2. Not What We Do, but Who We Are
2
NOT WHAT WE DO, BUT WHO WE ARE
It was missionary conference season. These are extended periods of special church meetings, lasting about 13 weeks each spring and fall. During this time, missions-minded churches carry on an old tradition that began centuries ago.
During these months, I spend as much time on airplanes as I do on the ground. Night after night I find myself addressing crowds of faithful believers who support foreign missions programs.
It is always a time of intense spiritual warfare for me, and I battle discouragement from one meeting to the next. As I preach each message, the souls of lost millions tumble before my eyes into the eternal flames of hell. Yet I realize that for many in the audience, I am just a kind of spiritual entertainment for the night.
As I have made the rounds of these conferences each year, certain truths have become evident. One of the most devastating is the fact that the concept of missions has been so cheapened that many Christians now equate it with fund-raising. It has been reduced to just another appeal for money, similar to the annual budget campaign or the building fund drive.
I’ll never forget the night that I first came to understand this. Before the service at one church famous for its generosity to missions, the pastor asked me if I would meet to pray with him and the missions committee. We gathered in a side room. But there was little prayer. Instead, the financial shortfalls and budget goals for the conference were discussed. Finally, just before we were to go on the platform, one of the men led us in a short prayer asking God to “use me and bless the service.”
I didn’t understand the full impact of all this until just before my turn came to speak. The pastor gave a stirring challenge for missions and then introduced me in such heroic terms that I winced in embarrassment. Finally, just as I was coming to the pulpit, he asked the people to welcome the man who “is going to help us give our best offering ever for world missions.”
Suddenly, I felt as if he had shoved a knife into my heart.
In that one instant I understood that he and his missions committee viewed me as a traveling salesman. They had a big missions fund-raising thermometer set up for conference week. And now I knew the role they planned for me. I was little more than a hired gun who came to help them color in the blank space!
I also understood why—in so many churches—I could share the exciting, new opportunities we now have for world evangelism yet see so few pledge to support missions in the 10/40 Window.
If and when missions is reduced to a dollars-and-cents decision—merely another option for our giving—we prove that we have lost sight of the Savior. The test of our true affection is not how much we give, but how we live. Missions is not something we do, but something we are.
There is a principle at work here: Self-centered Christians cannot and will not respond to Christ because they are not submitted to Him as their Head. Dichotomized Christians have reproduced their schizophrenic personal lives in the corporate life of the body. Disobedient Christians produce disobedient churches!
Christ’s Unchanging Mandate
Jesus has made clear the mission mandate for each one of us who claims to follow Him. He said that He lived to do the will of His Father; the fields of lost souls were white unto harvest; and He was sending us into those fields just as the Father had sent Him (John 4:34–38).
That means “missions” is simply an extension of His life, working through your life, to reach this generation with the love of God for a lost humanity. God is not asking us to give money to missions, but to make missions the central passion of our lives!
The Church, as the corporate expression of the Body of Christ, exists only to fulfill His will. And what is His will? He is “... not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Christ meant His Church to be primarily a missionary organization—or better yet, a missionary organism.
The Body of Christ, His Church, is the living presence of a God whose heart is pounding with a passion for lost and dying souls. We must therefore be fellowshiping and worshiping with one thing in mind: reaching lost men and women wherever they are. We are to be a people willing to exchange anything and everything we have for the pearl of great price—the kingdom of God.
Is the Christ we worship and follow today the same Christ of the Gospels? Jesus was always pressing on to preach the Gospel in the next village. His heart’s cry and prayer was for the dead and dying, for the lost, sick and undone. And the heart of every true disciple who follows in the steps of Jesus will be the same. We must be willing, as He was, to let everything go for the sake of lost souls—to give our lives to recapture just one lost inch of territory from darkness and hell. How can a church that does not reflect this spirit really be the bride of Christ?
What explanation or rationalization can we offer to explain the condition of Christianity today? The Bible offers us little help. It doesn’t give much space to descriptions of a church that appears to be nothing less than a headless corpse.
How else can we describe a church body that appears to have fallen so far away from the commands of its mind—the Lord Jesus? Let me elaborate:
Feed-Me-First Fixation
We have a feed-me-first fixation. Christianity today is stuck in a rut of self-development. It is a me-and-mine style religion that survives on an endless diet of books, video teachings, conferences and seminars.
This fat-head faith has produced a generation of Christians who know all the answers but won’t cross the street to help a neighbor in spiritual distress. This demonic reasoning goes, “Me first—after all, I can’t help others until I help myself!”
We’re content to sit in our comfortable pews week after week sucking on our spiritual baby bottles—as long as the religious entertainment offered doesn’t interfere with lunch or the ball game.
That this style of religion has no effect whatsoever on our Monday-morning lifestyle doesn’t matter. It wasn’t meant to make a difference at work, school or play in the first place. Our newest churches, with their air-conditioned atriums and gymnasiums, are being designed with the best ambiance money can buy. The designers don’t want us to feel too much different there from the way we do at the mall or health club.
Our churches are patterning their architecture, evangelism and programs after the world rather than the dictates of Christ through the Holy Spirit. For far too long, we’ve grabbed the latest fad in the world and baptized it into the church by adding a cute phrase or two. So “Jazzercise” became “Praisercise,” and computer dating services became Christian singles’ clubs. Rock ’n’ roll emerged as “Christian rock music,” and the heavy metal sound was reborn as something called “Christian shock-rock.” The list goes on and on. There are hundreds of examples.
A look at our church activity calendars reveals not a body of givers, but a society of receivers. Even our prayer meetings are little more than “bless-me” clubs. Could it be that we have let our churches become elaborate social programs with the name of God tacked on as an afterthought? Was Karl Marx right in this case? Isn’t this kind of religion really a narcotic—“the opiate of the people”?
This is “convenience store” Christianity. The pastor’s main job is to find ways to sugarcoat the Gospel message, making sure that he preaches a gospel that offends no one and runs a church that meets every imaginable mental and physical need.
It is a religion that loves to quote “charity begins at home” when the subject of missions comes up. It reminds us that Jerusalem must get in line to be fed first, but never gets around to quoting the part of the verse about “Judea and Samaria” and especially the “uttermost parts of the earth.”
What does the Lord Jesus think of our religious merry-go-round?
The question that must be asked of every Christian activity we support is simply this: Will this event create any impact on a lost and dying world? If the answer is no, then we must reconsider sponsoring it. We must ask if this is something from our agenda or His.
“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22).
We have switched to a retreat and survival mode. Actually confronting the takeover of our school systems and institutions by decades of secular humanism is too much of a strain for our kind of religion. That would require going out and witnessing to the publicans and sinners of our day.
So we are running into temporary survival shelters such as Christian schools, religious radio and television broadcasts, Christian concerts and myriad other escapisms.
The controlling force behind this massive retreat from the post-Christian, secularized culture is fear rather than holiness. It is laziness rather than righteousness. And it is born from a lack of love rather than a genuine desire for separation. Could it be that these “good things” are really enemies of the best?
“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).