3. The Unique Sacrament of the Charter

The Key to the Missionary

Matthew 28:16-20

1. The Universal Sovereignty of Christ

All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.

The “all things” of Matthew 11:27 is limited to the revelation of the Father; the “all power” of Matthew 28:18 refers to the absolute sovereign universal power of the Risen Lord. “All power is given unto Me. . . . Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.” The basis of the missionary appeal is the authority of Jesus Christ. Our Lord puts Himself as the supreme sovereign Lord over His disciples. He does not say the heathen will be lost if you do not go, but simply—“This is My commandment to you as My disciples—Go and teach all nations.” Jesus did not say—“Go into all the world”; or, “Go into the foreign field,” but simply—“Go and teach,” i.e., “preach and teach out of a living experience of Myself.” We are all based on a conception of importance, either our own importance, or the importance of someone else; Jesus tells us to go and teach based on the revelation of His importance. “All power is given unto Me. . . . Go ye therefore. . . .”

(a) The Real Solitude with Christ

“Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain . . .” The disciples had been in intimate fellowship with Jesus, day and night, for three years; they had seen Him go through the unfathomable agony of Gethsemane; they had seen Him put to death on Calvary; they had seen Him after His Resurrection, and now they stand in solitude with Him. If we want to know the universal sovereignty of Christ, we must get into solitude with Him. It is not sufficient for someone else to tell us about Him; we must perceive with our own eyes Who He is, we must know Him for ourselves. Jesus Christ alone is the key to the missionary.

The danger to-day is to make practical work the driving wheel of our enterprises for God. All the intense social work and aggressive movements of our day are apt to be anti-Christian. They are antagonistic to the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ, because they are based on the conception that human ingenuity is going to bring in the Kingdom of God, and Jesus Christ is made of no account.

(b) The Right Spot to Meet Christ

“. . . where Jesus had appointed them.” “Come unto Me,” that is the right spot to meet Jesus Christ. “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden”—and how many missionaries are! We banish these marvellous words of the universal Sovereign of the world to the threshold of an evangelistic after-meeting. They are the words of Jesus to His disciples. He says “Come,” and we have deliberately to take time to come. If we do not take time to come, we shall be inclined to call God’s messages the devil. We are so busy in work for Him that when He just touches us, down we go, and in our panic we say—“Oh! that must be the devil.” It was God. “Despise not thou the chastening of the Lord.”^†

We must get to the place of real solitude with Christ. He is our mountain-height and our sea-calm; He is the recreating power; He is the universal Sovereign. He tells us to consider the lilies^†; we say—“No, we must consider life.” We mistake the mechanism of life for life itself, and that idea has become incorporated into Christian work. In the active work we do for God we do not really believe that Jesus Christ is sovereign Lord; if we did, we should fuss less and build more in faith in Him. We cannot do the Saviour’s work by fuss, but only by knowing Him as the supreme sovereign Lord.

“And when they saw Him, they worshipped Him: but some doubted.” It is not the doubt of unbelief, but the doubt of wonder—“Can it really be so simple as that?” If it is not as simple as that, it is all wrong. When we transacted business with the sovereign Christ, the misgiving in our heart was that it was too simple. The simplicity is the very thing that is of Jesus; anything that is not simple is not of Him. Anything that is complicated is not of His sovereignty, but of our self-interest, our self-will, our self-consideration.

It is a great thing to have our spiritual sight tested by the Celestial Optician, to watch the way in which He rectifies and readjusts our sight. There is one unmistakable witness that Jesus promised us, and that is the gift of His peace. “My peace I give unto you.” No matter how complicated the circumstances may be, one moment of contact with Jesus and the fuss is gone, the panic is gone, all the shallow emptiness is gone, and His peace is put in, absolute tranquillity, because of what He says—“All power is given unto Me.” Do we look and act as if we believed He had all power in heaven and in earth? What is our actual life like? Is it conducted on the line of John 14:1—an undisturbedness of heart arising out of belief in Jesus? We must remember to take time to worship the Being Whose Name we bear.

2. The Unobtrusive Service of the Commission

Go ye therefore.

These words are simply the introduction to a commission. The unobtrusive service of the commission is outlined in the quiet, almost commonplace statement—“Go your way, remembering what I have told you.”

(a) How to Go (Acts 1:8)

There is always the danger of starting up false enthusiasm in missionary work—“Oh yes, I will go, where shall I go?” That is like making a false start in a race and having to go back to the starting point. Our Lord’s word “go” simply means “live,” and Acts 1:8 describes the “going.” Jesus did not say to the disciples—“Go into Jerusalem, go into Judaea, go into Samaria, go into the uttermost part of the earth”; but—“Ye shall be My witnesses” (rv) in all these places: He undertakes to establish the goings. So many people are obsessed with this idea—“What are you going to do?” I hope none of us are going to do anything: I hope we are going to be what He wants us to be.

In Matthew 28:19 Our Lord does not say—“Go into all the world,” but—“Go ye therefore, and teach.” He does the engineering. In Acts 1:8 He does not say “Ye shall receive power, and you shalt go into Jerusalem”—but—“Ye shall be My witnesses . . .” (rv). How the disciples went is described later in the Acts of the Apostles, they went at the point of the sword, persecution arose and scattered them by the providence of God. “How to go” refers to the personal spiritual character of the missionary, not to his feet.

(b) How to Keep Going (John 15:7)

These wonderful words tell us how to keep going in our personal lives, viz., by the words of Jesus. “If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you.” We have continually to pull ourselves up short and recognise the amazing simplicity of Jesus Christ’s counsel. The reason we get perplexed is that we do not believe He is Sovereign Lord, we do not believe that He will never forget anything we remember; we conjure up a hundred and one things that we imagine He has forgiven. Instead of praying to the Lord of the harvest to thrust out labourers, we pray—“O Lord, keep my body right; see after this matter and that for me.” Our prayers are taken up with our concerns, our own needs, and only once in a while do we pray for what He tells us to. “Ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you” (rv). We must feed on His word, and that will keep our spiritual life going. Where we are placed is a matter of indifference. God does the engineering, and He sends us out. “Has God given you a special call to this place?” He never does. The place is arranged for by His providence, not by His call.

This verse tells us how to keep going till we’re gone—firstly, by allowing no afflictions to move us from our confidence in the sovereignty of Jesus Christ; and secondly, by not considering our life dear unto ourselves but only to Jesus Christ for the carrying out of His purposes; and thirdly, by fulfilling the ministry we have received of Him to testify the gospel of the grace of God, then we shall go, all together, like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ pony chaise, every part worn out at the same time. That is what happens with a wholesome Christian life.

3. The Unique Sacrament of the Charter

And teach all nations.

That is the central point of the commission—Teach, “make disciples of all the nations” (rv); disciple everyone, not proselytise everyone. There is nothing more objectionable than the spiritual prig. The type for the missionary is God’s own Son, and He did not go about button-holing men. There were plenty of promising men in Our Lord’s day, one of them came to Jesus and asked what he might do to inherit eternal life, and the words Jesus spoke to him sent him away in heart-breaking discouragement.^†† Our Lord never pleaded, He never cajoled, He never entrapped; He simply spoke the sternest words mortal ears ever heard, and then left it alone. Our Lord has a perfect understanding that when once His word is heard, it will bear fruit sooner or later.

To-day a number of hysterical and sentimental things are apt to gather round the missionary appeal. The need of the heathen is made the basis of the appeal instead of the authority of Jesus Christ. The need is made the call. It may be good up to a certain point, but it is not the line for the disciples of Jesus Christ. Our Lord did not tell His disciples to gather together and select certain people and send them out. That is what is being done in many places to-day, because we do not take our conception of missionary enterprise from the New Testament. We adapt the New Testament to suit our own ideas; consequently we look on Jesus Christ as One Who assists us in our enterprises. The New Testament idea is that Jesus Christ is the absolute Lord over His disciples.

(a) Administer Your Learning (John 17:17-18)

A disciple must administer to those who are ripe for it what he himself has learned. Jesus Christ is the Lord of the harvest; and the harvest is the critical moment in individual lives that is produced by conviction of sin, and Jesus alone is the judge of when that moment comes.

Many years ago I knew a godly old shepherd in the Highlands, John Cameron. He was so marvellously used by God in his contact with people that whenever he talked to them about their souls they would get saved. One summer John said to me—“If you get permission to talk to my ploughman about his soul, do.” Naturally, I said, “Why don’t you talk to him yourself?” He replied, “Didn’t I say, If you get permission? If you don’t know about getting permission, you don’t know anything about the Holy Ghost. Do you think I talk to everyone I meet? If I did, I would make God a liar. No, I have to get permission before I talk to a soul.”

This ploughman was with John for three years, and they were together every day, bringing the sheep over the hills, and John never once spoke to him about his soul. They would meet people on the hills, and John would talk to them and they would get saved. But he never said a word to the ploughman about spiritual things, until at last one day the ploughman burst out—“For God’s sake, talk to me about my soul, or I’ll be in hell.” So John did talk to him, and the man was wonderfully saved. Then he asked John Cameron why he had not spoken to him before. And John said, “Probably you know why, better than I do—I didn’t get permission.” Then the ploughman told him this—“When you ‘fee’d’ me, I knew you were a religious man, and I said to some of my mates—‘If old John talks to me about my soul, I’ll let him know what he is doing.’”

So the administering of the word is not ministering it where we think it is needed; the word has to be sown in living touch with the Lord of the harvest, sown in touch with Him in solitude and prayer, and He will bring the folks round—black and white, educated and uneducated, rich and poor. They are all there, “white already to harvest,” but most of us are so keen on our own notions that we do not recognise that they are ripe for reaping. If we are in touch with Jesus Christ, He says all the time—This is the moment; this one here, that one there, is ready to be reaped. We say—“Oh, but I want to go and get scores of heathen saved, I do not want to be the means of reaping my brother”; but your brother happens to be the one who is white to harvest. The commission is to teach, to disciple—that is, to administer the word.

(b) Abandon Your Life (John 20:23)

These words refer to the sacrament of an abandoned life, filled with the Holy Ghost, through whom the Sovereign Lord makes His words to be spirit and life. “That was exactly the word I needed, how did you know?” You did not know anything about it, you were living in abandoned devotion to Jesus, and He administered the word through you. It is not done by our wits and ingenuity, by our agony and distress, or by our piety, but entirely by our abandon to Jesus Christ.

These words reveal how to apply our loyalty to our Sovereign Lord in every condition and every circumstance. “Be thou faithful unto death.”

The key to the missionary is the absolute Sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ. We must get into real solitude with Him, feed our soul on His word, and He will engineer our circumstances. “Consider the lilies how they grow”^†—they live where they are put, and we have to live where God places us. It is not the going of the feet, but the going of the life in real vital relationship to Jesus Christ. God will bring round a stationary life far more than He can ever bring round a “going” missionary, if the “going” missionary is not one whose life is hid with Christ in God. The goings must be of God. There are a hundred and one things in human life that we cannot control; but Jesus says—“All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.” Then what are we up to with all our worrying? He says, “Let not your heart be troubled, . . . believe also in Me.”

“All power is given unto Me. . . . Go ye therefore.” “Go established in Me, and disciple everyone whom I bring around you; I will tell you when they are ripe for it.” We shall find that it is not possible to be self-conscious servants of Jesus. We are never of any use to Him in our self-conscious moments; it is in the ordinary times when we are living simply in faith in Him that He gives out the sacrament of His word through us. “He that believeth on Me, . . .” out of him “shall flow rivers of living water.”

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