Matthew chapter 28, we're going to read the
account of the Great Commission from verse 16
to verse 20.
Matthew 28 verse 16.
The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the
mountain where Jesus had told them to go.
When they saw him, they worshipped him, but
some doubted.
Then Jesus came to them and said, 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 commended you.
And surely I will be with you always,
to the very end of the age.
Tonight to open our conference, I want to
try and do three things.
First of all, I want us to look
at the motivation for Christian mission.
Why should international Christian mission be so high
on the priority list of Christians today?
Secondly, I want us to look at the
situation in Christian mission.
Just how are we getting on in fulfilling
the Great Commission which Jesus Christ gave to
us?
I suppose there's one way we can find
out what really is on the heart of
the Lord Jesus Christ.
And that is to look at what he
spoke about particularly just before he ascended to
the Father's right hand.
If you look into the Gospels, the Gospel
writers leave you in absolutely no doubt.
Matthew's account we have just looked at together.
Go and make disciples of all nations.
John Mark puts it only slightly differently.
Go and preach the Gospel to every nation.
Dr. Luke puts it like this, right towards
the end of his Gospel.
Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached
in Christ's name to all nations beginning at
Jerusalem.
The Apostle John probably puts it in the
most challenging way of all the Gospel writers.
Meeting the disciples after his resurrection, the Lord
Jesus says, As the Father has sent me,
even so send I you.
Every time I speak those words or read
those words, they challenge my heart.
The Lord Jesus says, As the Father sent
me into the world.
How did the Father send the Son into
the world?
He sent his Son to pour out his
life for the world.
As the Father sent me, says Jesus, I
am sending you.
The Christian Church, the body of Christ, is
called to pour out its life for the
world.
When Dr. Luke begins his second book, the
Acts of the Apostles, he starts it in
exactly the same way.
You remember how the Lord Jesus gathers the
disciples around him on the Mount of Ascension,
and he commissions them to go starting at
Jerusalem, and then Judea, after being anointed and
filled by the Holy Spirit.
Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the uttermost parts
of the earth.
So there's absolutely no doubt, if the Lord
Jesus Christ was standing here tonight, one of
the subjects, not the only subject, but one
of the subjects he would want to talk
about is his great desire to see the
world reached with the message of salvation.
So five reasons why that should be a
priority for us today.
Very briefly, number one, the character of God.
That's where all Christian motivation begins.
The motivation to live a holy life begins
with the holiness of God.
The motivation to reach the world with the
message of salvation begins with the character of
God.
Once a Christian begins to understand the God
he is worshipping, he is thereby motivated, or
should be, to reach the world with the
gospel.
Think of God the Father.
God is spirit.
He is a mobile deity.
He's not a stone deity, or a wooden
deity.
He's not the kind of God who can
only be worshipped on one particular mountain, as
the woman in John 4 was convinced was
the case.
Our God is spirit.
He's a moving, mobile God.
Our God is light.
Light is a diffusive element.
It spreads itself out over all of space.
And the very nature of light is to
banish darkness.
Our God is love.
And it was the love of God which
motivated him 2,000 years ago to give
his only begotten son for the life of
the world.
You cannot look at God the Father without
being motivated to Christian mission.
You cannot look at God the Son without
being motivated in a similar fashion.
I was reading through one of the gospels
quite a few months ago now, and I
was impressed by how often the word immediately,
or straightaway, is used in connection with the
life of the Lord Jesus.
Here, if ever there was a man of
mission, was such a man.
Moving immediately from this situation of need to
the next.
And then straightaway here, remember how he said
to his disciples in John 9, I must
work the works of him who sent me
while it is day.
The night is coming when no man can
work.
Those are the words of a man of
mission.
And then look at God the Holy Spirit.
The Lord Jesus told us just before he
left to ascend to the Father that when
the Spirit came, he would convince the world.
The Holy Spirit has a world mission.
He would convince the world of sin, of
righteousness, and of judgment to come.
A few years ago now, quite a few
years ago, A.
W.
Tozer described worship as the lost jewel of
the Christian church.
If he was alive today and still writing,
I don't think he would write the same
words.
Because over the last 20, maybe 25 years,
I think the body of Christ increasingly has
been recapturing a sense of the importance and
the place of Christian worship.
And it's great to see churches, Christian unions,
fellowships being renewed in Christian worship.
It's wonderful.
But sometimes I wonder, just how genuine is
the worship?
Because you know if you are a genuine
worshipper of God, you must be a missionary.
Can I repeat that?
If you are a genuine worshipper of God,
you must be a missionary.
Because you cannot look at God, Father, Son,
or Spirit, without being motivated to mission.
So that's the basic motivation, the character of
God.
And then secondly, we have the clear commands
of Jesus Christ.
If you can't be a genuine worshipper without
being a missionary, then equally you can't be
an obedient Christian without being a missionary.
If you're a Christian tonight and you're not
a missionary, you're disobedient.
You're living in open disobedience.
Because it was the Lord Jesus who said,
you are to go.
He didn't say wait until you're fully qualified
and then go to some foreign land.
He said, I want you, where you are
right now, to be going into your world
and preaching the gospel.
So, the character of God and the commands
of the Lord Jesus motivate us to mission.
Thirdly, the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I'd like you to take time.
There's going to be a lot of spare
time this week, as you can see from
your program.
I'd like you to take time sometime this
week to read through the third chapter of
2 Peter.
Because I think it's such a vital chapter
when we're thinking of mission.
Here Peter describes the end of the age
and what solemn words there are contained within
that chapter.
And then he shows us what the response
of the Christian should be to the doctrine
of the second coming of Christ.
How do you respond to this fact that
one day Jesus Christ is going to return
to this world?
How do you respond to it?
Do you get your slide rule out and
try and determine exactly when it's going to
be?
What's going to come before it?
And what's going to follow it?
Is that how you respond?
That's not what the New Testament calls for.
Every time you come across the doctrine of
the second coming of Christ in the Bible,
every time, it calls for an ethical, practical
response.
So Peter, after describing the end times, says
first, since all of it is thus to
be dissolved, since it all to come to
pass, what sort of persons ought you to
be in lives of holiness and godliness?
Then he adds these words, speeding forward the
day of God.
Hastening forward the day of God.
Now here's a paradox.
We know that the day when Jesus Christ
will return to this earth is a fixed
day.
It's a tremendous encouragement to me to imagine
that in heaven there's a calendar.
And somewhere on that calendar the day is
marked.
I'm sure there's a red star beside it.
The day of God.
The day when Jesus will come and will
see the travail of his soul and will
be satisfied.
It's a fixed day.
Jesus told us that.
He said the Father knows the day.
But here there's a paradox.
There's a sense, says Peter, in which you
can speed forward that day.
In which you can hasten its coming.
Of course, the answer to the little riddle
is that God has not only fixed the
day, but he's fixed the means by which
that day will be brought to pass.
One of those means, just one, but one
important means by which the day of God
will be brought to fruition is by you
and I and all God's people spreading out
throughout the world with the gospel of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Because Jesus clearly taught that before that day
comes the gospel must be preached to all
nations.
There will be people from every tribe, from
every tongue and from every nation gathered with
us around the throne of our Lord Jesus
Christ in heaven.
So the coming of Christ should motivate you
and I to mission.
Fourthly, the call of God should be a
tremendous motivation.
It's a thrilling thing, isn't it?
God has not chosen angels to bring his
purposes to pass in this world.
He has not chosen to do it all
himself.
Of course, he could have done that.
There's one sense in which God doesn't need
you and I.
He only needs us because he's chosen to
need us.
He's chosen to give us this enormous privilege
preaching his Son, preaching the gospel, a message
so precious to his own heart.
He's chosen to give that privilege to me
and to you.
And there's no higher calling on the face
of this earth than the calling of the
Christian to share his life and his truth
with his fellow men.
And finally, the condition of lost men and
women motivates me to mission.
I was brought up in a Christian home.
My father was a preacher.
My brother was a preacher.
Some people said I didn't really have an
opportunity in life.
I was destined to become a preacher as
well.
Taken along to Sunday school from the age
of two, something I've never quite forgiven my
mother for, I learned the gospel very, very
early in life.
And by about the age of 14, ridiculous
really thinking back, I was going around the
chapels and churches of Cumbria, where I come
from.
You've probably never heard of it.
It's not in outer Mongolia.
It's actually just a little further north.
But I was going around the churches and
chapels of Cumbria preaching.
Now, I became a Christian probably very, very
early in my life.
I can remember very, very vividly.
This is important for any mother here.
I can remember very, very vividly, right back
to the age of three and four, sitting
with my mother every night.
My father was off in a way preaching.
But my mother was always there.
And every night, a Bible reading.
Every night, family prayers.
And very, very early in my life, I
came to love Jesus Christ.
I can't remember a day when I haven't
loved Him.
I can remember many, many days when I
haven't loved Him, as I should.
But I can't remember a day when I
didn't love Jesus.
Now, there's many advantages to an upbringing like
that.
I wouldn't swap it for anything.
But there are some disadvantages.
And one disadvantage, which I personally feel, is
that I just don't understand what it must
be to be lost in this world.
What does it feel like?
What is it?
To be without God and without hope.
I've never felt it.
It's never been my experience.
And so a passage of Scripture I often
meditate upon.
I don't think that's too strong a phrase.
Meditate upon is Ephesians 2, verses 1 to
3.
It's here that Paul describes what it is
to be lost in this world, whether it's
in Chester or China.
What it is to be lost in this
world.
Paul says it's two things.
The lost person is dead in trespasses and
sins.
Could he have chosen a more definite, illustrative
term than that?
The man without Christ is dead.
How helpless and hopeless the unregenerate are.
They are unable to do anything for themselves.
Dead in trespasses and sins, Paul goes on
to say at the end of verse 3
that they are by nature objects of God's
wrath.
What a phrase of Christian theology that is.
By nature objects of God's wrath.
They don't become under the wrath of God
because of the practice of their lives.
They are by nature the objects of God's
wrath.
They are born in sin.
They are shapen in iniquity.
And the original sin becomes actual sin.
They are the objects of the wrath of
God.
The person you are working beside, the person
you are living next door to, is dead
in trespasses and sins.
Living under the wrath of a God who
has a holy hatred of sin.
Amy Carmichael, marvellous female missionary to southern India,
once had this picture in her mind.
Many of you will have heard of it.
It was the picture of a vast plain.
And at the edge of the plain there
was a deep chasm.
And she was sitting making daisy chains with
her fellow Christians.
And walking across the plain were thousands and
thousands of people.
And she thought to begin with they were
just tourists coming to look at the depth
of the chasm possibly.
Then she with her fellow Christians saw one
fall to destruction.
Followed swiftly by a second and a third
and they were going over in their hundreds.
Looking more closely she saw that every one
of them was blind.
And then I'll add a little bit to
the story.
Looking a bit more closely she saw one
or two people running along the edge.
There were great gaps between these people.
There just weren't enough of them.
They were running along the edge and they
were crying this is the way.
Walk in it.
But there weren't enough of them.
And those who were involved many of them
were obviously so involved that their health was
breaking.
And Amy Carmichael said that's the world situation
today.
And brothers and sisters it is.
A world blindly moving to destruction.
And there just aren't enough people running along
the edge and saying this is the way.
Walk ye in it.
So here's the motivation for our conference this
week.
Here's that which should motivate each one of
us to be missionaries.
The character of God, the commands of Christ,
the coming of Christ, the call of God
upon our lives and the condition of the
lost motivate us to evangelism.
Think of it like this.
You cannot look up the character of God
without being motivated to evangelism.
You cannot look in to the word of
God, the commands of Christ, without being motivated
to evangelism.
You can't look forward to the coming of
Christ without being motivated to mission.
You can't look back to the call of
God upon your life without being motivated to
mission.
You can't look around you to the people
you're rubbing shoulders with without being motivated to
mission.
Brothers and sisters, it's a fact.
You can't look anywhere as a Christian without
being motivated to Christian mission.
There's the motivation.
Very, very quickly, let's look at the situation.
With this motivation for 2,000 years, how
have we got on?
It'd be interesting to have a geography lesson
to begin our conference.
I wonder how many people there are living
in the world today.
I often ask the question, get some amazing
answers.
Well, in 1976, the last real records I
have at my disposal, there were 4 billion,
19 million people living on the face of
the earth.
There'll be many more than that now.
But let's take that 4 billion as a
general number.
How many of these are Christians?
1 billion of the 4 billion would claim
to be Christians.
Now that includes every possible facet of the
visible Christian church.
It would include Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, all
the Roman Catholic Church, all the Protestant churches,
even all the pseudo-Christian cults as well.
1 million people claim to be Christians.
I don't know how many of those are
truly born again.
I'm sorry I said 1 million.
I should have said 1 billion claim to
be Christians.
How many are true Christians?
I don't think anyone can compute.
Another billion live in the same areas, general
areas, as those Christians live.
So it would be quite natural, if the
church was a witnessing church, for another billion
of the 4 million to easily hear the
gospel of Christ.
1 billion claim to be Christians.
Another billion live fairly close to Christian.
But that leaves 2 billion people.
Half the world's population who are not going
to hear the gospel of Christ.
Now listen to this.
They're not going to hear the gospel of
Christ unless a Christian leaves his own culture,
leaves his own nation, probably leaves his own
language, and goes, as we say, cross-cultural.
Goes into another culture, to another nation, learns
another language to share the gospel of Christ
with his fellow men.
I think we can still honestly say that
probably half the world's population has never been
given a clear presentation of the gospel of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
Well I was going to say much more
about the situation, but time has gone, and
I do want to just touch on this
third point.
Having looked at the motivation, having had a
very brief look at the situation, let's look
at the mythology of Christian mission.
And if I talk about this and I'm
a little tense, I'm sure you'll understand, because
I am a bit tense, a bit upset
about the British church when it comes to
mission.
Because I hear these 3 myths being propagated
constantly.
The first myth is that the job can
never be done.
I've actually had Christians shrug their shoulders in
front of me and said, we're never going
to reach the world with the gospel.
Some have argued their way out of it,
I don't know whether you've heard this particular
doctrine, and they say the Great Commission isn't
for us.
Matthew 28, 16 to 20, it's not for
us.
I've never been told who it's for, but
it's not for us.
I can give you a tape from a
preacher trying to make that point.
We're no longer under the Great Commission.
We'll just be feeling under legalistic bondage if
we feel we have to take the message
to the whole world.
It's impossible.
The population's exploding at such an astronomical rate,
there's no possibility of the job of world
mission ever being done.
What would I say to such people?
Well, if I could keep sane and quiet
and calm and cool, I would say three
things.
Number one, I would say think of recent
history.
Two hundred years ago, Protestants were confined to
Northern Europe, the Atlantic seaboard of North America,
and there were a few outposts in the
Caribbean, South Africa, the Dutch East Indies, which
is now parts of Indonesia, and India.
Every Protestant in the world lived in that
small section of the world.
Today, two hundred years later, there are more
Evangelical Christians living outside of these lands than
within them.
The growth of the body of Christ in
Africa, South of the Sahara, Latin America, and
parts of Asia continues at a far higher
rate than the population growth in many of
those countries.
Take Africa.
Africa is rapidly becoming, nominally, a Christian continent.
Already more than half of black Africa claims
to be Christian.
We really should stop, if we have time,
and just praise God for all he has
done, and particularly, over the last two hundred
years.
It's a drama which I trust you'll get
up to date upon.
Get the books of recent mission history.
You'll find many of them on the book
table.
And you will gasp at what God has
done the last two hundred years.
The second thing I would say to such
people is think of the present.
Open your eyes and see what God is
doing in the world today.
And then tell me, the world will never
be reached.
I've only got time to give you one
example.
I don't know how much you know of
the land of Afghanistan.
I hope you'll know a lot more before
the end of this week.
It's a land of about nineteen million people.
It's a land which I've been praying for,
personally, for about ten years.
Before the Russian army moved in, there were
only a handful of Christians in that country.
Maybe thirty, forty.
Very, very, very few.
And I can remember being very angry the
day I heard of the Russian army moving
into Afghanistan.
I was very angry with God.
Angry that he should allow a country already
ruled by Islam now to have this atheistic
government ruling it as well.
But I just didn't understand what God was
doing.
Now we can look back and see two
things.
See about one and a half million, maybe
two million refugees living in the freedom of
Pakistan.
Now I can't explain all the suffering, all
the bloodshed, but I can tell you that
almost two million people are now in a
position where they can be reached with the
gospel of Christ in comparative freedom.
A friend of mine was telling me that
this is the greatest day to reach Afghan
people with the gospel for eleven hundred years.
And he said it's by courtesy of the
Russian army.
And within Afghanistan extraordinary things are taking place.
Arthur Pont, the General Secretary of the Bible
and Medical Missionary Fellowship was with us in
Bromley at a prayer meeting recently and he
was speaking of the growth of the church
in Afghanistan.
The church, which may have been fifty before
the Russians moved in, has grown tenfold.
It's at least five hundred now, probably many
more.
And how have these people come to Christ?
Listen to this, it'll probably blow your mind
so take a deep breath.
Many of these Afghan people have come to
Christ on the streets of their towns and
villages through the witness of Russian Christian soldiers,
conscripted into the army.
They have been through their life and through
their lips where possible, witnesses to the beauty
of Jesus Christ.
And Islamic Afghan people have been drawn to
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, through the
witness of Russian soldiers.
I don't know whether you've got an imagination
like me but I can imagine committee meetings
in hell, demons getting together and saying we've
really blown it.
Where's the strategy gone wrong?
You know that's happening all over the world.
A sovereign God overruling every day the deeds
of men to bring glory to the name
of Jesus Christ.
If I had time I could tell you
of Nepal, the land I've recently been to,
where it's illegal to become a Christian.
How does the Holy Spirit contend with that?
It's illegal to become a Christian but the
church is growing.
Nothing in 1953, probably 13, 14, maybe even
16,000 Nepali believers today in the only
Hindu kingdom on earth where it's illegal to
become a Christian.
My, I could keep you here a long
time just encouraging you to think of the
present.
A sovereign God at work fulfilling His promises
and then I would say think of the
future.
Why?
Because the promise of God is I will
build my church.
The promise of God is most people from
every tribe, every tongue and every nation will
be there and I just know that you
believe the promises of God.
That's the first myth.
Wipe it from your mind, the myth that
the job is beyond us.
The second myth is the total opposite and
I hear this even more prominently in Britain
today.
The myth that the job is already done.
I was at a major Christian conference here
in Britain a year or two ago now
and the leading speaker at this conference began
his message with the following words.
I wrote them down.
We all now know that Britain is one
of the most un-evangelized nations on the
face of the earth today and there were
many amens when that sentence was spoken and
Britain is a desperately needy nation.
5% of our population attend church regularly.
In the inner city it's probably as low
as 1%.
But please, please get it out of your
mind that Britain is the most un-evangelized
nation in the world today.
That is just such an imbalanced view.
It's almost impossible for me to believe that
people believe it.
In the world today there are 5,103
known spoken languages.
770 of these languages have the New Testament
complete.
Another 340 do not need the Bible in
their own tongue.
That's either because they're bilingual or because their
language is now almost extinct.
In 940 other languages Bible translation has begun.
That leaves over 3,000 languages being spoken
and read on the face of the earth
today where they haven't got one page of
Holy Scripture.
There are lands still in the world today
with no known believers whatsoever.
Others with literally just a handful maybe 5
or 10.
Maybe this week we should be praying for
Colonel Gaddafi's Libya.
The Maldive Islands.
Mauritania.
Saudi Arabia.
Mongolia.
The Muslim Malay population of Malaysia.
The Comoros.
Afghanistan.
I've already mentioned Turkey with its 46 million
people and probably less than 100 Christian Muslim
Turks in that Christian Turks, sorry in that
Muslim nation.
Recently there's been a lot of work on
the subject of unreached peoples amongst missionary strategists
today.
And we're confidently told that there are at
least 15,000 people groups.
That's groups with a separate identity.
Might be a language might be a cultural
identity or something like that.
There are at least 15,000 people groups
where the work of the Gospel is still
to be begun.
Let's get it out of our minds forever
that the job of world mission is done.
When you hear people saying let's bring the
missionaries back to heathen Britain you pull them
up short.
You agree it's heathen Britain certainly but in
comparison with many of the lands you're going
to be hearing about this week there is
much more opportunity to hear the Gospel here
than there's ever going to be in these
lands unless the vision for mission of the
Christian Church in the West and in Korea
and in many other countries is renewed.
And the final myth is the myth of
the missionary.
I still find many many people today in
the church believing that missionaries are some kind
of super evangelicals.
You know the home worker is here like
me the home worker and then the foreign
missionary is somewhere way way up here.
And the idea is that what the world
needs today is competent brilliant evangelists.
I've just been looking around some of the
missionary exhibitions some of these exhibitors have put
personnel needs up you go and have a
look see how many people are crying out
for brilliant Billy Graham type evangelists we could
do with a few of course but it's
not the urgent need of the hour.
We do need church planters certainly but we
need mechanics we need secretaries we need accountants
accountants accountants we need a lot as you
can see.
We need administrators we need plumbers we need
cooks we need ship captains and engineers but
that's another story.
Ordinary people people just like me and people
just like you are needed throughout the world
today.
I often challenge people you come and tell
me your specific ability your particular qualification and
90% of the time I'll be able
to tell you somewhere in the world today
where that skill that ability that qualification could
be used for the glory of God and
the extension of his kingdom.
You Lord Jesus are the Lord of the
Universe this is your world and this is
your church which you are building.
We thank you that you are in control
you are risen from the dead you are
ascended far above all principality and might and
power and dominion every name that is named
the highest place that heaven affords is yours
by sovereign right and we bow before you
and worship you and acknowledge you as the
Lord our Lord my Lord the Lord of
your church the head of your church this
evening.
We thank you that all that the Father
has given to you shall come to you
and those who come to you will in
no way be cast off.
Lord we want to build on this confidence
this week.
Send us from this tent rejoicing and worshipping
keep us worshipping and praying throughout this week
together in Jesus name we pray.
Amen.