5. The Discovered Supremacy of Redemption
The Lock for the Missionary Key
Romans 10:14-15
1. The Discovered Sense of Responsibility
How then shall they call . . . ?
The awakened sense of responsibility to God for the whole world is seen in the rousing up of the Christian community in sympathy towards missionary enterprise. Within recent years missionary organisation from the human standpoint has almost reached the limit of perfection. But if all this perfection of organisation does is to make men discover a new sense of responsibility without an emphatic basing of everything on Redemption, it will end in a gigantic failure. To-day many are interested in the foreign field because of a passionate interest in something other than the Lord Jesus and His command—“Go ye therefore, and make disciples” (rv). All this organisation ought to mean that we can go ahead as never before; but if once the dethronement of Jesus creeps in, the finest organisation will but perfect the lock which cannot open of itself.
There are wonderful things about light, but there are terrible things also. When once the light of God’s Spirit breaks into a heart and life that has been perfectly happy and peaceful without God, it is hell for that one. “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin.” If we take this aspect of things out of the individual setting and put it into a universal setting, we shall see the reason of the antipathy to foreign missions. It is because light brings confusion and disaster. The light produces hell where before there was peace; it produces pain where before there was death. God’s method in the pathway of light is destructive before it is constructive. The missionary is the incarnation of Holy Ghost light, and when he comes all the things of the night tremble. The night of heathenism is being split up, not by the incoming of civilisation, but by the witness of men and women who are true to God.
In this country we know nothing about what Jesus mentions in Matthew 10:34-39, but wherever the missionary brings the evangel of Jesus, he will have to face it. Those who become converts to Jesus have to go through these things literally, they are persecuted and flung out; and unless the missionary knows God and trusts in Him entirely, he will step down to a lower level and compromise, and tell the people they need not do certain things in exactly the way that Jesus indicates. But if he stands true to God, he will preach the truth, at whatever cost to the converts. No nervous system can stand that strain, no sensitiveness of mind can stand that test, nothing but the Holy Ghost can stand it, because He has the mind of God.
2. The Discovered Service of Reasonableness
How shall they believe . . . ?
Never before has there been such an educated and reasonable and intense grasp of all the problems, social and international and personal, as there is today. Everything has been laid at the service of the missionary. The opportunity is one that makes us hold our breath with amazement, and at the same moment sink back—But who has the key? All the forces of civilisation and education and healing are in perfect trim; the fulness of time has come as never before; the only thing that is lacking is the key that fits the lock. To-day the emphasis is on the reasonable aspects of missionary work, the healing, civilising, and educational. These are all admirable, and if the key were used, they would facilitate rapidly our Lord’s purpose and make it much easier to get into the heart of the problem; but the danger is that we have forgotten the key. The key is the Lordship of Jesus Christ and His supreme authority.
3. The Discovered Scheme of Representatives
How shall they hear . . . ?
There is nothing more thrilling than the realisation of what is at the disposal of the Christian church to-day. Every element of science, skill and learning has been taxed to its limit to serve the missionary purpose. It is a magnificent scheme, and all of it in order that the world might hear, but “How shall they hear without a preacher?” The work that is being done cannot be too highly praised, but it is not preaching. “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel,” that was the burning message of the apostle Paul. In spite of all the perfection of organisation the magnificent equipment and tremendous resolve, the purpose for which the whole thing was started is frequently not fulfilled, and the scheme ends simply as something to be admired. That accounts for the alternation of exaltation and despair. Just when everything seems ripe for God and our hopes are raised to the highest pitch, we are suddenly chilled, because there is no message, nothing to be believed, nothing for the world to hear. Our organisation has enabled us to re-arrange and systematise the problems, but it cannot solve the problems. It is not that the scheme is wrong. What is wrong is that the key has been lost, the Lordship of Jesus Christ has been forgotten; His supreme authority over the missionary has been ignored, He is not realised as King of kings.
Out of the centre of His own agony in the Garden, Our Lord counsels us to “watch and pray”† lest we slip into temptation. Missionary enterprise will reveal more quickly than anything whether we have been caught by the lure of wrong roads to the Kingdom. When we pray “Thy kingdom come,”† we have to see that we allow the King to have His way in us first, that we ourselves are personally related to Him by sanctification. God’s plan is that the truth must die—“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone . . .” (John 12:24). Christian work, if it is spiritual, has followed that law at home and everywhere, because that is the only way in which it can bring forth God’s fruit.
4. The Discovered Source of Reserves
How shall they preach . . . ?
A missionary is one sent by Jesus Christ as the Father sent Him. Our Lord’s first obedience was not to the needs of men, but to the will of His Father ,††† and the first great duty of the Christian is not to the needs of his fellow men, but to the will of his Lord. To elevate the heathen, to lift up the down-trodden and oppressed, is magnificent, but it is not the reason for missionary enterprise. The teaching of the New Testament is that we ought to be doing all these things to the best of our ability, but missionary enterprise is another thing. A missionary is one who is fitted with the key to the missionary lock while he pursues the ordinary callings of life.
What is needed to-day is Christian sociology, not sociology Christianised. One way in which God will re-introduce the emphasis on the Gospel is by bringing into His service men and women who not only understand the problems, but who have learned that the secret of the whole thing is supernatural regeneration, that is, personal holiness wrought by the grace of God.
Jesus Christ came to do what no human being can do, He came to redeem men, to alter their disposition, to plant in them the Holy Spirit, to make them new creatures. Christianity is not the obliteration of the old, but the transfiguration of the old. Jesus Christ did not come to teach men to be holy: He came to make men holy. His teaching has no meaning for us unless we enter into His life by means of His death. The Cross is the great central point. Jesus Christ is not first a Teacher, He is first a Saviour; and the thing that tells in the long run in the missionary’s life is not successful understanding of His teaching, but the realisation in his own personal life of the meaning of the Cross. There is only One Who saves men, and that is God. The missionary is there to proclaim the marvel of that salvation, and what he proclaims becomes a sacrament in himself, he is made the incarnation of what he preaches. The missionary will be put into places where he has to stand alone, because he is being held true to the content of the Gospel as it is in Jesus. There is a loneliness which comes from a defiant heroism which has no element of the Gospel in it.
There is no more wholesome training for the foreign field than doing our duty in the home field. The foreign field is apt to have a glamour over it because it is away somewhere else. There is an inspiration and a sense of the heroic about going to the foreign field—until we get there, and find that the most terrible things we ever touched at home were clean and vigorous compared to the corruption that has to be faced there. Unless the life of a missionary is hid with Christ in God before he begins his work, that life will become exclusive and narrow, it will never become the servant of all men, it will never wash the feet of others. Therefore we come back to the first principle—“The heathen shall know that I am the Lord . . . when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.”
5. The Discovered Supremacy of Redemption
How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!†
Thank God for the countless numbers of individuals who realise that the only Reality is Redemption; that the only thing to preach is the Gospel; that the only service to be rendered is the sacramental service of identification with Our Lord’s Death and Resurrection. To preach the Gospel is to proclaim that God saves from sin and regenerates into His Kingdom anyone and everyone who believes on the Lord Jesus. It means even more—it means to disciple all the nations (rv) not only on the authority of Jesus, but on the flesh and blood evidence of entire sanctification in the life of the missionary. “When it pleased God . . . to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen.”
Thus we end where we began, with Our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the First and the Last,† and laying His hands on the missionary, He says—“Fear not; I . . . have the keys.”