You can do what millions of others have done. You can settle down to the monotony of American life, get married, raise children, work, retire, die, and be forgotten. Or, you can become a pioneer, trail blazer, invest your life in a great adventure for God, be the first to give some unreached tribe the Gospel, and be remembered forever.
It's for you to decide.
- author unknown
I Heard It Again
"I just admire you missionaries SO much! You give up everything to serve the Lord. I could never do something like that!"
Such a telling statement. And then in the same conversation: "How do you missionaries go to those dangerous places and terrible climates and yet work there so happily?
I'm not sure that a response will move the person who is asking off dead center or toward those places - people generally cling to their self-protective excuses - but I'll try. The big part of the answer is this : such missionaries have settled the survival question.
Those who ask these "how" and "why" questions clearly have not thought much about it, and so they think that missionaries are either super spiritual or completely crazy, while they somehow admiring them and faintly wishing that they could be like them.
Our "survival question" answer gives insight into the way Jesus lived and conducted His ministry. "Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28). Jesus was able to live as He lived and minister as He ministered because He had settled the survival question.
We say, "I can't live without this or that," meaning, "I could never survive without it." This just shows how deceptive has been the spirit of this age subverting what is at the essence of the Christian life. That is: Christians cannot live authentically without the cross. "Whoever does not forsake all [that everyone else is living for, longing for, and cannot do without] and take up his cross, cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:33).
To be Jesus' disciple means to be like Him in embracing the cross and in His will to sacrifice self that the Father might be glorified through the worship of those so redeemed. This means that when I no longer ask, "How am I going to survive?" I am finally free to ask, "How can I serve?" and like Jesus, I move into all of life with freedom, authority, integrity and single-minded purpose.
Someone has said, "There's something worse than dying; it's going through life with nothing to die for." But I think there's something even worse than that. It's going through life never having died! Indeed, having never died, we have nothing to die for!
Have YOU settled the survival question? To the extent that there is any prior commitment to self, you haven't - and you will always be amazed when you see in someone else the joy and adventure of total commitment. In fact, I predict that you will always be more saddened when you realize that the person you watch with such admiration could have been you.
Such a telling statement. And then in the same conversation: "How do you missionaries go to those dangerous places and terrible climates and yet work there so happily?
I'm not sure that a response will move the person who is asking off dead center or toward those places - people generally cling to their self-protective excuses - but I'll try. The big part of the answer is this : such missionaries have settled the survival question.
Those who ask these "how" and "why" questions clearly have not thought much about it, and so they think that missionaries are either super spiritual or completely crazy, while they somehow admiring them and faintly wishing that they could be like them.
Our "survival question" answer gives insight into the way Jesus lived and conducted His ministry. "Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28). Jesus was able to live as He lived and minister as He ministered because He had settled the survival question.
We say, "I can't live without this or that," meaning, "I could never survive without it." This just shows how deceptive has been the spirit of this age subverting what is at the essence of the Christian life. That is: Christians cannot live authentically without the cross. "Whoever does not forsake all [that everyone else is living for, longing for, and cannot do without] and take up his cross, cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:33).
Someone has said, "There's something worse than dying; it's going through life with nothing to die for." But I think there's something even worse than that. It's going through life never having died! Indeed, having never died, we have nothing to die for!
Have YOU settled the survival question? To the extent that there is any prior commitment to self, you haven't - and you will always be amazed when you see in someone else the joy and adventure of total commitment. In fact, I predict that you will always be more saddened when you realize that the person you watch with such admiration could have been you.
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