Jesus then gave his disciples—and by implication all believers—one main command: “Make disciples” (Matt. 28:19). Jesus commanded his disciples to make disciples. He requires his followers, then and now, to summon others to follow him. He then gave three supporting instructions that show us how to “make disciples.” First, we need to go. We need to go to where the nations are, whether that means crossing the street, crossing town, or crossing an ocean. Second, we baptize those who follow Christ. And finally, he tells us to instruct new disciples to obey every one of his commands. To become Jesus’s follower is to give your whole life to trusting Jesus, following Jesus, learning and obeying Jesus’s teaching, and following Jesus’s example.
So according to Jesus, we “make disciples” by baptizing true believers and teaching them to obey all that Jesus commanded. The order is important: make disciples, baptize, teach.
Are you a disciple of Jesus? Then you need to show it by baptism—that’s what Jesus said. Jesus wants those who have trusted him as Savior and submitted to him as Lord to get baptized. As you can see, then, baptism publicly identifies someone as a disciple of Jesus. Baptism formally and publicly enrolls a disciple in the school of Christ.
God marks his people by baptism. By getting baptized, we are essentially putting on a jersey that says “Team Jesus”—we’re playing by his rules and following his commands. By following Jesus’s command to get baptized, we’re saying we’re committed to do all that he commanded.
Now, what exactly does Jesus mean when he says “baptize”? Here is a definition of baptism I offered in another short book, called Understanding Baptism:
Baptism is a church’s act of affirming and portraying a believer’s union with Christ by immersing him or her in water, and a believer’s act of publicly committing him or herself to Christ and his people, thereby uniting a believer to the church and marking off him or her from the world. 1
Now that’s a bit of a mouthful. More simply, baptism is a believer’s act of publicly committing him or herself to Christ and his people by being immersed in water.
We have already seen from Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 28:19 that baptism is how someone publicly commits to follow Christ. And we’ll see biblical support for much of this definition in the next two sections. Here we can simply note that baptism should be performed by immersion. The Greek word baptizō, on which our word “baptize” is based, means to dip or plunge something completely into a liquid. New Testament examples of baptism imply that it was done by immersion (John 3:23; Acts 8:38–39), and immersion best fits the imagery of union with Christ in his burial and resurrection, which we will consider in the next section (Rom. 6:1–4).
To summarize Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 28:19, we can say that baptism is the first item on Jesus’s list of “Everything I Have Commanded You.” Why should you get baptized? Because if you consider yourself a follower of Jesus, then, after repenting and believing (Mark 1:15), the first formal, public act of following that Jesus requires of you is baptism. The Christian life is more than following commands, but it certainly isn’t less. So after the command to repent and believe, here’s your first “to-do” from Jesus. All you have to do is declare your faith and lean back.
