Six Essentials for Biblical Missions
What's really going on with modern missions? Sadly, in many quarters, almost nothing at all. Our love for missions has grown cold. If your church is excelling here, then guard your hearts, watch and pray lest you too be tempted. Fan the flame of the zeal to proclaim Christ. If your church is failing here, then repent and return to the works you are called to.
We want our lampstand to burn brightly for the cause of Christ around the earth. If we hope to fan this flame of evangelistic and missionary zeal in our churches, there are six truths that we must believe.
The Saving Efficacy of the Word of God
Many of our churches hold to the inerrancy and infallible authority and sufficiency of God's word. We believe we should hold forth the gospel of God and the person and work of Christ as it's been delivered to us in the word of God. We’re committed to this, yet thousands of language groups, whole peoples who speak a particular language, continue without a Bible in their language. A typical American Christian household probably has multiple versions of Scripture in their house, yet these people do not have access to a single Bible in their language.
This makes it all the more exasperating that many missionaries will not commit to learning the language to fluency of the people to whom they are sent. Some missionaries from our church have wrestled for years to reach fluency in their first language. We have had Zoom calls where they are in tears about the struggles and sacrifices to learn the language. We say to them, “Congratulations. Praise the Lord. Get to work on the next one.”
Furthermore, orality movements are growing in our circles. This is the idea that we don't need to deliver a written book and teach a language group to read it. They think they’ve found a shortcut: we just have to record it for them to listen to. I hear these half measures and wonder, who endorses these methods or approaches? I can think of one church that would: medieval Rome.
William Tyndale would not endorse it, nor would the church’s confessions. As the Westminster Confession of Faith says,
“But because these original tongues, Hebrew and Greek are not known to all the people of God who have right unto and interest in the scriptures and are commanded in the fear of God to read and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come.”
This is a confessional requirement because we believe it's a biblical requirement. But to the extent that our denominational agencies abandon the central conviction of the necessity of learning the language and translating the Bible into that language, these agencies liberalize, or rather, they Romanize.
We must cease sending people overseas who have no commitment to learning the language of the people in order to translate the Bible into that language. We don't need gimmicks or shortcuts. We need more men like Tyndale. It's our sacred privilege and obligation to lay down our lives to see the Bible in every language. In order for the saving efficacy of God’s word to be at play, the Bible must be in every tongue.
The Supernatural Power of Ordinary Prayer
Pray, pray some more, and however much you think you're praying, it's not enough. When we think of the problem of reaching the lost, the solution is going to be the same: pray, and then pray some more.
As Hudson Taylor rightly said, "the power of prayer has never been tried to its full capacity in any church." If we want to see mighty wonders of divine grace and power wrought in the places of weakness, failure, and disappointment, let the whole church answer God's challenge. What is that challenge? "Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known." (Jeremiah 33:3). We must pray to the Lord of the harvest to raise up workers for the field. We must pray for the work of our missionaries. Praying to the Lord will empower them to proclaim the gospel with clarity and endure in the work given to them. Pray that the Lord will open the blinded minds of unbelievers around you and in the nations so they might see the light of the gospel for their everlasting salvation.
Our covenant God, our Redeemer, is with us. The God who created and sustains all things has invited you to make requests to Him. Have you ever thought about that? It's a wonder that our prayer meetings are not overflowing with participation. The Lord Jesus who upholds the universe with the word of His power, listens and takes us seriously! We should be like the widow banging at the door of the Lord and pleading with Him to keep His promises. Not because we think we need to awaken Him to His forgotten duties and promises, but because we are confident He has not forgotten them.
Jesus's Promise to Build His Church
Jesus made a promise in Matthew 16:18, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” He then sent out His apostles as ambassadors to carry that gospel message to the ends of the earth. Ephesians 2:20 tells us that their mission has been passed to the church and it is by the spirit-empowered ministry of the church's gospel proclamation that Christ builds His church. Christ's church, in this sense, is the means and the end of the Great Commission. When our lampstands shine the light of the gospel of Christ to all the earth, Christ's spirit is the one who empowers that witness.
The Lord Jesus is with us always by His spirit. Do we really believe that? Too many of us are licking our wounds, complaining about the decline of the church, fearing what comes in the next election cycle, worrying about the demise of the Christian West. So many people tell me that the days are gone of missionary societies like that led by William Carey. William Carey started his missionary society with 14 men. Their first collection was 13 pounds, two shillings, and sixpence. Yet it was Carey who said, “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.” If we have truly believed, as William Carey did, that the Lord Jesus has poured out His spirit and that He is with us, if we truly believe that Jesus will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, then let us utterly forsake the prayers of meager expectations and small visions.
The 19th century Scottish Presbyterian Thomas Chalmers once said, “regardless how large, your vision is too small.” Why do we have such small vision and such meager expectations? Our God is the God of all the earth. He spoke and the universe leapt into existence. Yes, we are weak. Yes, we are clay pots. But the Lord is mighty to save.
The Everlasting Love of God in Christ for Us
The Apostle Paul wrote that the love of Christ controls, or compels, him. When Paul said that in 2 Corinthians 5:14, he meant that Christ’s love for him compelled him to gospel ministry. When you heard the gospel preached and when the Holy Spirit gave you the grace of faith in Christ, He poured into your hearts the love of God for you (Romans 5:5). He gave your heart the knowledge that God loves you, and it is His love to us that gives birth to our love to Him. We love because He first loved us. When our love for Him grows, then we can't help but speak of our Beloved. If we really knew and meditated upon the love of God in Christ for us – how we are each children of wrath made alive in Christ by his mercy – we'd want to shout it from the rooftops.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9). This is the love of God for you. God loved me, not because something outside Him moved Him to me specifically, but because God is love.
The better we grasp this, the more we'll want to run to every highway and byway and compel people to come to Christ to know the love of God. The less we think on this, the more we fall in love with this present world, the more the light dims in us. This condition drives a lack of belief that Jesus is really worth the sacrifice. Thus, we become more committed to our current mental and physical well-being than our eternal well-being and the eternal well-being of the nations. Until you believe who God is, what you have in Him, that Jesus is really worth it, you're not going to lay down your life for Him.
The Gospel Imperative is to Proclaim Christ
The Great Commission is a pivotal moment in the history of salvation: the Messiah receives His inheritance of the nations and commissions His church to go and claim His inheritance for Him. So when our churches send people to the nations, we're not merely hoping that maybe somebody might get saved. We are going confidently to claim the nations that belong to Christ.
This ought to propel an unapologetic and relentless focus on the task of training missionaries to take the gospel to language groups who have never heard of Christ, who have no Bible, who have no church, who have no Christian witness. This ought to kindle our concern for our local churches to be well-trained to obey the Great Commission.
We're being sent by Jesus to claim His inheritance of every people. What right do we have to do otherwise? Paul, citing Isaiah, understood this to mean that he must preach the gospel where it's never been. “But as it is written, ‘Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.’” (Romans 15:21). This doesn’t mean forgoing commitment to the local church or eschewing missionary efforts in major languages. It simply means using our God-given will and wisdom to respond to a pre-existing gross imbalance in our obedience to the Great Commission: more than 3000 people groups have never heard of Jesus, and yet our churches send well over 90% of our missionaries and resources to the most reached places on earth!
We have the word of God in spades and 3000 people groups do not. There are whole language groups perishing without even the chance of knowing God's love and mercy to them in Christ. These are nations for which Christ has poured out His blood. They are His inheritance. An inheritance which we have not yet gone to claim for our King.
We were once those pagans ourselves, but Christian missionaries came to us, and the gospel came through the generations to you. Will we now take it to those who have not yet heard? We do not have the right to shine the light of Christ to the parts of the globe that most appeal to us. This is not our commission or our inheritance. This is Christ's.
The Necessity of Obeying the Great Commission
“And Jesus came and said to them, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you. And surely I'm with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20)
The Great Commission is not a suggestion. It's a command. It's the reason your lampstand exists: to shine the light of the gospel. Yes, ultimately we exist to worship the triune God in the beauty of holiness. But, as John Piper is fond of saying, "Missions exist because worship doesn't." While missions is not the ultimate purpose – our ultimate purpose is those who are saved – it is our penultimate purpose.
We have three options in light of the Great Commission: go, send, or disobey. And I want to clarify this: sending is not some sort of half-hearted commitment for those who stick around while our missionaries go and lay down their lives for Christ. No, we are fellow workers for the truth with those whom we send and support. Christ is building His church by the means of His church. We too often think of the known missionaries and not the unknown supporters, the coworkers of the gospel. You may not go, but you should be no less committed to laying down your life for the sake of Christ being known in all the earth.
May the Lord cause us to rise to our feet and join shoulder to shoulder in this work. May the Lord by His spirit cause our lampstands to burn brightly throughout every corner of the earth so that every tribe and tongue and nation hears the gospel of their salvation.