Trinity Sunday - The Mission - 2 - Multiplication

Scripture: Matthew 28:16-20

Matthew 28:16–20 NIV

16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

5/31/2026

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

Almighty and everlasting triune God, we confess that we fail to honor Your unmatched majesty and glory. We neglect our calling to make disciples and care for Your creation. Forgive us and renew us with Your Holy Spirit, that we may reflect the image of Christ’s love in all we do. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Call to Worship

Leader: O Lord, our sovereign, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!

People: You have set Your glory above the heavens.

Leader: Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations.”

People: We come to worship the one who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Leader: Come, let us lift our voices to our Creator and King.

All: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!

Trinity Sunday: Multiplication

Opening

Last weekend, we celebrated graduations, Memorial Day, and the major transitions that those celebrations and memories mark in our lives. Those transitions often feel like they happen too soon. Our scripture reading today marks another big transition. Today is Trinity Sunday, and it marks the end of the first half of the church calendar. It is like the full telling of the gospel, beginning at Advent and those Old Testament prophecies, following Jesus from his birth through Lent and all through the Easter season until the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost, which was last Sunday. Our season ends here with the commissioning of the church.

In many ways, it ended just as it began — Jesus gathering them, teaching them, empowering them, sending them. The difference now was that they had walked with Jesus for three years, watched him die, seen him alive again, and received a full share of his Holy Spirit. Everything before had been practice for this moment.

Good coaches start their practices off with small things and teaching the basics. But before they get into the big games, the work they do in the practice sessions is almost indistinguishable from the real games. Like a good coach, Jesus had given the disciples everything they needed. He had entrusted them with His Word. He entrusted them with his mission of forgiveness. And now he was entrusting the world to them.

Picture this with me. Jesus took them up a little higher on that mountain to look past those villages of Galilee, to Judea, Samaria, the borders of the Gentile lands, the ocean, and everything that lay beyond that—beyond their eyesight, beyond their imagination. It was almost as if Jesus was saying again,

"The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. We need more workers in the harvest."

Movement 1: Obedience and Understanding

We in the church have been guilty at times of reducing this powerful moment down to marching orders and putting it to use in ways Jesus might not recognize. So, before this becomes another reason to feel busy or behind, stay with me in this moment as we see what is actually happening when the church received her mission.

They followed Jesus to this place, just as they had always done. Having come to know him, his love, and the God who he was and is, more than anyone had ever experienced, it says they worshiped him there, just as they would often do every time they found themselves in the presence of Jesus for the rest of their lives.

I want you to notice, here in the text, it says, In this powerful graduating kind of moment, "some doubted." They had been given everything, and yet they were still not immune to doubt. But that didn't stop the mission or stop Jesus from entrusting them with it. That struggle with doubt just became another part of their story that Jesus would work through and redeem every time it appeared.

We see that clearly because those who doubted could have stayed home. They struggled with their doubt, and they followed Jesus anyway.

That's the first thing we need to see and learn from this passage about mission: We follow Jesus before we figure Jesus out. We obey before we understand.

When we serve with Jesus, we don't figure it out first and then jump in and do the work. We follow Jesus to where he leads us and do as he asks us to. Then, as we are serving with him, sometimes our eyes are opened to the bigger picture of what he's doing around us. We trust and obey. As Proverbs 3 says, we "...don't lean on our own understanding, but in all our ways, we acknowledge Him, and He directs our path." ...even when we doubt, because Jesus commissioned the doubters, too.

Movement 2: Authority

The first thing Jesus tells them is that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. Why does he begin here, with his authority? Because this is a moment of graduation for Jesus, returning to his place as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, no longer present in only one place at one time.

Sometimes, in our minds, his declaration of authority makes us think he's handing it over to us, the church, as he leaves and returns to heaven, as if Jesus is going from graduation to retirement without anything in between. But Jesus is not giving up that authority, nor is he handing it over to us like relay racers passing a baton. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, and it's staying with him.

We notice this sometimes in our frustration with mission. When we skip over Jesus as the authority and try to take that authority on ourselves—serving out of our own understanding, serving out of our own strength, just trying to do the best we can—we hit stumbling blocks and roadblocks. Then those people that we want to help, we just can't figure out how to help. The way we talk about them changes: "They just need a little help." "They just need a little love and encouragement." "They just need prayer." To the point when "they just need Jesus" becomes the sentence we say to ourselves so we can walk away.

In our frustration, we recognize that the ability and the authority to use it always has been and always will be with Jesus. What we have here is not a handoff. It's a moment of empowerment, a moment where the kingdom of heaven is preparing to grow.

When couples have their first child, either by birth or adoption, their lives change. Their daily routines and habits, along with their plans and dreams, shift and move to accommodate this new life in the family. It affects more than just the mom and dad—grandparents and extended family members are affected as well. It's a moment of celebration and growth in the family.

But if that couple has another child, the first child isn't forgotten. He doesn't hand his role over to the baby and lose their place in the family. Everything shifts and changes around that new life coming to the family, but that first child, who is still a child, becomes empowered in new ways. Their roles and responsibilities may change, but they will never stop being children of their parents.

As Jesus took up all this authority and prepared to send the disciples out to become the body of Christ—the church in the world—fulfilling the mission that he gave them, they would never replace him, and they would never stop being his disciples. Their roles and responsibilities would change and shift as he empowered them to welcome in new disciples, but he would always be the one in charge.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have always been a family — eternally loving, eternally giving, eternally sharing. And on this mountain, Jesus invites us into that family, and into their work of growing it, not by handoffs, but by multiplication.

Movement 3: Families

These disciples were not the first people commissioned to take God's word out to the people of the world. But this kind of multiplication — family making more family — has a long history in scripture, and not all of it is positive.

Do you remember the Prophet Jonah? He ran from God's call, ended up in the belly of a giant fish, and finally — reluctantly — went to Nineveh. He preached the shortest sermon in scripture, then climbed a hill outside the city to wait for fire to fall on the people he had been sent to.

Instead, the entire city repented. Jonah had impressive salvation numbers. He saw thousands turn to God — but I don't think he could name a single one. Jonah went, but he didn't love. He saw thousands repent, but he didn't see a single face. He was an example of what we should not be like on mission with Jesus — not because he didn't obey, but because he obeyed without love.

When Jesus gave them the command to go and make disciples of all nations, he was not telling them to go stand on the ground in every country and preach the gospel so that they could check that country off the to-do list. The word he used for 'nations' means something more like 'tribes' or 'families'. He's telling the disciples to go to every family — and that starts with the families right next to them. The neighbors. The cousins. The coworkers. The people whose names they already know but whose hearts they haven't yet introduced to Jesus. That's a different kind of work.

Sometimes, when we think of taking Jesus to the nations, we imagine going to places and building churches. But I think what Jesus was asking the disciples to do was something much simpler and much more difficult. Jesus wanted their help getting him into those families so he could invite them to become part of his.

No matter where we are, we always have our eyes on who is just outside of Jesus' family — who needs to be invited in, who needs to be introduced to him.

I want you to think of one person right now. A face. A name. Someone Jesus might be inviting through you, into his family.

You're already doing this work — in your families, your friendships, your neighborhoods. You're doing this with your grandkids, who you bring to church or send prayers, scripture, and encouragement to follow Jesus. You're doing this with your friends and neighbors who were close to Jesus once, but it's been a while. You're showing them that Jesus is willing to come and be with them where they are, rather than wait until they come back to church.

You're doing this in our fellowship meals, where we're grieving and celebrating sometimes all at the same time, sharing the blessing among our church family with extended family who are celebrating and grieving with us. You're letting them know, in a hundred small ways, that Jesus is with them and wants them to be part of his family with us. And every time you're mentoring or caring for a young person or encouraging and showing compassion for someone in need, you're sharing Jesus as he invites them into his family.

Movement 4: Serving Together

How do we make disciples and help Jesus grow his family? Jesus gives us two words: baptizing and teaching. We've done a lot of crazy things with those words throughout history. In this text, those two words are participles, not verbs. They describe how we make disciples. They are not separate tasks alongside it. They're two sides of the same coin.

Maybe a better way to think of that is the left side and right side of your body. You may have one side that's stronger than the other, but you need them both, and you need them to work together. You might be able to draw a line to determine where the boundary is between them, but on a body, that's not helpful.

Baptism is how we welcome people into Jesus' family. We celebrate the sacrament of baptism only once in a person's life because that invitation comes from Jesus. That sacrament is a moment where we recognize that God has invited this person into his family by name. There is nothing the person receiving it can do to earn that invitation — it is pure grace from Jesus, offered freely.

Baptism is not a finishing line, and often, it's not really a starting line either. There are many ways we help share that invitation before the moment we celebrate that sacrament, and many more ways we remind each other of that baptism, of that invitation into Jesus' family, long after we are baptized.

Teaching is how we learn and grow to live in this family together with Jesus. That teaching often reaches us before we even know we are being discipled, and it carries on throughout our entire lives.

When I was young, I thought that being a Christian meant you got baptized and then went to Sunday school or Bible study forever, like a sports team that you were never too old to play on. But that was back when I thought the church was just a social organization. I didn't understand that the church was Jesus' family.

I've heard it taught that some people are wired for the baptizing kind of ministries, and others for the teaching — as if you have to pick a side, like Indiana University versus Purdue. But these aren't rival teams. They're the right and left sides of one body. You need them both. You want them both strong, both honored, both working together.

Some of you have been welcoming people into this family for years — and that work is precious. Some of you may be discovering that Jesus is also calling you to the work of teaching, of mentoring, of walking alongside someone as they grow. That work is precious too. The family needs both. We need to be willing to do both.

You can pick your favorite things to do and keep on doing those one or two things well as long as the family stays the same and doesn't grow. But when Jesus brings new people into his family, things change, and we find ourselves needing to grow and serve in ways that we're not used to. Those are the moments that we need to recognize that we serve together as a family, leaning on each other. And we especially need to lean in on Jesus, who is still the head of this family.

Movement 5: Jesus With Us

There are many challenges to making disciples with Jesus, but you don't have to have it all figured out today. We're going to spend some time this summer digging into what it means to be and make disciples, which is good news. The better news is that Jesus never asks us to do it on our own. Making disciples is something we do as a team, as a family, and everyone has an important part to play in the lives of everyone else.

But the best news of all is: this is not a handoff. Jesus is going with us. He's poured out his Holy Spirit into us, and where two or three are gathered in his name, he is there with them.

This mission was given to us by Jesus, who holds all the authority. He continues to teach us, nurture us, and grow us as his disciples every day. As we go out fulfilling this great commission, this mission with Jesus and with each other, he's going right there with us. There is nowhere he will ever send you, no person he will send you to, that he has not already visited first. He always goes ahead of us. We're not preparing the way for him; he's preparing the way for us, and he's joining us. He will be there after we're gone.

Two weeks ago, we saw Jesus entrust his Word to the disciples on the Mount of Ascension. Last week, we saw him entrust his mission of forgiveness, breathing the Holy Spirit on them. And today, we see him entrust the family — the work of making more disciples. He goes with us. He empowers us to serve with him. And he grows his family through us.

Brothers and Sisters, I would like to invite you to renew your commitment to the mission of Jesus this morning. I have four questions to ask you.

If you are willing to commit to them, I invite you to say, "I will."

If you cannot say I will today, that's okay too — let the question rest with you this week. Please stand if you are able.

Will you follow Jesus in his mission to grow his family?

Will you share him with everyone who crosses your way?

Will you share what he has taught you with those around you?

And when you doubt, will you follow him anyway, knowing he is there with you?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus,

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to you.

Today, we give ourselves to you.

Where you go, we will follow.

When you invite others into your family, we will welcome them well.

We will teach them to follow everything you have shown us.

And we will rejoice in your presence that is always with us as you work in us and with us to reach every family and make them a part of yours.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.