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Matthew 28:16-20

Matthew 28 Sermon: Authority, Doubt, and the Command to Make Disciples

Matthew 28:16-20 gets preached at missions conferences, ordinations, and the start of a new year, because it reads like a mission statement handed straight from Jesus. But the text is more careful than the plaque version of it: the eleven worship and doubt in the same verse, and the command to make disciples rests entirely on an authority the preacher has to name before the church can act on it. A sermon here has to decide whether the weight falls on somewhere else or on the person two pews over.

The text at a glance

  1. The eleven disciples go to Galilee, to the mountain Jesus had told them about, and when they see him they worship him — though verse seventeen adds, plainly, that some doubted.
  2. Jesus opens not with a command but with a claim: all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, and everything that follows depends on that claim being true.
  3. The main verb is make disciples, not go — going, baptizing, and teaching are the means by which that one command gets carried out among all nations.
  4. Baptism is named in the threefold name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching is defined as bringing people to obey everything Jesus commanded, not merely to know it.
  5. The passage ends the way it began, with presence rather than absence: Jesus promises to be with them to the end of the age, which is what makes the command bearable for people who know their own doubt.

Three ways a sermon can go

Authority as the ground of the command

The command to make disciples is a therefore — it follows directly from Jesus' claim to all authority in verse eighteen. A sermon can spend its weight there: showing that mission is not motivated by guilt or urgency but by who Jesus already is. This requires resisting the pull to rush past verse eighteen to get to the more quotable go, since the command without its ground becomes just another task.

Disciples, not decisions

In the sentence itself, make disciples carries the weight; going, baptizing, and teaching describe how that one command gets carried out, and teaching is defined as bringing people to obey, not merely to agree. A sermon here follows discipleship past the moment of response into the slower work of obedience over years. It costs the preacher an easy ending — there is no altar-call moment that finishes what verse twenty describes.

Worship and doubt in the same room

Verse seventeen refuses to clean up the disciples before Jesus commissions them: they worship, and some doubt, in the same sentence. A sermon can take this as permission to name doubt honestly in a congregation instead of treating it as disqualifying. This angle asks the preacher to leave the tension standing rather than resolving it by the end of the sermon — Jesus commissions the doubters along with the worshippers, and the text does not explain how.

Where sermons on this text commonly slip

Making go the whole command

Go is a participle, not the main verb, but it is the word that ends up on the missions-conference banner. Sermons that build everything on go can leave a congregation with either travel guilt or a vague sense that mission means somewhere else, when the passage's actual weight falls on making disciples wherever the listener already is.

Smoothing over verse seventeen

It is tempting to present the eleven as fully resolved before Jesus speaks, because some doubted is inconvenient for a triumphant sermon. Skipping it trades the text's honesty for a cleaner story, and it removes the one verse that lets a doubting listener hear the commission as meant for them too.

Turning the baptismal formula into a doctrine lecture

Verse nineteen is often preached as a proof text for the Trinity, which is a fair use of it, but a sermon that stops there can lose the sentence it sits inside — a command to disciple, not simply a formula to defend. Traditions read baptizing them differently — who is baptized and by what mode — and a sermon does not have to settle that fork, but preaching this verse as though the practice were settled everywhere is its own mistake.

Five questions to ask afterwards

  1. Did the sermon connect the command to make disciples back to verse eighteen's claim of authority — is there a moment on the recording where the preacher says why the command follows from who Jesus is, or does the command arrive without a because?
  2. Did the sermon mention verse seventeen's but some doubted, and if so, what did it do with it — named it and let it stand, or moved past it in under a sentence?
  3. Track how the sermon spent its time between go and make disciples — did go get treated as the main command more than once, or did make disciples stay the center it is in the text?
  4. If the sermon touched baptism in verse nineteen, did it name the threefold name and keep baptizing tied to the discipling process, or did it become a separate topic on baptism practice unconnected to the rest of the passage?
  5. Did the closing application name one person, one week, one specific action a listener without a passport could do — or did it end on let's be more missional, a direction with no action attached?

Keeping the application on the ground

Go and make disciples can stay a direction — let's be more missional, let's care about the nations — which nobody can fail and nobody can point to on a Tuesday. A landed application names one person and one action: not share your faith but this week, tell one specific person one specific thing Jesus has done for you. For this text, the action should be sized to make disciples, not to go — most listeners will obey this passage without leaving their zip code.

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