The Scandal of Missions

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Matt 28:18-20

Missions are the greatest scandal in the church during the past two thousand years. The scandal is that we have done so little.. For most of the two thousand years, missions were largely ignored.

Jesus placed a high priority on missions.

In the days after Jesus' resurrection, when He met with the disciples, he said two things that echo down the ages. First he said,

"Go into all the world, and make disciples of all nations."(Matt. 28:18) We call that the Great Commission.

Jesus was so passionate about the calling for us to be missionaries that he made it a condition upon His return. "The Gospel must be preached to all nations, nad then the end will come." (Matt 24:14) He is saying "I won't come back, until you do what I asked."

Then right after that, Jesus said "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and in the uttermost parts of the world." (Acts 1:8) Again, it's unequivocal. We are to be out there winning people all over the place, even to the edges of the globe.

The church started out well--or so we've been told. But in truth, those who went forward only made up a small number of the early believers. Most disciples and even apostles only ventured out of their comfort areas rarely.

Flash forward five or six hundred years. Under persecution, the church made tremendous strides. They converted the Roman Empire, but they did not have the time or the boldness to finish the job.. When the Seventh Century rolled around, a highly aggressive competitor to Christianity, Islam, had begun in Arabia. Islam nearly wiped out Christianity. If the Arabs had been converted, they would not have happened. If they church had been bolder, they might have been converted.

You would think that the church would want to win those souls back from Islam, but they didn't. Instead, five hundred years later, the "Christian" nations tried to take back the Holy Land by force The Crusades were a disaster. During this time a few men had a vision to reach the heathen. St. Francis was one of them. He toured Muslim nations preaching the Gospel and was warmly received. But for the most part, Christians were more interested in sending the unsaved to hell than winning them to heaven. But what if St. Francis had had an army of devout monks, the size of the army of bloodthirsty knights? History would have been different. The power that defeated the Roman Empire failed to defeat the Muslims, for one reason, it was never unleashed. Christians were too preoccupied with themselves to care about people on the other side of the world. As a result, people on the other side of the world cared nothing for us, or our God.

Let's go on another three hundred years. A spiritual awakening hit Europe. The Protestant Revolution begins. Calvin taught the Protestant that every believer is a priest, every believer is a missionary. Even so, no sooner did the Protestant Revolution begin than the church found itself embroiled in doctrinal bickering and political intrigue. This time of spiritual awakening that fell on much of Europe had no impact on the rest of the world. How different this was from the old days. If the Protestant Reformers had the passion of Paul, they would have said. "You Calvinists can take Africa. You Lutherans can take South America. You Anglicans and Baptists can divide the Orient." They didn't. They bickered instead over their own home turf.

The modern missionary movement, sad to say was born only about two hundred years ago. That was when people suddenly realized that there was a whole world out there, and that they needed to be evangelized. How is it possible that this never occurred to so few. They sensed a call to missions.

Today, the missionary movement is not a matter of Americans and Europeans sending missionaries to foreign lands, but foreign lands are sending missionaries elsewhere. But it is still not large enough or strong enough to finish the job, because we are not doing our part.

That's a scandal.

To many people, the days of the great missionary movements are over. The internet, broadcast radio and television, and world travel make many people say there is no need for it. People can find the gospel wherever they go.

But Christianity cannot be taught. It must be caught.

The human heart is endlessly deceitful. We are forever making up excuses for our actions, attempting to justify ourselves. We rarely face up to the real reasons we do what we do. Missions is a good example of this. We say that we don't support missions because we don't have the time, we haven't been called, because our financial resources are small. The real reason we don't is because we don't know those people. We don't want to leave our comfort zones.

In the book of Acts, we see modeled three ways the Gospel spreads.

The first is local evangelism. This is one neighbor telling another neighbor. This falls on the local churches. We have been given the solemn task of being foot soldiers of the front lines oof sharing the Gospel. We do it face to face, mouth to ear. It is our mouth that will tell it to our neighbor's ear.

The second is church planting. This is what we are doing in Indian Land. One of the interesting things we notice when we study Paul' missionary journeys is that often when Paul returned to visit an area where he planted churches, there were more churches there than when he left. That's because the people in the churches, especially the elders, looked at the map and, without money or resources from anyone else, went out and started churches where they're are no churches. We know of one church, Ephesus, which planted six others in nearby towns. Every new church plant will reach outside the circles of friendship of the people around.

The third kind of evangelism is what Paul did--missionary evangelism. Supported by other churches, Paul set out to plant the Gospel in places he had never seen. All people deserved a chance to meet Christ, whether they are Greek, Roman, Jewish, oriental, or African.

Think about the Ebola virus. Ebola is a terrible disease, perhaps the deadliest in the world. So why aren't we all dead from Ebola? Because the health department of every nation knows the danger of Ebola. If Ebola starts up, they quarantine until the Ebola virus dies with its victims. To Satan, evangelism his Ebola. Whenever Christians start to evangelize, he isolates us. He makes sure that no one comes or goes from the church. Satan knows if he can't stop the Gospel, then he must work to contain it. The first thing Satan does when he sets off to render a church powerless is to put a stop to interest in missions. If he isolates a Christian community to itself for any time at all, then it will forget what it is there for, and stop trying to evangelize.

For this reason, missions and church planting are very important to the church. Many of the communities where revival starts will eventually be isolated by the enemy. The greatest strategy we can do is while we are reaching our communities, assist those who are seeking to plant communities here and oversees. Every missionary is like one of Samson's foxes with burning torches tied to their tail. They leave a trail of fire behind them, all through the world.

So what can we do to help?

1. First, support missionaries through prayers and finances. We are fortunate to have Clinton and Diane Dix with us in this congregation. Clinton's impact in Brazil and Africa is considerable. He is strengthening a church that is exploding. He has been a blessing beyond measure to them.

Would it hurt us to seek to improve our individual giving and the giving of our church to Clinton and Diane Dix. If not them, then how about some other missionaries? What if we each pledged an additional ten dollars a month to support missionaries on the field?

I know what you are thinking. In these tough economic times, how can we possibly support all the good works that are needed. You can't. But you can do one or two. We as a church can't support many things, but we can do something.

Churches tell their people to give sacrificially. Shouldn't we be giving sacrificially as well. Paul wrote in Philippians about this little church in Fhilippi. It had just started. On his second journey, when he traveled down to Asia, most of the churches who had supported him could not. But this little church, no doubt suffering financially, contributed money to them. They did it, Paul says, not because they had do, or were ever even expected to, but because they wanted to. They delighted in it.

You don't have to give to missions. You get to give to missions. You get to put some of yourselves into the worldwide evangelism of souls.

2. Then, we can take an interest in missions. Read up on missions in the prayer lines or the individual mailings. Go online and read about missionaries on the ARP website. Get informed. Maybe you would like to take a short term mission trip to one of our fields, to see what missionary work it really like.

3. We can directly support the missionary effort by reaching out to the internationals in our area. A woman in one of my early churches was from South Africa. She had a passion for missions. She wanted to turn our church lawn into a cricket field, to attract a growing Indian and Pakistani population so she could share the Gospel with them. She lit up whenever she saw internationals, because she knew that tis was an opportunity to share Christ.

4. We can support online efforts to spread the Gospel. The internet is still in its infancy. No one knows how influential it will be in the future, but ever day, it seems to grow in power and impact. Whenever possible we Christians need to be part of this new world. It gives us an opportunity to speak around the world to people in every country. I was delighted to learn a few years ago that my sermons were being read in Pakistan. Today it is possible not only for us to go to the world, but for the world to come to us.