The Church and the Great Commission--Zane Pratt (December 8, 2024)

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FBC Travelers Rest sermon from December 8, 2024 by guest preaching Zane Pratt. Zane services the International Mission Board as Vice President for Global Training.

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It is a pleasure to be here.
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We have loved the Burns family ever since we met them, and it was a joy to us to get to be part of the beginning of their time in Turkey.
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And yeah, Rhett and I have many interesting stories of coaching football together. Some of you in Sunday school heard some of those, but more than that, just being together to share the gospel that had never been heard before, to fill in the most important gaps of his introduction,
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I am the husband of one wife, and her name is Catherine, the father of two children, Charlotte and Greg, and the grandfather of three children, five -year -old
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August, three -year -old Julia, and six -month -old Jack. And for those of you who have not yet attained to that state of life of being grandparents, all the hype is true.
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It is the best of all possible worlds. You get to enjoy them and hand them back.
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And for those of you who are currently parents of small children, it's in the manual as part of the job description that we have to give them either caffeine or sugar before we hand them back to you.
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That really is there. It's what we're supposed to do. If you would, open your Bibles to Acts chapter 13.
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We're going to be reading the first four verses of this passage. So, either open or open, as your technology dictates, and we'll look at this together.
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Acts chapter 13. Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers,
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Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manan, a lifelong friend of Herod the
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Tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the
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Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul, for the work to which I have called them.
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Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them and sent them off. So being sent out by the
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Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus.
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Let's pray again. Father, we recognize that when
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Jesus said, apart from me you can do nothing, he meant it. And that includes both proclaiming and hearing your word.
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And Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit now would be at work in us. You would guide the words that I say.
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You would give all of us ears to hear, minds to understand, hearts to love, and wills to obey your truth.
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Only you can do it. So we're asking you in Jesus' name. Amen. Who has the responsibility for global missions?
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Now I think many would automatically say, well obviously missionaries have that responsibility. And when you think who are the missionaries, you think the few, the proud, the slightly unhinged who actually go halfway around the world to take the gospel to those who don't know it.
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Well who has the responsibility for sending them? Obviously it's mission agencies. It's missionary agencies then that gather the funds, do the training, send them out.
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And so that's all safely out there done by someone else. The problem is that the
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Bible has no such notion. The Bible has a very different perspective on the missionary task.
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See there were no mission agencies in the ancient world. There was no Jerusalem board of foreign missions that sent out the first missionaries.
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There were none of the support structures that we have. Instead it was all done by churches.
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Now this passage here gives us a model for how it was to be done. And that model would be the paradigm for centuries to come.
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So what do we see in this text? First of all, we see that there was a church in Antioch.
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The story for this is given in Acts chapter 11. After Stephen was martyred, believers were scattered.
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Those believers at this point were almost entirely made up of Jewish followers of Jesus. And what we're told is that everywhere they went, they spoke the word, but they spoke the word only to fellow
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Jews, except in Antioch. Now Antioch was one of the big cities of the
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Roman Empire. It was sort of one of the big three, along with Rome and Alexandria you had
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Antioch, it was a port city, it was a trade route, it was one of the most significant cities in the ancient world.
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And it was in Antioch that for the first time they didn't just share the gospel with fellow
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Jews, they also shared the gospel with Greeks, with Gentiles. And so the first mixed church came into being there, a church consisting of Jewish and Gentile believers worshiping
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God side by side. But what's really interesting as you read through the book of Acts is that you begin to realize that evangelism automatically produced churches.
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It didn't just produce disciples, oh it did that, but it also produced churches because where you had disciples, automatically you had churches because that's the whole
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New Testament pattern. The local church is the inevitable consequence of evangelism and mission work.
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Now we also notice here that this church had leaders. So fast forward a little bit in the story, when the disciples in Jerusalem heard that there was this new church in Antioch, they sent
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Barnabas to check it out. So we see already right here a pattern in missionary activity, it wasn't hit and run evangelism, it wasn't plant a church and move on and forget about it.
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They heard there was a church, they sent someone to help out, to check it out and to help it out. Barnabas was the ideal person, the very word
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Barnabas means son of encouragement, it wasn't his real name, it was his nickname, his name was Joseph. But he was one of the most encouraging people in the early church.
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He was sent there to encourage the church, to instruct it, to help it really get on its feet.
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Well he quickly realized that he needed help in this work and he knew about this guy named
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Saul. Someone he himself had welcomed into the church when no one else would have anything to do with him.
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Well Saul was just up the road in Tarsus and one of the fun things about living in our part of the world is
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I can actually say that I was driving from Tarsus to Antioch one day, it really was, it's not that far, it's about a four hour drive which means if you're walking it it's obviously quite a bit longer but not that distant.
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So Barnabas went to Tarsus, picked up Saul who was a well trained rabbi before he became a believer, brought him to Antioch and the two of them together were engaged in teaching this church.
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They then recruited some other guys as well and it's quite a diverse group as you look at this group of people.
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There were two Africans, Simeon who was called Niger which means black so he was probably a black
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African, then another guy who has a Greek name and was probably a Hellenist of some sort, you have
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Manan who was closely connected with Herod the Tetrarch so he was a politically well connected guy and then you had
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Barnabas and Saul. So as we look at this picture we have a glimpse into the life of a first century
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New Testament church that was exhibiting many signs of health. We see that there were prophets and teachers so there was a teaching ministry going on there.
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We see they were engaged in prayer and fasting and worship. This was a normal part of the life of the church.
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And what we see flowing out of the normal life of the church was the first missionary journey.
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See a local church was the setting for the first intentional sending of missionaries in church history.
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Up to this point it had all sort of happened incidentally, it had happened in response to persecution, it had happened as believers were going about wherever they were.
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This is the first time it was deliberate. And so as we look at this passage we see a local church producing missions.
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Let's look at it a little closer. Let's look first at the missionary call. We're told that as they were fasting and praying the
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Holy Spirit said, set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.
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Okay. When you hear the word call, what do you think? I know that I grew up in good
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Southern Baptist style thinking that the call was something that was restricted to pastors and missionaries.
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And it inevitably had to in some ways be like the call of the
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Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road. So if you weren't knocked off a donkey you were safe, you weren't called.
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If you didn't see a blinding light from heaven, okay, you're off the hook. But you'll notice here that it wasn't anything like that.
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It was the Holy Spirit speaking to and through the body that said, set apart
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Barnabas and Saul to the work to which I have called them. So what is this call thing?
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Well, if you look through the New Testament at the uses of the word call, what you discover is that it's just typically used just like we would use the word call.
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So you have things like Herod called the wise men and asked them, when did the star rise? Or you shall call his name
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Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. But when God's the one doing the calling, when he's the subject of the verb, it takes on some specific forms.
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And first and foremost, overwhelmingly above everything else, when God's doing the calling, it's the call to salvation.
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It's the call of the gospel. God calls sinners to repent of their rebellion against him and to put their faith in Jesus.
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Overwhelmingly, that's the majority of the uses of that word call, which means that if you are a believer in this room, you have responded to God's call to follow
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Christ. And it happens that that call comes as a package deal. So everyone who is called to salvation is called to some other things as well.
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So for instance, if you are called to salvation, you are also called to sanctification.
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Yes, I'm a Baptist preacher. I have to alliterate. So you were called to salvation. You were called to live a holy life. Every believer is called to live a holy life.
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It's not like there are different categories. These people are really holy, but these people just have to be sort of holy.
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No, there's only one tier, as it were, of believers, and all of us are called to live lives that reflect and honor our
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Savior. Well, it also happens that everyone who is called to salvation and sanctification is called to suffering.
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And there are verses in the New Testament that make that very clear, that the normal life of a normal Christian is the life of paying a price for following Jesus, is a life that says, whatever price he wants me to pay,
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I'm willing to pay. And because we live in a world that's in rebellion against our God, we live in a world that hates the gospel that we proclaim.
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We can expect opposition of some sort to our lives as Christians. But it's also true that every
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Christian is called to their situation in life. 1 Corinthians chapter 7 particularly illustrates this, that things like marriage or singleness, it's a call from God.
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It's obviously not a permanent calling. You were called at one point to be single. Some of you are called after that to be married.
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Some of you may, after being married, find yourself a widow or a widower and you're called to be single again.
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But the fact is that even circumstances in your life like that are not random.
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They didn't just happen. They're callings from God. And so we think of things like marriage or singleness.
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We think of things like vocation, the very word means calling. And it comes from the conviction of the reformers that you can be called by God to be a garbage man as much as you can be called by God to be a missionary and you can honor
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God in that calling. To location, where you are, you are called by God to be there.
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And so I live in the house I live in, on the block that I live in, the neighborhood that I live in, not because of just some random circumstance, but God put me there and he put me there to be his ambassador where I am.
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Same thing is true of your place of work, of your school, of whatever situation you find yourself in,
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God called you to be there to represent him. And then finally, every believer is called to service.
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We are called to service in the fellowship of the church. Everyone is gifted by God in certain ways, not for our own sake, but to serve the rest of the members of the church and everyone's gift.
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Everyone's service is essential for the health of the church. So again, nobody's off the hook here.
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Everyone is called to invest their lives and the gifts that God has given them in the lives of your fellow church members for the sake of the health of the whole body.
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And we are all called to service of the gospel out in the world. And so all of us are to be ready at all times to give an account for the hope that is in us, to outsiders and those who do not yet believe in Jesus.
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So if that's the meaning of the word call, guess what? You're called. If you're a believer in Jesus, you are called.
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And so in the case of Paul and Barnabas, it wasn't, I'm calling them and not the rest of you.
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It set them apart for the work for which I have called them. And that's just part of the overall picture of the work that God had given to his entire body and was asking for them to do.
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What that means then also is that the question is not, am
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I called? It's how am I called? How am I called to serve God in his church? And you are. How am
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I called to serve God in the world? We also notice that the call to proclaim the gospel is what happens when the
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Holy Spirit is at work. So it's the Holy Spirit who said to them, set apart
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Paul and Barnabas. Now, when we think about the work of the Holy Spirit, certainly in the conversation in the church today, the focus tends to be on the gifts of the spirit and people think a whole lot about that.
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And it's easy to get a really, really rip roaring argument going. If you start talking about the gifts of the spirit of actually the
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New Testament pays less attention to that than it does to the fruit of the spirit and the work of the spirit.
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So it's far easier to tell if someone's really a follower of Jesus if you see in their lives love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self -control than whether or not they're exercising a certain gift.
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But the other thing that fascinates me in looking through the New Testament is that wherever the Holy Spirit is, evangelism missions happens invariably.
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So think about Pentecost. Oh, actually, go back. Think about the
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Great Commission. You know, in every iteration of the Great Commission, and it happens several times in the 40 days between the resurrection and the ascension, the
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Holy Spirit is mentioned and proclaiming the gospel to the nations is mentioned. In Matthew, it's phrased as,
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I will be with you always to the end of the age. Jesus is with us through the person of his Holy Spirit.
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In Luke, it's you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
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In Acts, it's again – oh, sorry, that's Acts. In Luke, it's thus it is written that the
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Christ should suffer and rise from the dead and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem but wait for the gift of the
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Holy Spirit from the Father on high. So where the Holy Spirit shows up, evangelism and missions happens.
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And so it was in Pentecost when the Holy Spirit is poured out on the church. The result is 3 ,000 people getting saved.
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You keep reading and you get to Acts chapter 4. The believers are threatened and then released.
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They gather together and they pray, not for protection but for boldness. What happens?
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The Holy Spirit is poured out and they boldly proclaim the gospel. So if you want signs that the
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Holy Spirit is really at work in your church, ask are people becoming more and more like Jesus and are people boldly proclaiming the gospel in their community and to the ends of the earth?
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That's the mark of the work of the Holy Spirit. And then the consequence of this calling was that Saul and Barnabas are sent out.
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They go first to Cyprus and then to the central part of what is now the country of Turkey and you have the beginning of the explosion of the gospel outside of the eastern
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Mediterranean and it would eventually reach to all of Europe. So that being the case, what can we conclude about the role of the local church in missions?
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And it's simply this, it's the most important role of all. The local church is where missions happens.
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Now this begins with missionary preparation. So I'm in charge of training at the
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International Mission Board and we put people through quite a rigorous training before we send them overseas but we recognize that actually we're just putting the icing on the cake.
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The bulk of the training happens right here in your church because the bulk of missionary preparation is discipleship and discipleship happens best in the context of the local church.
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So teaching and discipleship was going on in Antioch and the consequence then was well trained disciples going out to make disciples because that's all a missionary is.
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A missionary is simply a disciple of Jesus who makes disciples for Jesus where Jesus is not yet known and you can't give away what you don't have.
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You need to be a disciple to make disciples and discipleship happens right here. Now discipleship has been something of a buzz word in Christian circles for decades now and I think often we think of it as a program you go through, a book you read, a set course you take.
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It's way more than that. See discipleship means you are becoming more and more like Christ and better and better equipped to serve
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Christ and you're doing this in every area of life. And so discipleship involves content which is knowing the word of God.
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It involves character, conformity to the image of Christ and it involves competence.
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It involves the ability to do things like share the gospel, disciple others and for some to teach and this is the heart of missionary training.
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So when we're looking at missionary candidates what we want to know is have you been discipled by your church?
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And if not let's work with your church on that. We're finding in recent years more and more that people come to us who haven't been and that's a desperate need.
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And so right here in front of me is a missionary training school, a missionary preparation.
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This is where boot camp happens for missionary service. Right here in your church as you pour yourself into one another's lives and as you make use of the means
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God has given you of the teaching of this church, the accountability, the prayer, the ordinances, all the things that go into church life are the most important part of missionary training.
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It was as the prophets and teachers were doing their work that missionaries were raised up in Antioch.
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This is also where missionary recruitment happens. It wasn't the case there, it was the
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Holy Spirit said to the group, these are the men that I want to send out as missionaries.
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Now too often missionary recruitment happens in sort of an outsourced way.
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We outsource it to conferences and mission agencies. I get to hear the testimony of everyone who comes as a missionary candidate to the
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IMB and it is sadly rare that someone perceived that God was calling them to missions in the context of their church.
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All too often it was in a parachurch group when they were students or it was at some conference.
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But ordinarily it should be right here, right here among you as your pastor preaches.
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And I know that every time it comes up in the text he preaches about the mission that God has given his church to go to the nations.
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And it also comes about in your conversations with each other. Usually all too often in fact what happens is someone says,
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I feel God's called me to the nations. And the people in their church are going, oh you don't want to do that.
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I mean it's dangerous and besides how dare you take my grandchildren somewhere else.
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It should be the other way around. It should be that we as the church are encouraging people, even maybe being gracious gadflies in each other's lives to stir each other up to missionary service.
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So missionary recruitment happens in the context of a local church. So does missionary assessment.
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Now Saul and Barnabas were clearly qualified and the Holy Spirit was the one who indicated it. We don't have the advantage of quite that direct a message for the most part.
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So when someone applies to us to be a missionary we send them straight back to you and ask you to assess them.
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Are these people qualified for this kind of service? And that's a change. When my wife and I went through the process, when the
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Burns went through the process, asking the church was the last thing we did. Now it's the first thing we do and that's been one of the initiatives that I have been delighted to take.
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And we want to know is this person qualified for missionary service. That does not mean is this person a super saint.
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It does not mean does this person walk on water, does this person shadow heal the sick. What it means is is this person a faithful growing disciple of Jesus.
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So we're looking for things like does this person know the Bible? Do they have godly character?
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Do they show integrity? Are they healthy in their relationships? Are they involved in their church in a robust manner?
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Are they actively sharing the gospel and discipling others? If you're not doing it here you won't suddenly start when you get on a plane and go somewhere else.
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Are they physically healthy enough to live in a third world potentially environment?
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Do they have emotional stability and strength and resilience? But those are the things we're looking for and with the possible exception of the health issue, those are things that should be true of every single believer.
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That shouldn't be some super saint category in the church. Are they ordinary, biblically ordinary faithful disciples of Jesus?
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And it's the church that's in the best position to assess that. And what we have discovered with our new process is that if the church works through the assessment we ask them to do and they make it through, then about 95 % of those people will end up on the mission field with us.
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Sometimes we discover things about their health that they didn't know about or things like that. But otherwise usually the bulk of the work is done.
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And then it's the church that sends. So it's not that the IMB, the
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International Mission Board, sends missionaries. No local churches send missionaries. We're a tool that you created since 1845 to assist the church in doing the church's job of sending missionaries.
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Then it's the church that supports them or churches together as we pool our finances so that our missionaries don't have to spend 40 % of their time raising support, which is the norm in support raising mission agencies.
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Prayer, encouragement and pastoral care, all of those things come from local churches.
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And then it's local churches that will assist many times in sending out short -term mission teams for encouragement and pastoral care and also to support the missionary task.
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And so we were blessed by mission teams that came out to help us with football.
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Believe it or not, you can do that. They came and put on football camps for us because anything you know about football as an
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American is more than those guys know. And they were able to support and encourage our platform for being there and also be in the lives of our players and for those who spoke
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English to share the gospel with them. There's dozens of things that can be done to support the missionaries by teams that the church sends.
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So that's the role of the local church in missions. It's the major role. It's the predominant role.
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And I might add it is also churches that receive missionaries back. So all of us come back every two to four years on stateside assignment and we come back without houses, without cars, needing support in that fashion.
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Our kids need help. My son, under a pseudonym, wrote an article,
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Are the Kids Okay? And it was published as a guide to churches to how to love on missionary kids who have returned to the states as college students.
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Because very often they are assumed to be American because they have American passports and American accents, but they're not
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Americans. And they're puzzled and confused by this strange country that their parents have dumped them in.
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And so there's a need for assistance there. And then for those who return long term for a variety of reasons, there is a need for the support of those people as they reintegrate into life in the
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United States. So, just to summarize what this text tells us, the first intentional missionary sending was the work of the
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Holy Spirit in the context of a local church. And then let me add that those missionaries went out to start more churches.
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Everywhere the apostles went, a church emerged, without exception. Everywhere they went, the result was a church.
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So, what does that mean then for First Baptist Church of Travelers Rest in December of 2024?
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I would say there are several applications that I would encourage you to pursue. The first is, if you can't give away what you don't have, then above everything else, you can't give away a relationship with God that you don't have.
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In a church this size, a group this size, I don't assume everyone here is a follower of Jesus.
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And so let me just remind you of the gospel. It's the gospel you hear in this church every week, but it is the single most important message you'll ever hear in your life.
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The message of the gospel is that there is, in fact, a God who created everything, including you.
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He owns everything, and He knows everything. And He is the judge of all the earth, and every one of us is accountable to that God for every thought we have ever thought, every feeling we have ever had, every word we have ever spoken, every deed we have ever done.
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And God's standard of judgment is His own perfection and holiness. But we, all of us, every single human being on the face of the earth, are guilty before that God, because we have rebelled against Him and gone our own way.
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Every one of us has done things that offend God and have failed to do things that God requires.
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And so every human being on the face of the earth deserves condemnation from a holy
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God. And if God had simply stopped at that, He would have been entirely fair and just.
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But praise God, He looked at us, undeserving rebels, and loved us instead.
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That He made a solution to our problem. When we got ourselves in the hole,
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He got us out of it, and He got us out of it at incredible cost to Himself. Because God became a man in the person of Jesus.
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And our Lord Jesus lived the life we should have lived as the perfect man, but we didn't.
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He did as our substitute. And then He died the death we deserve to die. He took on Himself the wrath that our sins deserve.
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This is the most astonishing good news in the universe. And having died, truly died,
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He rose again from the dead, conquering sin and death and Satan. And He now sends
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His people out into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the command that everyone everywhere should repent.
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That is, do a 180, repent of your rebellion against God. Lay down your sin and embrace
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Him. Follow Him and trust Him and Him alone to make you right with the Father. And everyone who does that will have their sins forgiven, will be given the gift of the
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Holy Spirit, made a new creature in Christ, put in a new family, the people of God, empowered by the
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Holy Spirit to serve Him in this life, and guaranteed an eternity in infinite joy and glory with Him.
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And so if you have never done that, if you have never repented of your rebellion and trusted in Jesus alone,
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I would plead with you to do that today, because that literally is the most important decision you will ever make in your life.
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But for those of us who have done that, what does it mean for us? Well, first of all, let me say, since a missionary is a disciple of Jesus foremost, and since a disciple of Jesus should be a normal church member, a normal Christian, let me encourage you to take discipleship seriously.
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Take discipleship seriously for yourself. Make use of the means God has given you.
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Study His Word intently. Pray diligently. Engage in the church faithfully.
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Ruthlessly put your sin to death and seek to serve Christ in the world.
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Grow to be more and more like Him. And let me add that discipleship certainly involves spiritual disciplines like the
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Word and prayer and fasting, but it's more than that. Those are means to an end. Those are means to the end of transformation of every area of life.
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And so you want to have your heart transformed as you're born again, but that then leads to a transformation in your mind, as your mind is, your brain's rewired by the
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Scriptures to think like God does. It means a transformation of your affections as you learn to reverse the course of the world, love what
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God loves, and hate what God hates, which is generally the opposite of the way the world feels about things.
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It means a transformation of your will that you obey God gladly, not grudgingly or out of fear, but out of love for Him.
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It means a transformation of your relationships where you love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
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You love your neighbor as yourself. You love the people of God, and you even love your enemies. And it means a transformation of your purpose, and this is key.
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A disciple is someone whose purpose has been transformed so that you are not living for yourself and you are not living for the
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American dream. You are living for the agenda of God. You are living to the praise of His glory and the advance of His gospel.
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That's why you exist. And if that becomes the purpose of your life, then suddenly the quote -unquote sacrifices demanded of a disciple, and especially of a missionary, come to make perfect sense.
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So, take discipleship seriously yourself. Next, mobilize each other.
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Be in the habit of spurring each other on to love and good deeds, including the good deeds of sharing the gospel here in your own community.
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If I heard correctly earlier, eight out of ten people in this community, in the heart of the Bible Belt, have no connection to a church.
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I mean, that is offensive, and it should offend you. That means you're surrounded by lost people, and you are here to share the gospel with them.
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That's God's plan. God's plan is churches that share the gospel, and you're here. And this is a
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Bible -believing, Bible -preaching church, so the gospel should sound forth from here every week by everyone who knows the
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Lord Jesus. Stir each other up to that, but also stir each other up to a knowledge of the world and a knowledge of the need of the world and the imperative of the
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Great Commission. I mean, you have a tremendous advantage. You have a pastor who has lived it and done it, and who knows firsthand just how destitute most of the world is of the knowledge of Jesus.
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But just to give you an idea, the part of the world that we both worked in, Central Asia, is 99 .9
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percent lost. That means less than one -tenth of one percent of the people of that part of the world have a saving knowledge of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. The overwhelming majority of them have never met a
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Christian and never heard the gospel. And we, right here, are in the middle of the greatest concentration of gospel knowledge and healthy churches in the world.
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And so stir each other up to pray for the nations and to go to the nations.
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Then as people do, as God raises up missionaries from your midst, assess them seriously.
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Don't be casual about it. Be diligent to make sure that these people really are healthy, growing disciples of Jesus who will be able to stick it out and show resilience on the mission field.
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Don't send anybody you wouldn't want on your team. Send people that God has raised up.
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Then support generously. Let me pause here and simply say thank you.
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On behalf of my family and me, on behalf of your 36 ,000, excuse me, 3 ,600 missionaries around the world, thank you for your support that you've given us throughout the years.
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We have the most brilliant missionary support system anybody's ever come up with. I mentioned earlier, people who are involved in support raising, on average, spend 40 percent of their time raising or maintaining their support level.
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Your missionaries can spend that time sharing the gospel with lost people and don't have to come back early because their support dropped off and suddenly they can't support their family anymore.
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So thank you for your giving. This is the Lottie Moon Christmas offering time.
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The Lottie Moon Christmas offering is a wonderful tool for sending missionaries.
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Let me add that 100 percent of what you give to that goes overseas to the support of missionaries.
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Southern Baptists have been generous. This past year we had, far and away, the largest Lottie Moon Christmas offering we have had.
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By far and away, I mean like 25 percent above what it was just three years ago. The problem is that we also have experienced record inflation, cooperative program money is dropping off, and our desire is to send even more missionaries.
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So thank you for your generosity, but let me encourage you to continue to be generous so that we can send missionaries with the good news of Jesus to the ends of the earth.
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But missionary support is more than that. It means keeping in touch with missionaries, which we can do so much better now than we could in years past.
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My wife and I were appointed in 1991 and for most of the first decade we were on the field, we felt out of sight, out of mind.
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Now it did happen that we were living most of that time in a place where the phone system didn't work, the postal system didn't work.
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There was no internet and nobody in their right mind ever came to visit us. So okay, you kind of understand it, but we did sort of feel like we'd been left dangling out there.
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And then we got a new minister of missions at our sending church, which is Providence Baptist in Raleigh. And suddenly
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I got a phone call every month for the next 15 years from that guy.
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And the church came to visit us and the church remembered my kids' birthdays and the church took care of us when we came back to the states on stateside assignment.
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So let me encourage you, adopt missionaries and love on them as best as you can. So stay in touch, pray fervently, visit helpfully, and then welcome back caringly.
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That's the role of the church in missions. But I want to close with one final admonition.
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I think it becomes very easy for us to think, yeah, we really need to send someone else to the mission field.
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And for most of us, we think, I am called to stay where I am unless I have a dream in the night and the next day
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I walk outside and God rearranges the clouds with my name and the name of a country I'm supposed to go to.
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And the following Sunday someone walks up to me and speaks a prophetic utterance over me that happens to name that exact country and then maybe sort of, kind of,
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I might start thinking about it. But that's assuming that the call of God is an unusual thing.
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Remember, you're all called. So here's the challenge. Don't ask why me.
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Ask why not me. Given the extent of the need and the clarity of the word, why not me?
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In fact, I am called to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. How am I called?
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It may be that very many, probably most of you will be called to do so as senders from this church.
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But I would pray that God raises up laborers out of this church. And let me dispel just a couple of myths.
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I think typically when people think of that, what they think of is young ministers.
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So you've got to be young and they've got to be theologically trained and they've got to specifically have a vocational calling to preaching.
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Well it is true that God calls such people. But God doesn't just call young people. He also calls older people.
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And I can tell you from personal experience, you know, I once was young and now I'm not. There used to be hair up here and this used to be bright red.
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And when this fell out and this turned white, what I discovered was in the Muslim world where we were working,
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I actually had more credibility than before. I could be bolder than before because those cultures revere age, kind of like the
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Bible does but our culture doesn't. And so you can leverage your retirement, you can leverage your gray hair for the sake of the gospel in very fruitful ways while at the same time bringing much needed wisdom and experience to the missionary team.
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I remember when we first had kids and we were alone, it's like, help, we need some grandparents around and we were alone.
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So young, yes, but also old. Preachers yet, but also every other profession because most of the people in the world who have never heard about Jesus live in places where you can't go as a missionary.
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They won't give you a visa to set up shop overtly doing missionary service, but they will let you come as a football coach or a businessman, an engineer, a medical worker of any kind, a teacher, you name it, pretty much any profession can be used, can be leveraged to go to places where you can't go openly as a missionary.
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We have sent lawyers to the field who have set up international law firms. We have sent policemen to the field.
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This is actually one of the funniest. So right after the Soviet Union collapsed, the police force in Central Asian countries were puzzled and they came to us and said, we've been told that we need to stop torturing people when we interrogate them and we don't know how to do that.
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Could you find somebody to teach us how to interrogate people without torturing them? And so we sent police officers to help train the local police forces that you can in fact interrogate people without making them scream.
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So you name it, if it's a profession, you can leverage it to take the gospel to those who have never heard it. So let me simply offer you this challenge.
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You are called to service in the church and to service in the world.
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Ask yourself how? And let me ask that before you go to bed tonight, you go in prayer before God and put a blank check on the altar and say,
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God, I will go wherever you want me to go, whenever you want me to go, and I will pay whatever price you want me to pay for the sake of the good news of Jesus.
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And then bring that to your church, because this is where missionaries are sent.
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Let's pray. Father, thank you for the missionaries who crossed so many bridges such that the gospel got to us.
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Thank you for the people who share the gospel with us, each of us. Father, thank you for faithfulness of your people through the ages to keep it going.
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And I pray it wouldn't stop here. Father, I pray for this church. I pray that you would raise up out of here laborers for your harvest field who would gladly take the good news of Jesus where it's never been heard.