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Stephen: The act of prayer is a daily part of the Christian faith. We pray in silence and out loud, alone, around the dinner table and corporately at church. In prayer we confess our sin and give thanks for God’s mercy in Christ. But we’re also told to offer up our desires to God and to seek His will. For a Christian whose heart has turned to the mission field, this part of prayer can feel like a black box. We know we need to pray, but what does God want us to pray for? Christ tells us that we can expect God to answer our prayers when we pray as we ought to. Who could ask for a greater promise?
But what is God’s will for us? What are the desires that we ought to bring to the Lord?
Brooks, our question today comes from Mish Koloff on Instagram. He asks, “What should I pray for if I’m thinking about giving my life to missions?”
Brooks: Yes, Stephen, that’s a really good question. I was at a church yesterday, actually in Carlsbad, California, and went out to lunch afterward with a handful of young people who were asking this exact question.
Christians are praying people. And so when we think of giving our lives to something great—when we think of uprooting our whole trajectory of life and going in another direction—it should be bathed in prayer. There should be something that is common not just to missionaries but to Christians.
And so if I were answering young people today about what they should pray about if they’re thinking about giving their life toward missions, it would probably fall along the lines of four things.
The first would be courage—courage to walk away from potential opportunities, courage to marry the right woman who is on the same path. I’ve seen a lot of young men, and especially young women, shipwreck what was potentially a promising missions career because they married the wrong person. They didn’t meet somebody who was against missions; they just didn’t meet somebody who was for missions. And so, courage to walk away from a good opportunity to marry and to think, “You know what, the Lord may have somebody better for me.” He may, He may not, but the Lord is good and right in these things.
But courage as well to walk away from those things that are near and dear to us. I was reading a few days ago in Pilgrim’s Progress and was struck by when Christian is walking through Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair is kind of like a picture of this world, and the various things that the stall operators are trying to sell to him and his traveling companion include three things—husbands, wives, and children. To have courage to walk away from even good things, that’s something significant to pray about.
Number two, I would pray that God would bring the right people into your life. It’s no small coincidence that the right people at the right times in your life can make a dramatic difference. God speaks to us typically through people coming into our lives. He speaks to us through His Word, but then through teachers, pastors, and leaders who have been further along the journey than we have.
This is why I love the idea of churches inviting seasoned missionaries who know their Bibles to speak well in church and for families that are trying to raise their kids to possibly be goers someday to have missionaries in their home on a regular basis. That is a very good and proper way to get exposed to missions, but also to put some steel into your spine, so to speak. As someone thinks through this and sees someone who has gone further along this path, it tends to galvanize them. It tends to give them a little bit more of, “I think, by God’s grace, I could do this,” because they can see a living example of this in front of them. So missionaries, but mostly the right people—whether professors or pastors—that God would bring those people. I would pray intentionally, “Lord, bring those people into my life who will shape me for the coming seasons of my life.”
Third, I would pray for perseverance—perseverance to stay the course. It’s really easy to get excited about missions. It’s pretty hard to continue to walk in that path for years and years and years. Perseverance goes hand in hand with courage in some ways. I’m often surprised how often when someone wants to go into missions, there are lovely, dear people—often close to that individual—who try to talk them out of it, who try to give them a better reason to stay home, a better reason to stick with that job. “You could make such a difference in San Diego.” These were common things faced by John G. Paton, Hudson Taylor, and Amy Carmichael. “The needs are so great here.”
If you don’t have perseverance and if you don’t pray to the God who gives good gifts to His children, you’ll falter. Pray, “Father, give me perseverance. If this is what You have for me, give me the perseverance to press on even in the face of those challenges from people I love and care about so dearly.”
Hebrews 10:3 talks about persevering to win the crown, and Hebrews 12:1 talks about perseverance to run the race well. That’s a gift—to run well. Not just to depart from the home context, but to make it to the field, if you’re going to an unreached language group, to learn those two languages, to get settled among that people, to learn to enjoy their food, to live in that context, and to stay until a church is planted—the missions sphere of living is littered with people who started well and faded after two, three, four, or five years. That’s the most common group of people. And it’s not because they didn’t love the Lord; it’s because their perseverance quotient wasn’t where it should have been before they left their home context. They should have thought through the cost of this and then brought that back to, “Okay, if it’s going to cost that much, am I willing to lay these things all on the line, to give my life for this? Am I willing to persevere through all of these challenges?”
So there are two sets of challenges in perseverance: the domestic side—the leaving, the opportunities, the goodbyes, I know this will be painful for family—and then the perseverance of making it to the mission field and keeping on going until you see that good, strong New Testament church planted. I would pray for that every day as I got up.
Finally, I would pray almost exactly Philippians 1:27—that you would conduct yourself in a manner worthy of the gospel. Paul is speaking here to the Philippian church, talking to them about what it means to see yourself living as a Christian. He talks about, whether I come and see you in person or only hear about you, I pray that you would conduct yourself in a manner worthy of the gospel. That would be my biggest prayer for everyone thinking about giving their life toward missions. Would I conduct myself–– not just when I get to the mission field, but even today—in the way I talk to fellow church members, the way I organize my life, the urgency with which I live my life, the way I spend my money, the way I speak and act around my girlfriend or my boyfriend? Would I conduct myself in a manner worthy of the gospel so that, at the end of days, when I look back on my life and as I prepare to cross that river of death and see my Savior face to face, I that I would have no shame in the way I conducted myself? Yes, we’re going to have things in our life that trip us up, but overall, my general trajectory of life should be one toward obedience and continuing to lay my life down for the sake of the gospel. That my life would be something I could look back on and say, “I conducted myself, by God’s grace, in a manner worthy of the gospel.”
Those would be the four things I would pray for: courage, finding the right people, perseverance, and conducting myself in a manner worthy of the gospel.
Stephen: To learn more about how to pray for missions, visit our website, missionary.com, where you can find articles and videos by missionaries and pastors like Chad Vegas and Mark Kuo that will encourage you to pray and pray well for the gospel going to the nations.
If you have a question you’d like to hear answered on Ask Missionary, leave a note in the comments section, get in touch with us on social media, or you can contact us through missionary.com, and your question may be featured on the show.
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Thanks for listening.