Chibuike was thirteen when his uncle put him on a night bus from Nnewi to Lagos with a small bag, a letter and instructions to find a certain shop in Alaba International Market. The man who owned it sold televisions, sound systems and generators. He read the letter, looked the boy over and said, “You will stay with us.” That was the beginning of seven years.
This was the old Igbo apprenticeship system, igba boi. Chibuike received no salary. He slept in the boys’ quarters of his master’s house in Ojo, ate at his master’s table and woke before everyone else to open the shop. For the first year he mostly swept, carried cartons and ran errands. He was not allowed to speak to customers about prices.
But he watched. He watched how his oga greeted a customer who had come with a complaint, how he could tell within minutes whether a buyer was serious, when he gave credit and when he refused. He watched him correct a careless driver without humiliating him in front of the other traders. He saw him go back to a customer’s house to return change that had been miscounted, a forty-minute journey for four hundred naira. In the evenings, at home, he watched how the man spoke to his wife and handled his own children’s school reports.
By the third year Chibuike was selling on his own. By the fifth he was keeping the books. In the seventh year, his oga did what the system promised. He settled him, renting him a shop of his own a few rows away and stocking it with goods to start.
On the day of the settlement, the older man said something Chibuike has never forgotten. “I did not keep you for seven years so that you would know about electronics. Anybody can learn that in six months. I kept you so that you would become a trader. A good one.”
PunchlineKnowing about the trade. Becoming a trader. The difference between those two things is the difference at the heart of Jesus’ command to make disciples.
A word Jesus chose carefully
The word disciple is so familiar in church that we can lose its meaning. In the New Testament it translates the Greek mathetes, which means a learner, a pupil, an apprentice. It describes someone who attaches himself to a teacher in order to learn from him, not only his words but his way of life.
The word appears around two hundred and sixty times in the Gospels and Acts. By comparison, the word Christian appears only three times in the whole New Testament, and the first time is in Antioch, where Luke tells us, “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26). The followers of Jesus were disciples long before they were called anything else. That was their basic identity.
In first-century Israel, it was common for a young man to seek out a respected rabbi and ask to follow him. Jesus reversed that pattern. He did the choosing. He walked along the shore of Galilee and said to fishermen, “Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). Notice I will make you. Discipleship begins with His call, and the transformation is His work. The disciple’s part is to come after Him.
So when Jesus later commanded His followers to make disciples, He was asking them to reproduce what He had done with them. They were not to gather an audience or collect members. They were to bring people into the same kind of life under His teaching that they themselves had known.
The commission read slowly
Here are the words Jesus spoke on the mountain in Galilee after His resurrection:
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
The command rests on His authority: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” It ends with His presence: “lo, I am with you alway.” Between those two truths stand the instructions. The King James translators noted in their margin that the first teach in verse 19 can be rendered make disciples, and that is the main verb of the sentence. Going, baptizing and teaching are the activities through which it is done.
There are many ways to misread this commission. One is to treat it as a call for decisions only, as though the task were complete once people have responded to an invitation. Another is to treat it as a call for information only, as though the task were complete once people had sat through enough classes. Jesus’ own words rule out both.
The focus of this teaching is a single question: what exactly does Jesus command His followers to teach? Matthew answers it directly. We are to teach them “to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” The content of disciple-making is the commands of Christ. The goal is that people keep them. That means discipleship is a continuing life under His authority. Baptism and instruction are parts of that life, and essential ones, but they serve the larger responsibility: forming people who live under the rule of the risen Lord.
NuggetJesus did not command us to teach people all things. He commanded us to teach them to observe all things. Discipleship is formation in obedience, not only the transfer of information.
Baptism: a public beginning
Baptism comes first among the activities Jesus names, and it marks the beginning of the disciple’s new life. “Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Notice the name, singular. One name, three Persons. Baptism places the believer under the name of the triune God. In the ancient world, to act in someone’s name meant to belong to them and act under their authority. A disciple who is baptised is publicly declaring whose he is. His old allegiances have been surrendered. He now bears a new name and lives under a new Lord.
It is a public act. In many parts of the world, including some communities in our own nation, baptism is the moment when a family realises a son or daughter has truly become a Christian. A person can attend church quietly for years, but baptism makes the allegiance visible. That is why, for some, it is costly.
Sincere believers differ on certain questions about baptism. Some traditions baptise the infants of believers as a sign of the covenant; others baptise only those who can personally confess faith. Some immerse; others pour or sprinkle. Those discussions are worth having carefully and charitably. What all agree on is that baptism is not a graduation ceremony at the end of discipleship. It is an entrance into it. In the book of Acts, people who believed were baptised promptly, often the same day, and then the life of learning began.
So when a church baptises new believers, it must not consider its work done. The baptism is a beginning. The words that immediately follow in the commission describe what comes next.
Teaching them to observe
“Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”
The word observe translates the Greek tereo, which means to keep, to guard, to hold onto, to obey. It is the language of keeping a command, not merely of knowing it. A student can know the Highway Code perfectly and still drive dangerously. A disciple who knows the teachings of Jesus but does not keep them has not yet been discipled in the sense Jesus intended.
This is where much of our church teaching falls short. We are often good at transferring information. We run classes, hold seminars and distribute notes. All of that has value. But the question Jesus asks is whether people are observing what He commanded, and that requires something more than a lecture. It requires instruction, example, practice, encouragement and correction over time. In a word, it requires what Chibuike received in his master’s shop.
So what has Jesus commanded? It is worth asking the question plainly, because many believers have never read the Gospels with that question in mind. Here is a sample of what He told His disciples to do:
- Repent and believe the gospel.
- Love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.
- Love one another as He has loved you.
- Forgive those who sin against you, from the heart.
- Pray, give and fast in secret before your Father.
- Do not worry about tomorrow; seek first the kingdom of God.
- Deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow Him.
- Remember Him in the breaking of bread.
- Abide in Him.
- Go and make disciples.
Read through Matthew 5 to 7, John 13 to 16 and the parables, and the list grows longer and deeper. Notice that the last command on the list brings us back to the commission itself. Teaching people to obey Jesus includes teaching them to make disciples in turn. Discipleship is designed to reproduce.
How does that obedience relate to grace? Jesus Himself answers:
He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.
Obedience in the New Covenant flows out of love. “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” Jesus does not say, “Keep my commandments so that I will love you.” He says that keeping His commands is the way love for Him expresses itself, and that those who love Him will know the love of the Father and the self-revelation of the Son. The disciple obeys from within a relationship.
And the power to obey comes from the Spirit. This is not a return to law-keeping by willpower. Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). His yoke is easy. The Teacher is gentle. And the Spirit He gives writes His words on our hearts, so that what He commands becomes, over time, what we want.
This matters greatly for anyone who disciples others. On the night before the cross, Jesus told His disciples, “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26). Notice the content of the Spirit’s teaching: whatsoever I have said unto you. The Holy Spirit does not lead disciples away from the commands of Jesus toward some more advanced revelation. He brings them back to what Jesus said, and He gives them understanding and power to keep it.
So the human teacher is never the only teacher in the room. When you sit with a new believer over an open Bible, you explain, illustrate and encourage. But it is the Spirit who opens the heart, convicts, comforts and brings the word back to mind on Thursday afternoon when temptation comes. That should take an enormous weight off your shoulders. You are not trying to produce obedience in someone by pressure. You are cooperating with the Spirit who is already at work in them.
Continuing in His word
John’s Gospel records a moment that every disciple-maker should study. Jesus was teaching in the temple, and many who heard Him believed. Then He turned to those new believers and said:
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
“If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed.” The word continue is meno, the same word translated abide in John 15. It means to remain, to stay, to make your home in something. Jesus distinguishes between an initial response of belief and the ongoing life of a disciple. Those who are disciples indeed, truly, are those who keep living in His word.
What happens next in John 8 is sobering. The same group of people who had believed on Him begin to argue as Jesus speaks to them. They protest that they are Abraham’s children and have never been in bondage. The conversation grows sharper. By the end of the chapter, “Then took they up stones to cast at him” (John 8:59). An initial response that did not continue in His word turned, in a single conversation, to hostility.
I do not say this to make anyone anxious about whether their faith is real. If you are reading this and you love Jesus, the very fact that you are seeking to understand His word is evidence of His work in you. But the passage shows us why a church cannot be content with initial responses. Discipleship is a continuing. It means staying under His teaching when it is comfortable and when it is not.
And notice the promise attached: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Freedom is the fruit of continuing. Jesus is not describing truth as abstract information. He is describing the kind of knowing that comes from living in His word over time, a knowing that breaks bondage. A few verses later He says, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). Truth and the Son are bound together. To continue in His word is to continue with Him.
Becoming like the Teacher
Jesus described the goal of discipleship in a single sentence:
The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master.
“Every one that is perfect shall be as his master.” The word perfect here means fully trained, fully equipped. It was used for mending nets and setting bones, for putting something into proper working order. A fully trained disciple becomes like his teacher. That is what an apprenticeship produces. Chibuike did not just learn about trading. He became a trader who resembled his oga in a hundred small ways.
That is why discipleship cannot be done only through programmes. When Jesus chose the twelve, Mark tells us He ordained them “that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach” (Mark 3:14). Notice the order. Before they were sent, they were with Him. They ate with Him, travelled with Him, watched Him handle crowds and critics, heard Him pray, saw Him weep and saw Him angry. They learned as much from His life as from His sermons.
Paul followed the same pattern. He reminded Timothy, “But thou hast fully known my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, charity, patience” (2 Timothy 3:10). Timothy had seen Paul’s teaching and his way of living side by side. And Paul could say to the Corinthians:
Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.
Here is the necessary guard-rail. Paul invited imitation only as he followed Christ. The disciple-maker is never the final model. In every apprenticeship there is a risk of abuse: some masters in the old system refused to settle their apprentices, or exploited them for years. Spiritual discipleship carries its own versions of the same danger. Some leaders have used the language of discipleship to demand personal loyalty, control people’s marriages, finances and movements, and punish those who ask questions. That is not discipleship to Jesus. A faithful disciple-maker points beyond himself, encourages people to read the Scriptures for themselves, and expects them one day to stand on their own feet before the Lord. If someone in spiritual authority is controlling or harming you, you are not obliged to remain under that control. Seek safety and wise counsel, and where there is abuse, involve the appropriate authorities.
PunchlineChrist is the Master. We are fellow apprentices, some further along than others, helping one another follow Him.
What it looked like in the first church
Luke gives us a picture of the very first disciples made after Pentecost. Three thousand people had just been baptised. What happened next?
Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. And fear came upon every soul: and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men , as every man had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.
Notice that Luke counts. “About three thousand souls.” Numbers are not unspiritual. But he does not stop at the count. He immediately describes what the new disciples continued in, and the description is more important than the figure.
“They continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine.” Teaching was central. These new believers were being instructed in what Jesus had commanded, as the apostles had received it from Him. “And fellowship.” The Greek word is koinonia, a sharing in common, the word used for business partners who hold a venture together. These new believers did not simply attend the same meetings. They held their lives in common, bearing one another’s burdens and rejoicing in one another’s joys. A disciple formed in isolation tends to stay small. A disciple formed in fellowship is shaped by many hands: the older woman who prays with her, the brother who visits when she is sick, the friend who notices when she has stopped coming. “And in breaking of bread, and in prayers.” They worshipped together, remembered the Lord’s death together, and prayed together.
Notice where it happened. “In the temple” and “from house to house.” Public gatherings and private homes. Large meetings for teaching and worship, and small tables where they ate together “with gladness and singleness of heart.” Discipleship was not confined to a Sunday service. It filled the week.
Notice also the generosity. “And all that believed were together, and had all things common.” They sold possessions to meet needs. We should read this carefully. Later in Acts, Peter makes it clear that such giving was voluntary; he tells Ananias that his property remained his own, to sell or keep as he chose (Acts 5:4). Acts does not command every church to abolish private property. But it does show what happens when people come under the rule of Christ together: their hands open, and nobody in the community is left in need without someone noticing.
And the result? “Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” The disciples were making disciples, and the Lord was adding to their number. Evangelism and discipleship were not separate departments. They were one life.
Making disciples in practice
What does this mean for you and your church? Here are some ways the commission takes practical shape.
Read the Gospels with Jesus’ commands in view. When you read, ask not only “What does this mean?” but “What did He command, and how will I obey it this week?” Do this with others. A group of three or four believers who read a passage together and hold one another accountable to obey it will grow more than a crowd that hears a dozen sermons and applies none of them.
Let people see your life. Discipleship cannot happen entirely at arm’s length. Invite a younger believer to share a meal with your family. Let them see how you pray, how you handle money, how you speak to your spouse and children. You will feel exposed. That is part of the cost. You do not need to be perfect. You need to be honest, and to show them how a believer repents and receives grace when he fails.
Start where you are. Parents are the first disciple-makers of their children. A believing employer can model Christ to the people who work for him without abusing his authority over them. A university student can read the Bible weekly with a younger student from her hostel.
Include correction, and give it gently. Chibuike’s oga corrected him often, and the correction was part of the training. Paul writes, “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). The word restore is the same word used for mending nets. Correction in discipleship aims at repair, never at humiliation. A disciple who is only ever praised is not being trained, and a disciple who is only ever rebuked will soon stop listening.
Measure what matters. Church leaders can ask honest questions of their own congregations. How many of our members could name five things Jesus commanded? How many are reading the Scriptures with another believer? How many new converts from last year are still with us, and who is walking with each of them? How many of our mature members are discipling anyone? Attendance figures tell you who came. These questions tell you whether people are being formed.
Be patient. Chibuike’s apprenticeship took seven years. Jesus spent three years with the twelve, and they were still slow to understand at the end. Discipleship is measured in years, not weeks. People fall back, struggle and sometimes disappoint. Stay with them, as Jesus stayed with Peter.
And remember the promise. “Lo, I am with you alway.” The One who commands disciple-making is present in the work. You are not responsible for changing anyone’s heart. You are responsible for walking with them and pointing them to Him. He does the making.
Chibuike now has a shop of his own in Alaba, and two boys of his own living in his house in Ojo. He wakes them early. He lets them sweep for the first year. He takes one of them with him when he goes to return wrong change, even for small amounts.
Some time ago, a customer who had known Chibuike’s old oga for many years watched him deal with a difficult buyer. When it was over, the customer laughed and said, “You talk exactly like your oga. The same words, the same patience.”
Chibuike told me he took it as the greatest compliment of his working life.
That is what Jesus meant. Not that we would merely know about Him, but that over time, through His word, His Spirit and the company of other believers, we would become like Him. The goal of every disciple is that someone, watching how we live, might say, “You remind me of your Master.” And the work of every disciple-maker is to walk with others until they can say the same of them.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What is the difference between knowing about Jesus’ teaching and being trained to observe it? Which better describes your own growth so far?
- If you made a list of what Jesus commanded, which commands would you find hardest to obey? Why?
- Why do you think Jesus said disciples “indeed” are those who continue in His word?
- Who has shaped your faith most by their life rather than their words? Who is watching yours?
- What safeguards help a church practise discipleship without drifting into control?
This Week
Choose one chapter of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6 or 7) and read it each day this week. Write down every command Jesus gives in it. Choose one and ask the Holy Spirit to help you obey it practically this week. Then invite one younger believer to meet you, read the same chapter together and talk honestly about what obeying it looks like.
A Prayer
Lord Jesus, You have all authority, and You have promised to be with me always. Thank You for calling me to follow You and for making me what I could never make myself. Forgive me for treating Your words as information instead of commands to keep. Teach me to continue in Your word and to love You by obeying You. Give me courage to let others see my life, and patience to walk with them for as long as it takes. Make me more like You, and use me to help others become like You too. Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.