“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.”
Matthew 28:18-19
There are almost 7 billion people currently alive on our
planet. Less than a third of them are Christians, and that counts the ones who
are only nominally or culturally so. That means that as of now, there are over
4.5 billion people who, if they died today, would spend eternity in hell,
separated from God.
The last thing Jesus said to his disciples before ascending
into heaven is the above passage. He sent all his followers, which includes us,
out into the world to make sure that those 4.5 billion people and all the
others who have died before them would know about his love for them. He didn’t
encode his wishes in a cryptic missive or make it hard for us to guess what he
wanted us to do. He made it pretty simple: Go. But are we doing our job?
As I’ve mentioned in some of my other blogs, I’ve been
reading the book Radical through this
last part of the race. I encourage everyone to read it, but there is one part
in particular that I want to share with you. It’s a little bit long, but David
Platt says it so well that I didn’t see the point in trying to rephrase it.
Where
in the Bible is missions ever identified as an optional program in the church?
We have just seen that we were all created by God, saved from our sins, and
bless by God to make his glory known in all the world. Indeed, Jesus himself
has not merely called us to go to all nations; he has created us and commanded
us to go to all nations. We have taken this commandment, though, and reduced it
to a calling-something that only a few people receive.
I
find it interesting that we don’t do this with other words from Jesus. We take
Jesus’ command in Matthew 28 to make disciples of all nations, and we say,
“That means other people.” But we look at Jesus’ command in Matthew 11:28,
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” and
we say, “Now that means me.” We take Jesus’ promise in Acts 1:8 that the Spirit
will lead us to the ends of the earth, and we say, “That means some people.”
But we take Jesus’ promise in John 10:10 that we will have abundant life, and
we say, “That means me.”
In
the process we have unnecessarily (and unbiblically) drawn a line of
distinction, assigning the obligations
of Christianity to a few while keeping the privileges of Christianity for us all. In this way we choose to send off other
people to carry out the global purpose of Christianity while the rest of us sit
back because we’re “just not called to that.”
Every
saved person this side of heaven owes the gospel to every lost person this side
of hell. We owe Christ to the world-to the least person and to the greatest
person, to the richest person and to the poorest person, to the best person and
to the worst person. We are in debt to the nations. Encompassed with this debt,
though, in our contemporary approach to missions, we have subtly taken
ourselves out from under the weight of a lost and dying world, wrung our hands
in pious concern, and said, “I’m sorry. I’m just not called to that.”
The
result is tragic. A majority of individuals supposedly saved from eternal
damnation by the gospel are now sitting back and making excuses for not sharing
that gospel with the rest of the world.
Radical is a
convicting and courageously worded book. He is not afraid to say things that
are hard to hear and call Americans out on our complacency and comfort. In
fact, the subtitle of the book is “Taking back your faith from the American
Dream.” In this section, Platt challenges all of us to stop making missions
something for the elite league of Christian superheroes by claiming that it isn’t
our calling. He goes on to say that claiming that we only have a heart for the
United States or for the specific city in which we live is like saying that we
only have 5% of God’s heart and being proud of it. In his words, “shouldn’t
every Christian’s heart be ultimately consumed with how we can make God’s glory
known in all the world?”
Sure, this will look different for every person, and not
everyone is expected to move to the other side of the world today, but we are
all commanded, not called, to have a
heart for the entire world and for making sure that God’s message of salvation
and love gets to them. So if that means reevaluating our priorities and
restructuring how we choose to spend our money and time, so be it.
This month we had the blessing of going to the country of
Laos and partnering with a ministry that is working to reach the hill tribes
that have never heard the gospel. Laos is a communist country that does not
have religious freedom. Evangelism is illegal, and missionaries risk their
lives to do the work God has asked of them. At the beginning of the month they
asked me to make a video to promote their work and encourage churches and
individuals to come to Laos and help them reach the people. I got to spend all
month photographing and videoing beautiful places and people to put this video
together. For the safety of the missionaries we worked with, I have removed all
the interviews and footage that shows any of the faces of the Christians we
met, so this is an edited, blog-friendly version. Please watch it and pray
about coming to Laos, whether it is for a week or forever. The people here are
waiting for the hope you can bring.
