this a very hard way. In the beginning of my ministry, I thought, well, you know, if I sit down with people and I teach them these things, one-on-one even, or in a class, they'll all become great disciples of God. It's not true. I mean, you tell them and you tell them and you tell them and they just don't grasp it. And I've discovered that they don't grasp it because the Holy Spirit is not inside them to connect. The Holy Spirit inside of a person is like the interface that God connects with. And if He's inside of you, then He can connect. If He's not in there, no matter what you do, it's not going to work. I don't know enough about electronics to do this, but it's like you have a wireless computer or something you're trying to connect with another. It has to be somebody out there that can receive the signal. I guess that's right. If it's not right, you'll tell me. No matter how much you send the signal out there, if there's not an apparatus out there to take it, then you're wasting your time. The same thing is true here. That's what He's talking about. Teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you. Now, our task in discipleship is to teach people what we've learned. That's why it's important for you to learn. Because your task is to help people around you learn. I get a lot of calls from people that say, Well, I'll tell you what, I've got this person that asked me this and that question and I told him to call you. Well, that limits the ability that we have of being able to disciple a lot of people. And what God's plan was in the beginning is you learn to be a disciple. And then you just tell people what you did. How did you get here? Most of us can tell people how we get somewhere if you've driven along the road, you watch and you say, How did you get over here? You can say, Well, I went here to turn left and right, whatever, and I got there. If you've built something, you know how to tell them to build it. If you have a project that you do, you can tell people how you've succeeded in those projects. We are supposed to be able to do that. That's what disciple-making really is about. You're to teach them to obey everything I've commanded you. Now, I want you to get this. He doesn't say that you're to teach them the Bible. There's a difference between teaching and passing on information and passing on a lifestyle. You know what I mean? Disciple-making is not channeling information from one person to another. It's helping people learn how to live a lifestyle. That's what God's interested in doing, developing in us the character and nature of Christ Himself. That's our job, to teach behavior, not to teach simply knowledge. There's a difference between behavior and knowledge. You can sit down with someone, with a book, in a stand, and you can tell them what a basketball is. You can tell them that dribbling means you go up and down. You can tell them if you shoot it and put it in that basket. But I don't care if you have seven years of training with books about basketball. You're not a basketball player until you get a basketball in your hand and you go out and dribble a basketball and learn to shoot it into the basket. The Christian life is intended not to be an academic pursuit. It is a transformation of lifestyle. And why we're in so much trouble in so many of our churches where there's conflict and resentment and bitterness and anger is because even churches don't have this. People go to church a little while until they get mad at somebody. Somebody gets mad at them and they don't ever learn how to live the Christian life. That is our job to teach people to live like Christ lived. So when He was on the cross and they were crucifying Him, He didn't cuss them out. He didn't say, wait until I get off here and I'm going to teach you a lesson. That's our job. To teach people how to live in a world that is filled with people who don't know how to live in harmony with one another. And churches are just as bad as that. Churches can't get along with each other. They can't solve problems with each other. They don't deal with each other very well. It's because we have not learned to be disciples. Teach them to obey everything I've commanded you. So the test will not be, can you tell me the books of the Bible when you get to heaven? It will be, how did you react in this circumstance of your life? How did you deal with this tragedy? How did you deal with this person that made your life miserable? What did you do? That's the test. The test of Christ's life is shown in the catastrophes that He faced and how He dealt with them. Then He says, when you do this, and surely, certainly, it's really the word behold. Isn't that an interesting word? Not surely or certainly, but behold. Like, you know, when something really weird happens in the Bible, behold, you see something really amazing taking place. And behold, God will be with you. That's amazing to think that He would be with us. And behold, I will be with you always. The language here is not like we translate here in Greek language. I will be with you all the days of the world. That's always, but every day of the world to the very end of the age till the world is over. I promise to be with you all the days of this world. And if you die before the end of the time comes, I'm with you all your life. If you're still alive when it comes, I'll still be with you at the end of all times. Now, I want to warn you. This assurance is given to disciple makers. It's not given to everybody who goes to church or wants to be religious. But this promise of being with us is given to those who keep the command to make disciples by teaching people to obey what God wants. Now, see, what people think about sometimes is saying, well, you know, I can't be a disciple maker because I've not even been to seminary. I haven't even been to college. I don't know what I could do. Everybody can be a disciple maker. If you think about the person that lives to the left of you and the right of you, and you observe their life and you see that they may not go to church, you know from the things that you talk to them about how difficult their lives are, and you can see that there's a difference in the way you are living your life and the choices you make and they are, then that should be a clue to you that they're probably not a disciple. You don't pass judgment on them. But you just try to figure out, you know, if a guy's driving his car down the road and he's going on both sides and hits the curbs on both sides, you know there's something wrong with him. Spiritually, if a person has something wrong with them, you can see by the problems and difficulties they have. You're disciple makers begin when you notice the people whose lives are broken. And when you see that, it's your job then to say, okay, I see a person whose life is pretty much broken up. I'm going to write their name down and I'm going to pray for them regularly. You pray that God would open their heart to His need. And you pray that you will be able to be a friend enough to them that they'll tell you the difficulties that they're facing. You don't have to do anything. You're just praying that God will give you opportunity. And then you ask God, if the time comes when I can tell them what you've done to change my life, I will tell them that. But you'll have to help me. And God will give you the words when that time comes. And if you tell them the story, all you have to say is, this is what happens to me. And I just believe with all my heart that if you did the same thing I did, this will happen to you. That's all you have to do. Anybody can say those words. And then you say, I want to tell you how God helped me to do this. So you think back in your life. How did you learn to become the disciple you are? Everybody has a different story. Alan tells a story about he didn't know enough about the Bible to know where the front and back was. But he came to church with his wife. She was teaching the little preschoolers. He went in there and learned stories. So you might say, you know, he'd go up to the church and go into the preschool apartment with my wife and start out. Then you'll learn the Bible story and you'll finally get to where you know this thing. Whatever your story is about how you got there is a story you tell them. And then they begin to listen and their life begins to be transformed. No one in the kingdom of God should ever have an excuse for not being a disciple maker. It requires only that you are a disciple. You've surrendered your life to God. He's taught you some things that has changed your life. And He's still teaching you things that are going to change your life. And you're looking at people who need to have that change. And you start praying for them. You start making friends with them. When you discover what their need is, you pray for God that you'd have an opportunity to tell them what He's done in your life. And when that opportunity comes, He'll give you the words. And then you invite them to start the journey that you started. That's all God wants. Imagine if we had a hundred people in our church who are praying for two people apiece. We'd be praying for two hundred people. And over the course of the year, two years, three years, how many of those opportunities would come to be able to say, here's what God can do for you. God only wants us to do the things that we're willing to do. He doesn't even ask us to be smart enough to do them. He says, I will put the words in your mouth. But I'm not going to do it without you. So the people you know, I'm not going to save them without somebody who says, let me tell you what God did for me and how He's changed me. And if you do the things that I did, God will change you too. The great task of the church is to have every member in the church who's following Christ to be on the task of making disciples. People like to be upset about the spiritual condition of our country and they blame the Supreme Court and the President and the Congress. But the reason our country has the moral condition it is is because of us. And I just like to accept that responsibility because it's the truth. It wouldn't matter if all the presidents and all the judges were atheists. If the church people were doing their job, churches would be growing exponentially. And you can see it around the world in places where there are people who are trying to live their life for the Lord. I see from people that talk about missions that it won't be very long before China will have more followers of Christ than America. Because they have found something and they're passionately making disciples. It works in every country of the world. This simple plan does. In every country of the world. It only doesn't work in the places where people don't do it. Let's pray. So Father, we see our marching orders. We are to be disciple makers. We ask that You would open our minds, our hearts, and our wills to what You want. We can't do anything apart from You. But we can do everything You want us to do by Your power, Your wisdom, and presence in our lives. I want to ask that You would continue to challenge us. To open our eyes to the needs of people around us. To find You. And to find life. That they might be able to learn to live as You planned us to live. In the name of Christ, we ask for this. Amen.