4. The Special Persons (Matthew 16:18)
What Is a Missionary?
Yet it was well, and Thou hast said in season
As is the Master shall the servant be:
Let me not subtly slide into the treason,
Seeking an honour which they gave not Thee:
Never at even, pillowed on a pleasure,
Sleep with the wings of aspiration furled,
Hide the last mite of the forbidden treasure,
Keep for my joys a world within the world.
He as He wills shall solder and shall sunder,
Slay in a day and quicken in an hour,
Tune Him a chorus from the Sons of Thunder,
Forge and transform my passion into power.
Ay, for this Paul, a scorn and a reviling,
Weak as you know him and the wretch you see,
Even in these eyes shall ye behold His smiling,
Strength in infirmities and Christ in me.
1. The Sure Characteristics (John 17:18; 20:21-23)
The great danger in missionary enterprise is that God’s call may be effaced by the needs of the people until human sympathy overwhelms altogether the significance of Jesus Christ’s sending. “As the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you” (rv). A missionary is a saved and sanctified soul detached to Jesus. The one thing that must not be overlooked is the personal relationship to Jesus Christ and to His point of view; if that is overlooked, the needs are so great, the conditions so perplexing, that every power of mind and heart will fail and falter. We are apt to forget that the great reason for missionary enterprise is not first the elevation of the people; nor first the education of the people; nor even first the salvation of the people, but first and foremost the command of Jesus Christ—“Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations” (rv).
If we are going to remain true to the Bible’s conception of a missionary, we must go back to the source—a missionary is one sent by Jesus Christ as He was sent by the Father. The great dominating note is not first the needs of men, but the command of Jesus Christ, consequently the real source of inspiration is always behind, never in front. Today the tendency is to put the inspiration in front; the great ideal is to sweep everything in front of us and bring it all out in accordance with our conception of success. In the New Testament the inspiration is behind, viz., the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. We are called to be true to Him, to be faithful to Him, to carry out His enterprises.
In revising the lives of men and women of God and the history of the Church of God, there is a tendency to say—“How wonderfully astute those men and women were! How perfectly they understood what God wanted of them!” The truth is that the astute mind behind these men and women was not a human mind at all, but the mind of God. We give credit to human wisdom when we should give credit to the Divine guidance of God through childlike people who were foolish enough in the eyes of the world to trust God’s wisdom and supernatural equipment, while watching carefully their own steadfast relationship to Him.
The New Testament lays down clearly what the work of the missionary is, it is to disciple all nations according to the command of the Risen Lord. The method of missions is clearly stated in each of the four Gospels. St. Matthew records the farewell command which Jesus gave to His disciples, and that command is to teach, i.e., disciple, all nations; not make converts to our ways of thinking, but make disciples of Jesus. In St. Mark’s Gospel the method is defined as preaching the gospel to every creature, accompanied by the power to cast out devils, and to speak with new tongues. In St. Luke’s Gospel the method is described as preaching repentance and remission of sins unto all the nations (rv), and in St. John’s Gospel the method is described by Our Lord as feeding His sheep and tending His lambs. The methods through which the life-giving truth is to be presented are as varied as the needs and conditions of the nations among whom the missionaries are placed.
Jesus Christ did not say—Go and save souls; the salvation of souls is God’s work. Jesus told the disciples to go and teach, disciple, all nations. The salvation of souls comes about through the ministry of God’s word and the proclaiming of the Redemption by God’s servants; but the command to the missionary is to disciple those who are saved. Every now and again the Church becomes content with seeing people saved. When men get saved, then the disciple’s work begins, and the great point about discipling is that you can never make a disciple unless you are one yourself. When the disciples came back from their first mission, they were filled with joy and said—“Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in Thy name,” and Jesus said, in effect, “Don’t rejoice in successful service, but rejoice that you are rightly related to God through Me.” Those who remain true to the call of God are those whose lives are stamped and sealed by God; they have one great purpose underneath, and that is to disciple men and women to Jesus.
2. The Subject Matter (Luke 24:45-48)
The subject matter of missions is the Life and Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ for one purpose—“that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name unto all the nations” (rv). The subject matter of missions remains an unchangeable truth, an historic fact, “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” (rv). The Cross as it is manifested in the life of Our Lord is not the cross of a martyr. He came on purpose to die. When once men get away from the teaching of the New Testament, the first thing that happens is that sin is minimised and the meaning of the Cross of Christ departed from. The Cross of Jesus Christ is the historic manifestation of the inherent nature of the Trinity. Through all the ages the perplexity in the minds of men without the Spirit of God arises because the Bible presents something utterly unlike what the natural heart thinks it wants. The natural mind of man thinks of God in a circle, everything is going to evolve and develop in a plain simple way. According to the Bible, things do not go as we expect them to, either in individual life or in history, but always at cross purposes. The symbol of the nature of God is not a circle, complete and self-centred; the symbol of God’s nature is the Cross. The end God has in view is entirely different from that arrived at by man’s unaided thinking. For instance, the conception that is working like leaven to-day all through missionary enterprise is that we are going to evolve into a circle of brilliant success, and the great conflict that awaits the missionary to-day is the conflict against the evolutionary idea that everything is growing better. The Bible does not look forward to an evolution of mankind; the Bible talks of a revolution—“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born anew” (rv). We have to get back to the preaching of the Cross, and the remission of sins through the death of Our Lord.
3. The Scriptural Method (John 21:15-17)
The method here is described by Our Lord as feeding His lambs and tending His sheep. Continually we get to the place where we see no one as sinful because we do not want to become shepherds. The great challenge is made to the missionary himself; not that people are difficult to get saved, not that backsliders are difficult to reclaim, not that there is callous indifference on the part of people to the message; the challenge is to my faith in my Lord—do I believe He is able? Our Lord seems to come steadily to us in every individual case we meet—“Believe ye that I am able to do this?” Whether it be a case of demon possession, bodily upset, mental twist, backsliding, indifference, difference of nationality and thought, the challenge is to me. Do I know my Risen Lord? Do I know the power of His indwelling Spirit? Am I wise enough in God’s sight, and foolish enough according to the wisdom of the world, to bank on what Jesus has told me? Or am I abandoning the supernatural position, which is the only one for a missionary, of boundless confidence in Jesus? If we take up any other method, we depart altogether from the scriptural method laid down by Our Lord—“All power is given unto Me. . . . Go ye therefore.”
Every time God presents us with a problem in Christian work, He gives us something to match it in our own heart, and if we will let His power work there, we shall go forth with unshakeable confidence in what He can do for any man. If once a man knows in his own life that God can do what Jesus Christ said He could, he can never be put in the place where he will be discouraged. He may be put in the heart of the vilest and most terrible phases of heathenism, but he can never be discouraged, nor can he be defiled, because he has the very nature of God in him and he is kept like the light, unsullied.
4. The Special Persons (Matthew 16:18)
Matthew 16:18 is Our Lord’s statement as to what constitutes membership in His church—a revelation of Who He is and the public confession of it. No man knows Who Jesus Christ is but by the Spirit of God, and the fact that he knows Who Jesus is and makes confession of it is the bedrock on which Christ builds His Church, according to His own word. The special person called to do missionary work is every person who is a member of the Church of Christ. The call does not come to a chosen few, it is to everyone of us. The special call is to stay at home. The big call remains—“Go ye”†; and if I am staying, I have to give God the reason. According to Our Lord, there is not a home church and a foreign church, it is all one great work, beginning at home and then going elsewhere, “beginning from Jerusalem” (rv). Jerusalem was not the home of the disciples; Jerusalem was the place where Our Lord was rejected. “Begin there,” said Jesus. In His first sermon at Nazareth Our Lord said that it was God’s way to send His message by strangers before it was accepted, and the history of the Church has proved that it is out of the mouth of strangers that the great awakenings have always come. Take any country that has had the life of God introduced into it, it has never been introduced by those belonging to the country, but always from outside.
In Our Lord’s conception all the world is the same to God, and the command to go embraces us all. Missionaries are ordained to preach, trained to teach and to heal, skilled to win savage races for Christ, but every method is to be subordinated to the one great message of the remission of sins through faith in His blood (Romans 3:25-26). Whatever line the missionary takes, whether it be medical or educational, he has only one purpose; one great truth has gripped him and sent him forth and holds him, so that he has nothing else on earth to live for but to proclaim the Death of Christ for the remission of sins. The note of false missionary enterprise leaves out the fundamental purpose of evangelisation and says that civilisation must come first. Robert Moffatt uttered solemn words when he said he little thought he would live to see the day when earnest missionaries would reverse the order of God, when the watchword would be not to evangelise first, but to civilise. Our Lord illustrates this in His parable (see Matthew 13:32). The birds of civilisation come and lodge in the branches of the spiritual tree and men say “Now this is what is to be!” and they have not seen God’s purpose at all. If we do not see God’s purpose we shall continually be misled by externals.
The thing to watch in all our enterprise for God is lest we should get swamped out of personal relationship to Jesus Christ, the One Who gives us the command—“Go ye.”† “I am made all things to all men,” says Paul, “that I might by all means save some.” The one dominating purpose and passion at the heart of the missionary is his own personal relationship to Jesus Christ. A missionary is a construction made through the Atonement by the God Who made the universe. It is not a sentiment, it is true, that God spoils a man or woman for any other use in the world saving for one thing only, to win souls to Jesus and to disciple them in His Name. The saddest thing is to see a man or woman who gave great promise of being a power for God in the world, fizzle out like an extinct volcano. The reason of it is that a rational common-sense explanation of holy things has ruthlessly torn down the great scriptural idea at the heart of the life, consequently the life has withered and become a negligible quantity from God’s standpoint.
Thank God for the words of Our Lord—“He that believeth on Me,” out of him “shall flow rivers of living water.” Always remain true to the Fountain-head.