The Great Commission Has One Imperative
“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”
Matthew 28:18–20 · ESV
Read the Great Commission slowly and count the verbs. Go. Make disciples. Baptize. Teach. Four actions in one sentence. But in the language Matthew wrote, only one of them is a command. “Make disciples” is the imperative. The other three are participles, supporting verbs that lean on the one in the center. Going gets you to the person. Baptizing marks his entry into the family. Teaching him to observe everything Jesus commanded is the long work of the middle years. Making disciples is the assignment.
That does not make going optional. The grammar hands those participles the full force of the command they serve, and a church that never goes will never make anyone. But it does tell you what the going is for. Travel is not the point. Arrival at a person is.
We need this because the supporting verbs are easier to measure. A church can send teams every summer, count baptisms every year, and fill classrooms every Sunday, and still be unable to name one person it is deliberately walking toward maturity. All the activity around the command can be present while the command itself goes quietly unobeyed. Jesus did not ask for decisions. A decision takes a moment. A disciple takes years, because the curriculum is not information but obedience: “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Observe, not just know.
Now notice what Jesus wrapped around his one imperative. Before it: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” After it: “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The command sits between an authority nothing can overrule and a presence that will not leave. That is why an ordinary believer can take it up without panic. You were never asked to produce disciples by your own strength. You were asked to obey a command backed by all authority and accompanied the whole way.
One more thing. The command has a built-in multiplication clause. A disciple, by Jesus’ own definition, is someone taught to observe all that he commanded, and this command is part of the all. Make a disciple properly and you have made a disciplemaker. The Commission carries its own seed.
From the Field
When DMM commissions a disciplemaker, whether inside Walker State Prison or in one of our partner churches, the word is chosen on purpose. It is the Great Commission brought down to the scale of one person’s obedience: entrusted with the deposit and sent to make disciples who can teach others also. More than 500 men and women have been commissioned to date, and the number that matters most is the generation after them.
This Week
If “make disciples” is the one command, who is the one person you are obeying it with?
Go Deeper
The Master Plan of Evangelism
Robert E. Coleman (Revell). Sixty years in print because it keeps proving true: Jesus’ own strategy was never the crowd but the few he trained to reach it.
Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus
Mark Dever (Crossway, 9Marks). A short, practical manual for doing the one imperative inside an ordinary local church.
What Is the Great Commission?
R.C. Sproul (Ligonier, Crucial Questions No. 21). Fifty small pages that define the terms — gospel, evangelism, missions, discipleship — so the Commission stays as big as Jesus made it.
Next week: what Paul actually deposited — the content of the gospel, not merely a technique.
Lee Truax
President, DiscipleMaking Mission
