‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
66th teaching
3.3.2013
“the Mission of
God”
Project Scriptura: God’s Blessedness
Review:
What was our subject last week? What does the word Providence literally mean? What was something
that the ancient Greeks perceived in reality which points to the reality of
God’s Providence? What Old Testament book is all about God’s Providence, though
it never once mentions His Name? What are some examples of events in Esther
which point to God’s Providence orchestrating things? What is a symbol or icon
for the Providence of God? What does Providence have to do with the accuracy of
Scriptural manuscripts? What are the two kinds of Providence? General
Providence can be referred to has preservation, and Special Providence can be
referred to as provision. Who were two historical figures who had a lot to do
with the development of this doctrine of Providence? Now knowing the truth
about God’s Providence, what should we do with it; what’s something practical
we can do with our lives now knowing about Providence?
End of Review
Earlier this week, I read a quote by a historian who said
this: “No other missionary in the nineteen centuries since the Apostle Paul has
had a wider vision and has carried out a more systematized plan of evangelizing
a broad geographical area than Hudson Taylor”.
James Hudson Taylor, born 1832, died 1905, was a missionary
to China and founder of the CIM (China Inland Mission). Another man said of him
that he was “one of the greatest missionaries of all time…” and indeed his name
is one of the first to pop in my head when I hear the word missionary. And rightfully so (all the glory to God through this
man’s life, of course).
Taylor had a heart for China. He would later write: “Can
all the Christians in England sit still with folded arms while these multitudes
are perishing—perishing for lack of knowledge—for lack of that knowledge which
England possesses so richly?”
Despite the difficult language barrier, Taylor took the
message of the gospel deep into the interior of China, beyond the then reach of
his fellow Protestant missionaries. Taylor even adopted wearing native clothing
and pulling his hair back into a pigtail as Chinese men did, much to the
criticism of his colleagues. When the society that sponsored him could no
longer afford him, Taylor became an independent missionary and trusted God
alone to meet his needs.
Taylor’s boldness continued in his second missionary trip
to China, when he saw more than 200 patients daily, when he began to send
unmarried women into inland China, when he amassed over a hundred missionary
candidates to work beside him in just six years. His grueling work pace eventually
took its toll on Taylor’s health and he had a complete breakdown, his own wife
died at the age of 33 and four of his eight children never reached the age of
10. That might sound like a steep price to pay. This is what Taylor himself
said: “China is not to be won for Christ by quiet, ease-loving men and women…
The stamp of men and women we need is such as will put Jesus, China, souls
first and foremost in everything and at every time—even life itself must be
secondary.” And the legacy of this man remains one of the most inspiring. He is
an incredible figure in recent Christian history, a man who motivated thousands
in the generations to come.
And do you know, I bet, he and his wife and his children
over on the other side have no regrets. If it is possible for them to look down
into our times, they would see the explosion of Christianity in the underground
Chinese churches, an explosion which may never have existed had it not been for
the burden, the passion and the sacrifices that James Hudson Taylor took with
him to that country.
*So as we come to our topic tonight, it is people like
Hudson Taylor, great missionaries like Paul of Tarsus, Saint Patrick, William
Carey and Jim Elliot, which pop into our minds. But we must try to surmount a
challenge tonight. Let me say carefully: the challenge here is not to go and be
missionaries, to fulfill the great commission, and to evangelize ourselves,
although that is off essential importance in the Christian life and we cannot
think otherwise for a moment. Missionaries should inspire us to reach the lost.
But that’s not my exhortation to you tonight, nor is it the
challenge I’m talking about. The challenge tonight is to look past all that,
really to look above all that at the
God of the missionaries. Tonight we’re
talking about the Divine Mission, the mission
Dei, the mission of God, not simply the missionaries or the mission of the
church.
Tonight we’re decidedly looking not at the mission field
but at the God who makes and sends into
the mission field. Tonight’s study is entitled, then: “The Mission of God”.
Turn to Luke 15:1-7.
“Then all the tax
collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and
scribes complained, saying, ‘This Man receives sinners and eats with them.”
Stop for just a moment and consider that complaint. The
scribes and Pharisees, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, made this complaint
against Him quite often. They would prefer that Jesus stuck with the in-crowd, that he didn’t sully Himself
by dining with sinners. They were in a way complaining that Jesus was doing
what they were supposed to be doing. As the religious leaders, they were
supposed to reach out to the sinner, but when a Man came along who did just
that, they were offended. It was Jesus who went out into the streets, who went
from town to town, who sought out the sick and paralyzed and possessed and
broken-hearted and the sinner and the lost, He sought them and brought them to Himself and to His Father.
Jesus now perceives this complaint of the Pharisees, and we
read: v.3, “So He spoke this parable to them, saying: ‘What man of you, having a
hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the
wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he
has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home,
he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me,
for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ I say to you that likewise there
will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine
upright persons who need no repentance.”
Jesus compares the lost sinner to a lost sheep that has
wandered from the fold of God. And for Christ, seeking and saving the lost
meant joy, it meant rejoicing with friends and neighbors. We might picture the
heavenly scene, when you arrive across the chasm of death and stand in the
Presence of God in heaven, and picture Jesus Christ there having gathered
together his friends and neighbors, the angels and the saints and our loved
ones who have gone on before us as He says “Rejoice! Here is My sheep I found
which was lost!”
The gospel of Matthew
records this same parable in 18:11-14,
and there it adds the words of Jesus, saying: “For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.”
I’m so excited that in some few weeks we’ll begin a new
adventure, closing out our study in Theology Proper, studying God’s attributes
and begin a new study in Christology, where we’ll learn about Jesus Christ
Himself. But here you have one of Jesus Christ’s many “mission statements” you
find all throughout the gospels. He said He came to save that which was lost.
He came to seek and save the sinner.
That is the parable of the lost sheep. And that is the
Mission of God, the Good Shepherd who went in search of the sheep that had
wandered far from him until they were lost.
Now that we’ve got the right subject in mind: not the
missionary or the missionary-calling, though these things are important. We’re
looking instead at the God of the missionaries. We’ve got several points to
address tonight:
1. What is Mission?
2. The First Missionary
3. Mission and Attributes
4. Biblical Basis for the Mission
of God
5. Reinterpreting the Old
Testament
6. The Shock of Christianity
1.
What is Mission?
We’ve all seen movies like 007, Inception, the Incredibles and Mission Impossible where the hero is given a mission that is
seemingly impossible. These and other examples might cause us to believe that a
mission is simply a job or a task that needs completion. That’s not what
mission is, thought. Note that all of these kinds of stories involve the hero
in the mission being sent out to complete the mission.
When Solid Snake is sent by Colonel Campbell to that island
in Alaska to disable the terrorists and stop their nuclear launch in Metal Gear Solid, it is not Snake’s task that is his mission. It is the act
of him being sent to Alaska that is
his mission. Mission is not the task, it is the sending out to do the task.
For this is the original meaning of the word mission. We get this English word
descended to us from Latin. In Latin, the word is missio which means simply “act of sending or dispatching”, sending
someone somewhere for some purpose. Note it is not the purpose itself that
forms the basis for the word mission,
it is, or at least was originally, the sending itself which makes it a mission.
The modern use of the word mission in the sense of a religious missionary originates with the
Jesuits in 1598, when they took the Latin missio,
“act of sending”, and applied it to the members they sent out to other places.
Though we now use the words missions and missionaries to
reference more the place or the person, the original word mission meant the act. Mission, then, is the act of sending.
2.
The First Missionary
Not to belabor a point, but we still often think
of Christian missions in terms of the Christian missionaries. It is difficult
to untangle the effort of the mission field and the sending out into it from
the people who go out, whom we call missionaries.
But if we ask ourselves: who was the first Christian
missionary? What kind of an answer will we give?
Possibly the twelve apostles. The word apostle comes from the Greek word apostolos, which means “messenger” or “a person sent forth”. Chuck
Smith simplified the word apostle as
simply “sent one”. That’s something I remember very distinctly from listening
to Chuck tracks in bible college.
We can think then of the apostle as being the earliest of
missionaries, since the words apostolos in
Greek and missio in Latinhave very
similar meanings. And indeed they were. The Twelve were the very earliest men
who were sent out by the early church in its infancy. The book of Acts records
the details of these first steps of missionary work, the very earliest sendings
of the first Christians ever.
Yet we’re trying here to look beyond the human to the
Divine, beyond the human missionary to the missionary God. And in considering
the Mission of God, we find that the Bible paints a startling picture. We
discover that the apostles themselves were far from the earliest Christian
missionaries.
Before them, of course, were the saints of the Old
Testament, some of whom were missionaries in the broad sense of the word, of
being “sent”. The many prophets of God had their own special missions and they
were sent with messages to Israel and Judah. Before them, the judges were sent
on missions from God to save Israel from their enemies. Before them, Moses was
sent as a shepherd in Midian to confront the pharaoh and deliver the people of
God. And even before him, a man named Abram, later Abraham, was told to go, to
“get out of your country”, by God.
But there was a Missionary even before them all.
Revelation 13:8
labels Jesus Christ as “the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world.”
I Peter 1:18-20
also says: “…knowing that you were not
redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless
conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of
Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. He indeed was
foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last
times for you.”
The word foreordained
that Peter uses means appointed or decreed beforehand. This means that
Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, was chosen to be sent to earth, was given His
mission to save world from sin, even before God created the world.
Who was the first Christian Missionary? Christ Himself. The
shadow of the cross stretched across eternity, the great and awesome goal of
the Son of God by which He could redeem mankind.
Missio Dei is a
Latin theological term that is translated as the “sending of God”. When we
think about this being the plan of God before the foundation of the world, He
foreordained decision to deal with the inevitable abuse of free will in the
form of sin, we discover God’s whole redemptive plan for the ages. The Son of
God was chosen from before the very beginning of the earth to be sent.
David Bosch, a Reformed theologian, wrote: “During the past
half a century or so there has been a subtle but nevertheless decisive shift
toward understanding mission as God’s mission. During preceding centuries
mission was understood in a variety of ways. Sometimes it was interpreted
primarily in soteriological terms: as saving individuals from eternal damnation.
Or it was understood in cultural terms: as introducing people from East and the
South to the blessings and privileges of the Christian West. Often it was
perceived in ecclesiastical categories: as the expansion of the church (or of a
specific denomination). Sometimes it was defined salvation-historically: as the
process by which the world—evolutionary or by means of a cataclysmic
event—would be transformed into the kingdom of God.
“Mission was understood as being derived from the very
nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity,
not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine on the missio Dei as
God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the
Spirit was expanded to include yet another “movement”: The Father, Son and the
Holy Spirit sending the church into the world. As far as missionary thinking
was concerned, this linking with the doctrine of the Trinity constituted an
important innovation …
“Our mission has not life of its own: only in the hands of
the sending God can it truly be called mission. Not least since the missionary initiative
comes from God alone… Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the
world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is church
because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to
participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a
fountain of sending love.”
Most important phrase there “Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God”. Do
you see the reversal? It’s uncanny. But we’ve come to think of missions in
terms of the human beings that are sent out and in terms of the mission-work of
the church, when in actuality, missions comes to the church from her Head: from
Jesus Christ. He was the First Missionary of all.
Thus missions does not receive its origin in any work that
the church is doing, but the church does missions only because God does
missions. Mission originates from the nature of God, from the Triune
relationship within God, from the Father sending the Son to the cross and then
from the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit as our Helper, and thus from
the Holy Spirit working in us to transform us and align us with the mission of
God, not creating that work but aligning us with that work of God that’s
already happening.
Another theologian said: “It is not the church that has a
mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and
the Spirit through the Father that includes the church.”
Nobody said “Here am I, send me” before it was uttered by
the voice of the Son of God Himself. Missions isn’t just a function of the
church, it’s a function of God who has as the Church as His Body. The church
does missions because God first does missions. The church reaches out to the
lost because God reaches out to the lost. The church goes out into all the
world because God Himself first because flesh and came into the world. The
church proclaims the glory of God and the gospel because God first did it
Himself.
3.
Missions and Attributes
Is the Mission of God actually an attribute of God, and if
so, how does it relate to His other attributes? First question first.
Is God’s Mission actually an attribute? Only recently has
it come to be seen as one. In fact, God’s Mission is probably the most recent
discovery of an attribute in God’s nature. Unlike other traditional definitions
of God as omnipotent or wise or loving or merciful, God’s mission is new and
unsure.
And at first glance it seems more like an action which God
takes, rather than a quality or characteristic of Himself. Sure, the Father
sent the Son and they then sent the Spirit, who then sent out the church, but
with all this sending being acted out, how can we say this is an attribute? How
is all of God’s sendings a quality of Himself and not just an action?
Well, we might start to think about why God does so much sending at all. Why does God do the sending?
Why does God have this mission?
It’s because God has a mission-tendency. We might call this
a mission-mindedness. And that right there, a mindset, is a definite quality, a
definite attribute. So if we’re to describe the Mission of God, His sending of
the Son and the Spirit and the Church, and His tendency to want to send, as a
kind of “mission-mindedness” then there it is: an attribute of God. Is God’s
Mission an attribute? Yes. I think we have a pretty good answer. Why so much
sending? Why so much mission? Why send the patriarchs and the deliverers and
the judges and the prophets and the disciples and the apostles and ultimately
the Son Himself? It’s God’s Mission-mindedness, a non-moral attribute of
Himself.
Next question was: how does this Mission of God relate to
His other attributes?
We asked “why does God have
this mission, so many accounts of sending”, now ask yourself not “why does God have this mission” but “why does God do this mission”. Why does God send
anyone at all?
Well, why does any reasonable being do anything? For a
reason and a purpose. So God has purpose and purposes to accomplish. But it
isn’t merely that.
Anyone can have purposes and never actually accomplish
them. You and I may know people, or may be people ourselves, who have plenty of
goals to accomplish that never actually get accomplished. Sometimes that’s
because of a lack of interest, a lack of motivation, or a lack of know-how. We
might just not know how to accomplish
our purposes.
But on the Divine side, God does accomplish His purposes. Isaiah 55:11, you know it, it says: “So shall My word be that goes forth from My
mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please.
And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.” God even sends His
word into the world, His Scripture, and it will accomplish His purposes.
How does the Mission of God relate to His other attributes?
Right here.
God’s Mission sends according to what He wants to do. And
what does God want to do?
Well, He loves the world so He wants to send His Son to die
to save humanity. The Mission of God sends the Son because of the Love of God.
“God so loved the world that He gave His
only begotten Son…”
And someday, God will rise up in judgment and condemn a
Christ-rejecting world during a time we call the tribulation period. The
Mission of God will again send the Son because of the Justice of God, and at
the second coming He will execute His judgment upon the earth.
Last week we studied God’s Providence and I had said that
Providence was practical Sovereignty. Providence is the orchestrating of events
as God governs the universe as Sovereign Lord. In a very similar way, God’s
Mission involves the sending of people according to God’s Sovereign decisions.
The Mission of God, His mission-mindedness, sends the Son because God
sovereignly decided to give salvation to the world and He orchestrated events
to produce this outcome: watching over the bloodline in Israel that would
produce the Messiah, orchestrating even the ways of the Romans so they could
construct an empire of networks that would allow the gospel to go out rapidly
into the world.
The Mission of God falls very much in tune with God’s other
attributes. It is the footwork, the activity which God has a tendency towards
because God desires to show mercy, to show love and also to make His sovereign
decisions and to pour out His justice. We can phrase the Mission of God as the
sending He does because of His quality of Mission-mindedness.
*So now I think we have a good idea of what the Mission of
God is: the sending-tendency, the mission-mindedness of God. What does the
Bible say about it?
4. Biblical Basis
for the Mission of God
Project Scriptura verses:
Other Christological mission-statements: What else did Jesus
say about His own mission? Here are five, though there are many more.
Matthew 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the
Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but fulfill.”
Mark 2:17, “Those who are well have no need of a
physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but
sinners, to repentance.”
Luke 4:18-19, “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because
He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the
blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable
year of the LORD.”
John 10:10, “The thief does not come except to steal, and
to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may
have it more abundantly.”
John 3:17, “For God did not send His Son into the world
to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”
5.
Reinterpreting the Old
Testament
Throughout my life, I’ve met many people who seem to
struggle with the Old Testament, whether it’s reading or understanding it. And
that’s a justified struggle. Sometimes the narrative of the Old Testament can
seem too broad to navigate. Sometimes you wonder why you’ve got to read all
these weird names. Sometimes you get a bad case of Leviticus when you’re trying
to read through the whole Bible.
I’ve always loved the Old Testament and it’s stories and
actually I’ve found that I have had a harder time understanding the New
Testament. For me, it’s the reverse. Sometimes the epistles just baffle me.
But my point is that there’s a tool here to help us
understand specifically the Old Testament. It’s to keep in mind the Mission of
God. If you do that when you read the Old Testament, then broadly you’ll get a
clearer picture of what’s going on.
When I was overseas, in that beautiful old country of
England, I was taking a class on the book of Acts, taught by Ed Major. One his
favorite taglines was: “God is a missionary God.” For me, thinking that God
only cared about Israel in the Old Testament, that was a mind-blowing
statement.
I had wondered why God chose Israel and spent so much time
with Israel in the Old Testament. It appears as if He couldn’t care “tuppence”
for the rest of the world. But that isn’t actually so. I just didn’t think
about God in that way, as being Himself a missionary God. But this truth opens
up the whole narrative of the Bible and the whole purpose of the Old Testament.
When you understand that God is a missionary God and His Mission-mindedness,
then you’re seeing the real picture, you’re reinterpreting the Old Testament,
now correctly. And the “God of the Old Testament”, if we can say such a thing,
becomes less a selfish, single-minded monster and more a grand orchestrator of
history moving toward the goal of saving mankind from sin.
When you read the Old Testament, you might ask yourself,
what in the world is this relevant to? What’s the point of God setting up this
whole nation of the Jews, and raising up King David, and giving them the Law
and setting up their priesthood and religion? You might scream: What’s it all
for?
Christ is what it’s all for!
God wasn’t playing favorites with Israel. He hadn’t
forsaken the rest of the world when he began to work through a specific
bloodline through Abraham. He had the whole of humanity in mind the whole time,
and there are several verses that make that clear.
Isaiah 60:1-3, “Arise, shine; for your light has come! And
the glory of the LORD is risen upon you. For behold, the darkness shall cover
the earth, and deep darkness the people; but the LORD will arise over you, and
His glory will be seen upon you. The Gentiles shall come to your light, and
kings to the brightness of your rising.”
Tell me, who are the Gentiles? Anyone who isn’t a Jew. So
God clearly had both the Jew and the
Gentile in mind even at the time of Isaiah the prophet.
In Exodus 12:38,
the children of Israel are delivered out of slavery and make their journey out
of Egypt and it says: “A mixed multitude
went up with them also…” Another reference to this mixed group of people
that went with Israel at the Exodus is made in the book of Numbers, but
speculation persists as to who exactly this mixed group is. But we know one
thing: they’re not specifically Israelites, because the text mentions them
separately from the children of Israel. Some think the mixed multitude were
other Egyptians disillusioned with Egypt perhaps and newly fascinated by the
God of the Hebrews. Or the mixed multitude could be other slaves from other
people groups that worked for Egypt that now found they too could escape their
bondage with the greater body of Israel.
Whatever the case, these were clearly other peoples than
the people of God, and yet the Lord did not forbid them from coming with Israel
on their journey of salvation. God apparently welcomed them in to His fold too.
Though the mixed multitude would later cause trouble for Israel, God did not
forbid the foreigner from coming to Him.
Speaking of the foreigner, do you realize that the Law of
Moses actually made room for the foreigner in Israelite society? Among the
instructions of the Passover, God made specific provision for any stranger, that is anyone from another
people group, to participate if they wanted to keep the Passover also. They
merely had to be circumcised and to circumcise all the males in their
household. Yeouch! But the possibility was there, in several other ways also,
for people who were not Jews to become Jewish in this sense and to seek the God
of Israel.
Even as we read in Esther
8:17, many of the people of the land became Jews at the end of the story.
So God clearly cared for those who were not His chosen
people in the Old Testament. He still had a heart for the nations around
Israel. That is no more evident than in the fact that He chose Israel so that
He could secure a lineage through which the Savior, not just of the Jews, but
of the whole world could come.
The children of Israel themselves were not the end result,
rather they were the means, the tool through which God would bring forth the
Savior. God was always a missionary God. His Mission-mindedness was present
even during the Old Testament. Maybe it’s time you read through the Old
Testament again, but now with the Mission of God, the bigger picture in mind.
God was always seeking the lost, even long before the gospels came along.
6.
The Shock of Christianity
Tonight we’ve come to perhaps an upheaval in our way of
thinking about God and about missions.
We’ve come to find that the first Missionary was not human
but was God taking on human flesh. We’ve found out that God has a kind of
mission-mindedness and that He is the One that does the sending. We’ve
discovered that mission-work is not primarily a function of the church but a
function of God through His Body the church. We’ve seen that God was a
missionary God even in the Old Testament, and that though He was working with a
specific people group that He had all peoples always in mind, that He in fact
chose Israel so that He could reach the whole world through Christ who would
descend from Israel in the flesh.
Each of these things set Christianity apart and above all
the other world religions. Christianity is unique in that the Lord God Himself,
not the parishioner, the worshiper, the priest or the believer, is the One who
does the seeking. In the other religions, it is the believer who works for
their deity, who studies and memorizes, who travels on pilgrimages and labors
in prayers, who does all this stuff
to seek their god or gods. But in Christianity, it is primarily the opposite.
It is God Himself in the first place who does the seeking.
We, like sheep, were off wandering away from Him, doing our own thing and
slowly perishing, until He sought us out and saved us. The great shocking thing
about Christianity, then, is not that we find God but that He finds us.
Nowhere among the Hindu deities, the Shinto spirits, the
Chinese ancestors, the Norse gods or the Greek pantheon is this ever apparent.
Zeus only went out to “get some”, never to seek and save the lost. The great
shock of Christianity is that God seeks us out well before we have sought Him.
As Scripture says in I
John 4:19, “We love Him because He
first loved us.”
In Christianity, God takes the initiative. God is the Lover
who pursues romance with us. God is the One who brings us to His light. God is
the One who searches the darkness for the poor sinner’s soul. It is not the
other way around. You’re only reciprocating the Divine love. You’re not
initiating it.
How small the human effort! How magnificent and majesty the
Love that found you, that sought out your soul even to the point of dying for
it!
The hymn-writers recognized it: “Amazing Grace! How sweet
the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found,
was blind but now I see”… “In tenderness He sought me, weary and sick with sin,
and on His shoulders brought me, back to His fold again”… “Jesus sought me when
a stranger wandering from the fold of God; He, to rescue me from danger,
interposed His precious blood”…
The deep shock of Christianity lies in the fact that the
Christian God seeks out His own followers, not the other way around. The other
religions play in the dark, groping for their deities. But Christianity
contains the real palpable joy (or horror) of discovering that there is an
all-powerful Being out there on the hunt for you.
But there is a deeper shock. It is this: that God sought
out you and sought out me. If you’re a Christian, then God
purposed before the foundation of the world to die for your sins, so loving you
that He would pursue you literally to death.
Now the greatest expert on earth about you is yourself. I
am the greatest expert on earth about myself. And you know, knowing yourself,
that you did not deserve such pursuit of affection. That’s just the heart of
the whole matter isn’t it.
The Mission of God takes us back full circle to God’s Love,
and we recall that it is a pursuit of Love which we never deserved. Of all the
incomprehensibility and mystery of God, this is the deepest of mysteries. We
might be able to rationalize a great deal of things, but never this. There is
no way to rationalize how the most important Being in existence could both know
you exist and still want you.
Yet that is the great comfort and shock of the Christian
faith, and all our hopes rest upon it. All we can do is respond to this Divine
Love and align ourselves with this Divine Mission.
I heard a story about two young Moravians, who heard of an
island in the West Indies where an atheist British owner had 2000 to 3000
slaves. And the owner had said, "No preacher, no clergyman, will ever stay
on this island. If he's ship wrecked we'll keep him in a separate house until
he has to leave, but he's never going to talk to any of us about God, I'm
through with all that nonsense." Three thousand slaves from the jungles of
Africa brought to an island in the Atlantic and there to live and die without
hearing of Christ. 3000 slaves were doomed to live and die without hearing of
Christ.
Two young Germans in their 20's from the Moravians sect
heard about their plight. They sold themselves to the British planter for the
standard price for a male slave used the money they received for their sale to
purchase passage to the West Indies. The miserly atheist planter would not even
transport them.
The Moravian community from Herrenhut came to see the two
lads off, who would never return again, having freely sold themselves into a
lifetime of slavery. As a member of the slave community they would witness as
Christians to the love of God.
Family members were emotional, weeping. Was their extreme
sacrifice wise? Was it necessary? As the ship slipped away with the tide and
the gap widened. The housings had been cast off and were curled up on the pier.
The young men saw the widening gap. They linked arms, raised their hands and
shouted across the spreading gap "May the Lamb that was slain receive the
reward of His suffering.”
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