Don’t Complicate the "Missionary Call"

by David Sitton

I was never called to be a missionary, nor was I drafted. I volunteered. No special call was needed. I chose to go; I wanted to go; I was compelled to go. And where I go is always determined by an open Bible and a stretched-out map of the regions where Christ is still unknown and un-praised!

I chuckle when I hear missionaries and pastors talk about “surrendering to the call” of ministry. I always want to ask, “After you surrendered, were you water-boarded, or just hauled off in handcuffs and leg irons.” Was it really necessary for you to be abducted by a heavenly vision before you would go into the work of the gospel?

The missionary call is not like a prison dog that tracks us down, sniffs us out, and hog-ties us for the nations. That is silly-talk and really bad theology. Nowhere in Scripture is a mysterious (supernatural) call a prerequisite before we can respond to the Great Commission. The opposite is actually true.

Don’t Wait for a Call

No aspect of mission is more bogged down with extra-biblical baggage than the “missionary call.”  The clear command of Christ “to go” should be, by itself, sufficient to set you on your way “into all the world. . . proclaiming the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15). You can’t go wrong by trying to go. Trust the Lord to direct your moving feet. If you are convinced of your “call” to “stay”, this will only serve as added confirmation that you are right. Don’t fear the risk of ending up some place the Lord doesn’t want you. Too many already took that “risk” when they assumed a stateside ministry or vocation with no confirmation other than their own desires.

Dramatic calls to ministry are the exception. If you have it in your heart to go, then go. Then, lean on the sovereignty of God to get you where he wants you in the harvest. Don’t worry about “running ahead of God.” You aren’t that quick!

Try to Go

Paul tried to go into Asia, but the Lord wouldn’t let him. He then tried to go to Bithynia, but was “kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia.” Still, he kept trying to go. I count at least six cities in Acts 16 where Paul tried to take the gospel. It was only then that the Lord gave him a vision of the Macedonian. He woke up the next morning and immediately headed for the regions north, having “concluded that God had called them to preach the gospel in Macedonia.

The heavenly vision wasn’t a “call” to mission, it was specific guidance for missionaries that were already going.

The point?  Don’t complicate the missionary call. Get radical with the going and God will get radical in the specific guiding.

David Sitton is the founder and president of To Every Tribe Ministries. David is a career church planting missionary who lived and worked in Papua New Guinea for 16 years, making first gospel contact with several headhunting, cannibalistic tribes.

It's hard to be a sinner.

There is a general assumption prevalent in the world that it is extremely difficult to be a Christian. While it is true that many don't completely disqualify themselves as "Christians," they do modify their claims: ordinary Christians they call themselves. They respect the church, worship fairly regularly, try to live decently. But they give themselves somewhat generous margins to allow for the temptations and pressures put upon them by the world. To really be on the way of faith, take with absolute seriousness all that the Bible says - well. that requires a predisposition to saintliness, extraordinary willpower and an unspecified number of nameless austerities that they are quite sure they cannot manage.

But this is as from from the truth as the east is from the west. The easiest thing in the world is to be a Christian. What is hard is to be a sinner. Being a Christian is what we were created for. The life of faith has the support of an entire creation and the resources of a magnificent redemption. The structure of this world was created by God so that we can live in it easily and happily as his children. The history we walk in has repeatedly been entered by God, most notably in Jesus Christ, first to show us and then to help us live full of faith and exuberant with purpose. In the course of Christian discipleship we discover that without Christ we are doing it the hard way and that with Christ we are doing it the easy way. It is not Christians who have it hard, but non-Christians.

These paragraphs and the Chesterton quote from chapter 10 of A Long Obedience In the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson are teasers to draw you into the chapter and the rest of the book.

I wish I had heard this years ago

Like 50 years ago. I am thankful that I did finally learn it and since then, I have tried to frame it - and say it. Not very successfully though; certainly with nothing of the clarity and impact of this from Dr. Sproul. Strangely, it seems to ruffle feathers. For me, it is validating and freeing. And I can go back on offense. 

Brothers, We Are Not Professors - by R.C. Sproul

It has been said by one great Reformed theologian that  we are living in the most anti-intellectual age in the church’s history. We are the TV generation, making way for the Internet generation. Images tickle our eyes, and sound-bites massage our brains. We are, compared to our Puritan fathers, ignorant shepherds leading sensate sheep in a dry and dusty land. Surely what we need then is more thought, more scholarship, more earnest hours spent pouring over the ancients in our studies. Right?

We are worldly when we, like the world around us, give ourselves to an entertainment mentality, when we amuse ourselves to death. We are still worldly, however, when we rightly reject the eye candy and froth of pop culture and then conclude that our problems are intellectual, and our solutions more learning. It was the enlightenment, not the Light of the World, that gave us education as its high and holy sacrament. What Jesus calls us to is to repent and believe the gospel. It is more important to us and our sheep that we would learn to believe more, than that we would find more to believe.

That means first that when we prepare to serve in the ministry, we have to prepare to serve in the ministry. Our seminaries, if we must have them, should more reflect a training hospital than a university. Divinity is not a body of knowledge to be mastered like geology. The Bible is not a book to be dissected like Moby Dick. We go there, if we must go there, not to study the Word, but to begin to learn to have the Word study us. We go to pursue not advanced degrees but the fruit of the Spirit. We go to lose our reputations, not to gain them. We go not to be thought wise, but to learn what fools we are.

That means next that when we are called to the ministry, that we minister. Our pulpits, sadly, are filled with men who started as seminarians eager to shepherd a flock. There they were introduced to a dynamic, likely godly professor, and suddenly the student determines he will pursue still more degrees, that he might follow in the footsteps of his hero. As seminary comes to a close growing debts, a growing family, and a growing urge to go and teach derail the plan to become a professor. Instead the young pastor determines to take a church that his flock can become his student body, and His Body, a tiny little seminary. He will lecture then during Sunday School, and regale them through each sermon. The Shepherd, however, calls us to feed His Sheep. We are not to give our wisdom, our insights, the fruits of our scholarship. Rather, like Paul before us, we serve up our weakness, our frailty, our need. That’s how the Word breaks through, where the power comes from.

Brothers, your flock may need some more information. What they need more, however, is someone to lead them, to show them the Way. They need to see you repenting. They need to see you wrestling with your sins. They need to see you preaching the gospel to yourself, not because you like the sound of your voice, but because you hate the sin that yet remains, and you need grace. They need to see you rejoicing in the fullness of His promises, and mourning both sin and its fruit, the last enemy, death.

No man needs advanced degrees, and arcane letters after his name in order to follow Jesus. Which means that no man needs these things to lead others in following Jesus. If you follow Him, they will follow you. If, however, you merely tickle their brains, they will soon go off in pursuit of someone who seems smarter than you. If they are taught to hear your voice, they won’t discern the voice of the Master.

When our days of ministry come to an end, our labors will either be dust, or they will be dust. No matter how many downloads our wisdom garners, no matter how many journals publish our insights, these will all one day decay. Our scholars’ hoods and robes, pulpits and libraries will become mere chaff.  If, however, we spend our days as shepherds, pasturing the flock, our labors will last forever. For we minister to dust, to men into whom the Spirit breathed twice. We minister to dust that is, through faithful, pastoral preaching, being burnished into the image of the Pearl of Great Price. Brothers, we are not doctors, but the sick, not scholars but fools. Let us then be fools for Christ. Preach.

Service

I am rereading the revised edition of what to my mind is a classic. First written in 1980, Eugene Peterson's, A Long Obedience In the Same Direction, brings the "Psalms of Ascent" into our lives with fresh instruction on the basics of a life of freedom and faithfulness to God.

I offer a few thoughts about Service taken from Chapter 5, which bears that title:

"In Psalm 123 we observe that aspect of life that takes place under the form of servanthood.

"'I look up to you heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help.' The servant assumes a certain posture, a stance. If he or she fails to take that posture, attentive responsiveness to the master's commands will be hard. . . .

"The psalm has nothing in it about serving others. It concentrates on being a servant to God. Its position is that if the attitude of servanthood is learned, by attending to God as Lord, then serving others will develop as a very natural way of life. Commands will be heard . . . and carried out with ease and poise. . . .

"The consequences are all positive. I have never yet heard a servant Christian complain about the oppressiveness of his servitude. I have never yet heard a servant Christian rail against the restrictions of her service. A servant Christian is the freest person on earth."

Today's Reality

So here we are . . . again! It's life. It's ministry.

A lot is "up in the air". Unsettled. Unsettling.  Too many things not fitting our plans or schedules. Life is getting disjointed; we are off-balance in ministry with the not-so-nice "surprises" and disappointments. It's so frustrating! 

But now what?

Well . . . there is really no benefit in wringing our hands. And I don't think it always helps to just roll up our sleeves and try to tough it out. So how about this novel idea? 

Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)

Stop the striving. Instead. seize the opportunity all of this disquiet and confusion affords to find and enjoy the stillness and coherence . . . the security and confidence that is in God.

Take time to not only know God but to know Him better.

You can study this further at http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Meditations/Be_Still/be_still.html

Ray

From an e-mail (10/12/12) to our 

TEAMS field and home missionaries and staff

Heartbeat

“God has only children; He has no grandchildren.”  Have you heard this before?  Well, it’s true and  I think it’s time to affirm it in the strongest terms. Here’s why:

Sometimes questions arise when Jamaica is cited as having the highest number of churches per square mile or when it is said that it is a Christian nation and its people are Christians. What is missed is the sad reality that the majority of Jamaicans do not go to church or, if they do, still can’t tell you how to get to heaven. It is true that some Jamaicans are working for revival but obedient faith has been in decline for so long that the need now is for grassroots evangelism and disciple making.

Because Christianity is part of Jamaica’s history and is still nominally present, some people question whether Jamaica is a  mission field at all! Well it is!  And we at TEAMS are not ready to “shake the dust off our feet" against that country just because there remain some vestiges of Christianity. We will not somehow penalize lost people today because their “Christian” forebears squandered the responsibilities of their spiritual privilege. Nor will we assign them a low priority or make missions work optional just because the country is not between certain latitudes on the globe, or cannot be defined as “unreached”, or is not populated by adoptable people groups.

My friends, people are not more or less lost and without hope because they live in Jamaica instead of Jordan, or reside in Montego Bay rather than Montenegro. Lost is lost and eternity without Christ is eternity without Christ.

“God has no grandchildren.” May we each find our God-directed place in His purposes “for the obedience of faith among all nations.” This is my Heartbeat.

- My editorial from the most recent Vital Signs which reports on the work of TEAMS for Medical Missions in Jamaica, West Indies

Life As A Vapor

Thank You, Lord, for the lives of flawed

and faith-filled saints!

Thank You for grace, amazing grace,

that saves and uses sinners!

Lord, don’t let us dream too small about our lives.

Don’t let us limit Your power

to what we see in the mirror.

Help us to trust You. 

Help us as William Carey said,

to expect great things from God

and attempt great things for God.

We are not great. But You are great.

Your power is made perfect in our weakness.

We surrender all claims on our lives.

Come. Make us useful for the glory of Christ.

In His great name, we pray, Amen.

-- John Piper