“Making Disciples of the Trinity” (Matthew 28:16-20)
1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word this Father’s Day weekend, but also the time in the Church year that we recognize that we worship God as Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, comes to us from Matthew’s Gospel in chapter 28 beginning at the 16th verse. It’s entitled, “Making Disciples of the Trinity,” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. What does it mean to worship God as our Father? On this Trinity Sunday we recognize how God the Father has called us to be His children through His Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. God the Father has made His Son Jesus known to us through the power of His Holy Spirit as He works through the means of grace in His Word and Sacraments to create saving faith within us and keep us in that faith. In John 1:12-13, John the Apostle writes, “To all who did receive [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” Here from John’s Gospel we learn that all of us who have received Jesus Christ as our Savior have been made children of God. And where can we as Christians look to when God has made us His children? Through the waters of Holy Baptism.
3. That’s why we learn of what our Lord Jesus told His disciples about baptism and teaching people the Christian faith in Matthew 28:16–20 says, 16Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
4. Notice here how Jesus says we become His disciples. It’s through being baptized into the name of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and being taught the very teachings of our Lord Jesus through His Word. When our Lord uses all nations he is implying that all people are to be baptized into the name of God, not just adults, but infants as well. After all, when you are born into a specific country you become a citizen of that country. And since we’ve been baptized into God’s name, it’s a privilege that we can call God our Father. You may not know this, but many passages in the Muslim holy book the Qu’ran, explicitly deny the fact that God can be Father to those who follow Him. To be Father, many of these passages say, would imply some kind of sexual and physical fatherhood, and thus this idea is rejected in Islam. Muslims consider it blasphemous to call God “Father” and can have difficulty relating to the Christian meaning behind this subject.
5. The fact that we as Christians can call God our Father and ourselves His children through the waters of Holy Baptism teaches us many things. First, we must understand that Muslims are right to say that having God as our Father in a sexual sense is blasphemous. But of course that’s not what the Christian doctrine of the fatherhood of God teaches. In John 8:39–47, Jesus tells the Pharisees that their actions reveal who their true father is. The devil. The fatherhood of God is to be understood in an ethical sense — those who obey God are those who have Him as Father. Secondly, in understanding God as Father, the New Testament emphasizes the special love God has for His children. As 1 John 3:1 teaches, “see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” Finally, when the Bible calls God Father, it’s not teaching that He loves all people without any kind of distinction. As John 1:12-13 teaches us it is those who believe in Jesus who have the right to become children of God. And the words of our Lord Jesus in Matthew 28 teach us that we come to be His disciples and believe in God as our Father through the waters of Holy Baptism.
6. The German scholar Joachim Jeremias has argued that in almost every prayer that Jesus utters in the New Testament, He addresses God as Father. In fact, here in Matthew 28 He tells His disciples to make disciples by baptizing in the Father’s name. Jeremias notes that this represents a departure from Jewish custom and tradition. Though Jewish people were given a great number of names for God in prayer, significantly absent from the approved list was the title “Father.” To be sure, the Jews would use the term “Father” indirectly by addressing God as the Father of people, but never by way of a direct address, in which the person praying addressed God in personal terms as “Father.” Jeremias also notes that the serious reaction against Jesus by His contemporaries indicated that they heard in His addressing God as Father a blasphemous statement by which Jesus was presuming, by this address, an equality that He enjoyed with God the Father. Jeremias goes on to argue that there is no record of any Jew addressing God directly as Father until the 10th century AD in Italy, with the notable exception of Jesus. Though Jeremias’ findings have been challenged in some quarters, it remains a matter of record that Jesus’ use of the term “Father” in personal prayer is an extraordinary use.
7. It is true that God has only one child, His only-begotten Son Jesus. We don’t have the natural right to call God “Father.” That right is bestowed upon us only through God’s gracious work of adoption through the waters of Holy Baptism. This is an extraordinary privilege, that those who are in Christ now have the right to address God in such a personal way as “Father.” It’s because of this that we ought never to take for granted this unspeakable privilege bestowed upon us by God’s grace. We note in the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus instructs us that now when we pray, we are to refer to God as “Our Father.” And this relationship is grounded in the unique ministry of Jesus by which, through adoption, He is our elder brother and He gives to us those privileges that by nature belong only to Him. Now, by adopting us as His children through waters of Holy Baptism, Jesus says that we may regard God, not only as His Father, but as our Father.
8. Notice how Jesus says to His disciples in Matthew 28 that they are to “Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.” This implies that making disciples of Jesus is more than believing that He is our Savior. We’re not to be content with the basic and elementary truths of God’s Word, but are to grow in depth of understanding and application of the Word as it undergirds our faith and stimulates our Christian living. The Church’s task is to make every Christian a “theologian” who can correctly apply Law and Gospel in his or her own life and in the lives of those around him or her. Jesus backed up His command with the promise that He would be with His disciples always.
9. Did you notice here in Matthew 28 that we can’t make Disciples of the Trinity unless we go to people? As we apply these words to ourselves, we certainly will want to include supporting mission work at home and overseas. But, at the same time, especially this Father’s Day, let us not overlook how this work begins at home in our families. The responsibility that God gives to mothers and fathers is to bring up their children in the fear of the Lord. We do this by bringing them to church to be baptized, by teaching them God’s Word at home, bringing them to Sunday School, maybe involving them in a Christian Day school or High School and taking part in family devotions. It also involves bringing them to confirmation class where they can learn what it means to be baptized into the family of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
10. On this Fathers’ Day it’s unfortunate that many people will remember that the term Father isn’t held with much high regard in our society. In many commercials and TV shows the father is the bumbling irresponsible fool. Watch an episode of Family Guy or even Everybody Loves Raymond. Society does not value fathers and honestly many fathers do not value their role as father and treat their children as afterthoughts. This has become the case even in church. It seems that a major factor of children not attending church into adulthood is that many fathers do not attend church with their families. In 1994 the Swiss carried out a survey that asked several questions to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation. The result was dynamite. There was one critical factor. It’s the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children. Basically, the gist of the study was if fathers go to church with their children, then chances are that their children will when they grow up. If fathers don’t, even if the mothers do, the children won’t go to church. It may be that the Lord has made it easy for fathers to carry out their calling to bring their children up in the instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). All you’ve got to do, dads, is take your kids to church. For it’s in church that your children will learn about how they have become children of God through the waters of Holy Baptism and have been given the privilege to call God our Father through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
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