I’m going to ramble on for a little bit here about things that I jotted down here on my piece of paper, but really I would like to have your questions and your feedback so I know whether I’m talking about the things that are of most significance to you. The topic has to do with the pastorate and world evangelization. Let me start by telling you the reaction of the church when I began to talk more about world missions back in 1983, 1984, 1985, and so on. There began to be this backlash. The church had about 1,000 people and had backlash from people who have a great burden for urban ministries in Minneapolis, for example, or who are strongly involved in the pro-life movement, or they were involved in issues about housing in Minneapolis or counseling in Minneapolis.

They were what I would “call domestic” ministries and they are as many as there are gifts and needs, and those people began to say things like, “Are we second class citizens around here?” So if you start riding any horse in your ministry, those who aren’t on the horse with you will start to ask those kinds of questions. It doesn’t have to be just missions. You might get into a big counseling thing or you might get in a big Bible study thing, or discipleship thing, or whatever. And those who aren’t with you will say, “Whoa, whoa, do we count? Is there a place for us? Does everybody have to have your first burner issue?” Now the reflection that I gave to that resulted in a little article in “Journal of Frontier Missions” and proved to be extremely helpful for our people. So let me just tell you what it was.

Exporting Domestic Ministries

If you list off all the possible domestic ministries that your church is involved in — and it could be anything from kids’ clubs, to Sunday school, to music ministries, to park ministries, to working with alcoholics, to working with crisis pregnancy — and you ask, “Now how does all that here in Minneapolis or in Philadelphia relate to Papua New Guinea, or unreached peoples in Afghanistan, or China, or Thailand, or wherever?” the answers are several. One is out of these domestic ministries flow training for people who will go overseas to unreached peoples.

Out of these domestic ministries, especially if you include all of your people’s jobs as ministry, and I think you should teach people if you’re a lawyer, doctor, teacher, bricklayer, and fireman as ministry, out of that flows money. They make their money doing this stuff, which is the way that missionaries can be sent. I had one other written down, which is credibility. Ralph Winter stood in my kitchen a few years ago and looked out the window at Minneapolis. And we were talking about these things and about my life, and about our church, and about how to be engaged most helpfully in finishing the Great Commission. And he said, “John, maybe the most important thing you could do for missions is to remake Minneapolis.” Now that’s a typical Ralph Winter overstatement.

But what he meant was it’s very hard to export a religion from a depraved culture. You don’t go to an average African tribe and tell them anything about solid family life in America. And we don’t have anything to say to a lot of the cultures of the world who are doing it a lot better than we are, and we’re supposedly “the Christian nation.” So the point is there’s got to be some credibility if you’re going to export anything out of this country, including Christianity. So he said, “Maybe you should just devote yourself to remaking Minneapolis for the sake of the nations.” So credibility, financial support, and training would be three ways that what’s happening in America in domestic ministries can bear fruit for the unreached peoples.

Now, if I stop there, that would only be half the answer and it wouldn’t be the most helpful half. What was the most helpful half was to recognize that any person who senses the call of God to go from an American setting to an unreached people group, whatever country, or either to an unreached people group in America, what they are doing is exporting domestic ministries. Now that was the insight that brought the two together. So you got these people out here who are passionately involved in pro-life or who are passionately involved in one-on-one discipleship to bring people to maturity and faith. And they’re feeling a little bit squeamish about all this emphasis on world evangelization.

I want to say now to them, “If you care about abortion, or you care about what becomes of old people, or you care about one-on-one discipleship to bring people to maturity, then for you to be authentic, you have to care about that also where the preconditions for it don’t even yet exist. You’re acting out of a Christian foundation that has been built up in this area for a couple 100 years and you have a tremendous advantage. If you really care about abortion, what about abortion in Thailand? What about abortion in China? What about abortion in Uganda? If you care about AIDS in Minneapolis, what about AIDS and Uganda where we’re going to lose half the population probably in the next seven years?”

And that means that if a people group exists somewhere that doesn’t even have the Christian foundations out of which can grow domestic ministries, then you people who love domestic ministries will be so glad when some missionary up and leaves to go to that group and start preaching the gospel so that the presuppositions can be put in place out of which then can grow domestic ministries. And when people began to realize that foreign missions is the exporting of domestic ministries, it really makes domestic ministries the goal of everything. So the people don’t feel as threatened anymore. If what you really think counts is demonstrating the justice of Jesus over against ugly structures in society, I say, “Okay, fine. What about all the structures in all the cultures over there where they haven’t even heard of Jesus who could bring anything to bear on anything? Does it matter there? And if so, then don’t feel like there’s a competition here between that issue and the issue of taking the foundation of that issue — namely the gospel and Scripture — to another place. That conception — that foreign missions is the exporting of domestic ministries — has gone a long way to alleviating the tension between the camps, those who are more immediately on the front lines of missions at Bethlehem and those who are pouring their lives into the domestic ministries at Bethlehem.

Question and Answer

Do you want to raise any question or comment about that particular observation? In the pastorate, you will run into that tension no matter what your particular emphasis is.

Wouldn’t it be fair to say then that domestic ministry is a good training ground for missions?

Okay. Exactly. When we talk about small groups, for example, one of our big issues about small groups is if you can’t plant a small group, you can’t be a missionary. If you can’t plant a small group, a possible church, then what are you going to do anywhere else? So small groups. If you can’t do evangelism in the urban center of Minneapolis, where our church is, what are you going to do in New Guinea? We view these things together. Tom Steller’s title is associate pastor for missions and leadership development. And Tom is probably the most creative and active person in putting together things that bless our people where they are — nurture programs, small group programs, and a district eldership. Tom is always dreaming this way as a missions leader in the church.

People always kind of scratch their head. What is Tom? What does he do? Why is he always thinking about these kinds of things when he’s a missions guy? And you gave the answer, namely, that Tom just says, if these 50 or 60 mission candidates that he works with right now at our church in the Nurture program, who are aiming for vocational missions, if they can’t study the Bible, teach the Bible, do small groups, do evangelism, and shepherd the flock, what in the world are they going to export? So domestic ministries are the training ground for missions as well. Any other observations or questions, maybe they’ll come to your mind as we go.

Do people who are doing domestic ministry at some point get to a level when they’re ready for cross-cultural work?

Some do and some don’t. I don’t try to put a value judgment on whether they are continuing. You see, here’s another angle on it. Minneapolis was once upon a time a mission field that somebody came to. And right now we are simply continuing the domestic ministries that were planted in Minneapolis by some Jesuit 150 years ago, probably. So in a sense, they are on the mission field that’s 150 years old. It’s not a mission field anymore because it’s well reached.

This is another point now kind of shifting. This is a good transition for me onto another point of what a pastor does to kindle mission zeal. I’m always holding out radical challenges to people, because I think most Americans are just bored stiff with making money. Yuck. What a way to spend your life? Get up in the morning, work your tail off for 10 hours, come home, watch TV, dink around in the garage, and go to bed. Get up, go to work, make a lot of money, come home, watch TV, dink around, and get up. What a life. So I create a lot of dissonance in my people by saying, “Really? You guys are happy not being pastors or missionaries?” I get into trouble doing that, but I think it’s worth the trouble just because Jay Campbell White back in the early 20th century said, “Most men (and women) are dissatisfied with the output of their lives when they slow down long enough to catch their breath and take a little break, and walk in the woods, and think about the meaning of the last five years, they say, ‘Is that all there is? Is that all there is?’”

They just go to work, have a nice house, live in the suburbs, and have a boat. In Minnesota you have the cabin at the lake, as though there was one lake in Minnesota. They all have these cabins. They all have these lakes, and they all have these boats, and then they go there and some come back for church and some don’t. And that’s it. When you come to die, that life will be no help for your conscience at all. So I’m always throwing out, what do you want to do with your life? Come on you 45-year-old businessman, come on. What do you want to do with your life when you grow up?

So I am pushing the domestic ministries real hard. My gut reason for doing that is the old analogy of, if you see a log and 10 men carrying it, and nine are at one end and one is at the other, where are you going to grab on? Now, that’s not a full answer. You have to leave room for the sovereignty of God to tell you, “Grab on the nine person end because they’re nine weak men and he’s worth 10 at the other end.” God might say that. But in general, when you look at Nigeria and you see these big holes, what do you do? Or consider Albania and Afghanistan? You’re talking about wastelands of incredible proportions spiritually. And here we are. There are more churches in the Twin Cities than there are missionaries to 1.2 billion Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. You talk about disproportion. So every time missions week rolls around at Bethlehem, I’m on my face saying, “Lord, how can I stay? How can I stay? What am I doing? Why am I here? I’m one among 1,000 churches in these Twin Cities. And that doesn’t count the Catholics.” And my answer is so far that I will do more good mobilizing like I’m doing than if I went to Guinea myself. So far, that answer has sufficed and kind of kept the lid on my dissatisfaction as I look around this saturated place.

So my answer to your question is, many of those people find the roots of their lives shaken. I describe my ministry at missions weekend and other times as I want to just take the trunk of your life, the trunk of your tree with its roots nicely planted at 3M, in your neighborhood, in your school, and in your small group and I’m just going to dig around it. And then if the Lord wants to pluck it up and plant it somewhere else, he can. But my ministry is to loosen the roots of people. I’m not talking seminary students, high school students, and university students who have their whole life before them and they don’t know what they want to do anyway. I’m talking about people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who are sunk real deep. This gives me another hobby horse now. I’ll just let the Spirit flow here. Especially retired people.

I hate the word retirement. There is no retirement in the Bible at all. Paul never retired. Peter never retired. The most deplorable thought in my mind is to reach 65 and to spend 20 years getting ready to meet Jesus on the golf course. Just think of it. You have 20 years of health wasted in leisure, in big, expensive condo places where they have all kinds of things that people over 60 are supposed to like to do. Thank God for the people in my church who are retired, who every winter leave town and go to Texas to work with HCJB, or fly over to Liberia and help rebuild, or go somewhere. Their whole mindset is, “I’m free. I don’t have to make money anymore. I can minister instead of being free to vegetate.” You need to just start right from the beginning and take five, 10, 15, 20 years in your ministry to knock retirement right out of your people’s minds, to build a mindset that this world is not our home and we’re just passing through. I’m an alien and an exile here. The forces of this world are warring like crazy against this church and these people. I’m going to fight this thing with all my might. I’ve got some gifts and I’m going to take retirement to use them. The old people in my church get this thing called re-tire. You put treads on your tire. They re-tire themselves when they retire, and they start off on a new road.

Do you think that becoming a missionary may encourage people at Bethlehem to take up the cause of missions?

Right. Well, as far as I can tell, the Lord has worked in a lot of people at Bethlehem to kindle a passion for missions through me who’s never been one and have no intention right now of being one, unless when I get on my face and say to God one of these years, “Why am I here?” And he says, “You’re not anymore. You’re out of here. You’ve done your work, now you go do it in Nigeria or somewhere else,” which is entirely possible to me. I want to be like Ramon Llull. He came back and he got old. When he was 83, he said, “Why am I here? If I’m going to die, why not die as a martyr?” And so he went back and he stood up in the city, and he started preaching Jesus and they killed him. That’s the way I feel. When I’m too old to do much good in yuppie, fast-paced America, why not just go to a totally unreached people where they’re so hostile no young people will go because I have nothing to lose. I’m going to die in four or five years of old age and just kind of walk in there and say, “Jesus is Lord,” and just die. I’ve watched so many old people die in old folks’ homes and it’s horrible. It’s horrible what happens to people in old folks’ homes. Just go get killed and you won’t have to be that way at all. Ramon Llull really did that. So maybe my credibility will jump way up at the end of my life. And then somebody will write a book someday about the last little chapter of my life, like David Brainerd, just a little teeny piece of his life and he’s changed the world because of Jonathan Edwards.

How do you balance between giving a radical call to obedience and missions with people needing to be wise and take care of their families? What if they feel bad about doing the ministry they have at home?

I may not solve that problem very well since I choose to err on the side of letting them feel that way. But the way I try to keep them from feeling that way is with a radical God-centeredness in all of life. So I wrote a little article for our newsletter, “How to Drink Orange Juice to the Glory of God”. My son went to a little school for summer that I thought was going to be a good Christian school. He took Latin so he could get up to speed last summer in eighth grade. And they never mentioned Jesus, they never prayed in class, and they never related Latin to church history. And at the end he said, “Daddy, I don’t want to go to this school because there’s no difference from Roosevelt High or any other place downtown.”

And I said, “No difference at all?” He said, “I don’t think so.” God was never mentioned. So I called the teacher and I said, “Now children can be really mistaken, but he said that there really wasn’t any difference between your class in Latin and what he would get at a secular school. And this is supposed to be a Christian school, and I want my boy to learn that God relates to all of life and get a Christian worldview.” And he said, “Well, I’d just defy anybody who would say that Latin or algebra can be made Christian.” And I told my wife that and said, “Nobody should say to John Piper, ‘I defy.’” So I sat down at my computer and I wrote a three page letter on how if I were teaching Latin, I would make it God-centered. I could have done the same thing for algebra and I don’t know anything about algebra. You don’t have to know much to know how God relates to anything if he’s God.

So I sent this to him and called him again. And I talked to the principal and they sent the letter to the big central headquarters in Indiana. And the president called me from Indiana. And we have this discussion that’s still going on now about how to make Latin Christian, how to teach Latin in a God-centered way. So when I preach, I do that with brick laying, nursing, teaching, and lawyering so that my people, at least occasionally, are hearing me say, if you’re a grade school teacher, you better teach spelling to the glory of God. This is when I remember because I developed this spelling thing because I have four sons but two of them are sort of anti-spelling. They say things like, “So why should I want to spell like everybody else?”

Well, now, right there at that point, if you’re a teacher, the ways divide. There is a Christian answer to that question and there’s a secular answer to that question. The secular answer is, if you don’t spell the way everybody else spells, you won’t get a good job, you won’t make enough money, and you won’t be happy. That’d be one answer. It’s true. It’s just godless. There are a lot of ways a Christian could respond. The person could respond, “But if you don’t spell the way others spell, then your powers of communication with clarity, understanding, and acceptance are going to be hurt.” And then if the person says, “Well, so what?” You say, “But you do have something to communicate, something of immense importance. Your whole life is communication from God to others. You are a broker of truth and grace. If you jeopardize that with crummy spelling, you dishonor God.”

So that is just a teeny little illustration of how I would say to a teacher, “Get God into your teaching.” So I think my people believe that there is a tremendous need in American culture for radically God-centered people in every layer of society and every one of the little pieces of professional life.

What might the effects of this be on the church’s missions mindset?

Here’s the most recent piece. Last missions’ week at end of October, when Operation World had just come out, we were selling them for four or five dollars. It’s incredible. If you buy enough of those things that are cheap, you can get them. And I said to the staff, “Let’s order 300 copies.” And the business administrator said, “No way, no way. We’ll start with 150.” I said, “Dan, I’m sure we can get rid of more than 150.” So I forget what we compromised at.

So I stood up and I said, “No, this is new, and I just think it ought to be in every home,” and they just vanished. And we thought we’d missed it. We had one more Sunday to go. And there’s a man in the city who had 2,000 of them. He just had so much faith that he bought 2,000 copies and had them in his house. So we got 400 more from him and we got rid of them. So the total was about 450. Now that’s about how many family units there are. But one response has been that just by my saying, “I think this should be in your house and maybe we should pray through it as a church,” I would say eight years ago, we would have sold a dozen, 20, or 30. But everybody bought one. So when prayer week rolled around, the first week in January, I said, “I think God is doing something at Bethlehem this year and I think he’s calling us to pray through the world in 1994. So let’s do it together. You’ve all got these books at home for some reason. Now let’s just with our children, start praying through.”

So that’s one thing. Another thing is we’ve grown tremendously in our prayer life. Nothing will grow your people up in prayer like a world vision. Every pastor that struggles with prayer meetings and so on, struggles with little bitty, teensy-weensy, banal prayers. Wesley Duewel told a story recently. He pictures God on the throne, and huge angels, the size of the Sears Tower in Chicago, flying in from the East, and flying in from South America and giving reports.

All of a sudden he hears, “God, please help us get enough money for a swimming pool. We can’t finish the swimming pool.” God says, “What was that? What was that?” It’s okay to pray, I suppose, that your swimming pool could be finished, I don’t know. But that’s the level at which a lot of church prayer life happens. And if you want to get people praying, “Hallowed be thy name in all the world. Thy kingdom come in all the nations. Let your will be done in Afghanistan the way the angels do it in heaven,” then you have to get them global-minded. So prayers are transformed.

Another thing is once you get the world in view, you realize that two-thirds of the world regard the poorest person in America as rich. There are 800 million people on the brink of starvation. They live subsistence hand to mouth. The only way to get your people aware of that is missions, to talk about the world and the needs of the world. And the effect that has then is to create a wartime lifestyle. That’s what we call it. It’s a wartime lifestyle where you say, “Look, really.” Ralph Winter walked into a student’s room in a dormitory and a student welcomed him. They’re going to have a conversation. He looked in the closet and he saw two pairs of shoes. And he said, “Oh, I thought you said you lived here by yourself.” He said, “Well, I do.” He said, “Oh, I just saw two pairs of shoes.” Let him who has two coats give to him who has none, as John the Baptist said, pre-grace — if you have the wrong theology.

If people are inundated from the media with crises all over the world, or even just from the Christian media of needs all over the world, do they come to throw up their hands about the hopelessness of praying for everything? And how do you as a pastor guide them in praying?

It’s going to be both-and. It’s going to be structured so that they don’t feel like they’re drowning in a sea of possibilities, but it will also be freedom because the Holy Spirit knows a lot better than I do what should be prayed for this week. And so if something happens like a crisis with the earthquake in Southern California, I’m part of a little denomination called The Baptist General Conference. The flags go up, and the little red cards come, and we can say, “This morning, let’s focus on that.” Operation World is giving us some focus for praying systematically throughout the world, teaching people to pray as they read the newspaper, just pray. But I’m less worried about people drowning in that than I am in just teaching them to act on the impulse. If a gracious impulse rises in your heart for something you’re reading in the newspaper, like we heard Bosnia prayed for this morning, don’t say, “Yeah, but is that the most important thing to pray for right now? There might be a more important thing.” You’ll never move. You’ll never get off a dime in your life if you second guess every impulse that you get and ask, “Yeah, but Lord, if I go to visit that person, there might be a person who has more need than that. Should I go to visit that person?” How will you ever know? How would you ever know the answer to that question? I think you have to trust the spirit to lead your people into praying.

Paul and Timothy Missionaries

Let me change the subject and send us off in a new direction for a few minutes here. And then you could ask some more questions. Here’s another distinction that has been helpful to get a handle on the picture of missions for our people. I distinguish Paul-type missionaries from Timothy-type missionaries. That’s my language for a common distinction between frontier and regular missionaries. But picture this. Romans 15, one of the most important mission chapters in the Bible, says, “I have fulfilled the gospel from Jerusalem as far as Illyricum. I have no more room for work in this place.” Now, do you know where those two places are? Jerusalem, you know where that is. Illyricum, that’s Albania. It’s up there, just when you’re crossing over from Greece to Italy.

He says, “I finished.” Now, picture that. What in the world does that mean? There are thousands and thousands of unsaved people between Jerusalem and Illyricum. And Paul says, “I have no more room for work in this place. I’m going to Spain. Pray for me. And when I get there, send me on my way.” That’s why he wrote Romans. What did he mean? I think he meant, my job is done because my job is penetrating either the peoples, or the urban centers, or enough strategic peoples and locations so that now the forces of expansion out from those centers can evangelize the people in those areas. So he’s gone, he’s on his way to Spain, saying, “I have no more room for work.” God has called him to preach where the name of Christ has not been named.

But Timothy, where is he from? What city? Lystra. And where does he wind up ministering? Ephesus. So he’s a missionary, right? That’s a different culture. That’s another city and a big metropolitan area, and little, I don’t know how old he was when he got called, but travels with Paul a while, gets all trained. And Paul plops him right into Ephesus and puts Titus on Crete. He leaves him there indefinitely as far as we know, and he takes off for Spain. He doesn’t guilt them and say, “No, you go to Britain or you go to Morocco.” He just leaves him there. I don’t want to make the 90 percent of the missionaries who are working right now reach people areas feel bad. They’re Timothy-type missionaries. The desperate need today, however, is for Paul-type missionaries. That’s far more desperate. And the Paul type missionaries are those who just got their antennas up for Ralph Winter’s statistics, David Barrett’s statistics, and Patrick Johnstone’s statistics. Where are the peoples who don’t have any church at all, don’t have any opportunity for a Timothy type, and they go there?

And so I want to constantly say to our people, don’t just consider crossing some space, that’s what Timothy did, and it’s okay. But consider the fact that if this job is going to be done, and Matthew 24:14 is going to be fulfilled as a testimony to all the ethnic, all the nations, then you’ve got to go like Paul to those. So in every local church and in every denomination, there has to be a group of people with the burden of the Paul type vision. Not everybody because Paul’s a very freeing person. He wrote Romans to people that he intended not to be missionaries because he told them in Romans 15, “Support me and send me.” If he had meant for them to be missionaries, he couldn’t have said that. So he just freed them up entirely to stay in Rome by saying, “Please speed me on my way,” in chapter 15.

But he had to do it and he always had a little band of people around him. Ralph Winter says the first missionary society, that little band of people. And so we need to say to our people, “Most of you need to stay here and be God-centered in your vocations, but a core of you need to become Timothy-type missionaries and a core of you need to become Paul-type missionaries. And we must have in this church a burden for Paul type missionaries.” And it may be, depending on the size of your church, a very small group of people. And they’ll probably be the most powerful prayers I would guess because they got the greatest opposition, I think.

Christian Hedonism

Let me just take a few minutes to talk about Christian Hedonism in this relationship. David Livingstone and Hudson Taylor, both said near the end of their lives — these men who had spent themselves, had been through tremendous crises, had lost loved ones, said at the end of their lives, “I never made a sacrifice.” As they poured their lives out and lost their wives, and suffered from disease. And when they came back, Livingston addressed the University of Cambridge and he said to them, “I never made a sacrifice.” The quotes are in Desiring God. Now what in the world was that all about? “I never made a sacrifice,” because most of the preaching to promote a missions’ mindset that I grew up under constantly said things like, “Don’t do your own will, do God’s will.”

I would always sit there thinking, are those the only two options? Is it possible that I could be so changed that I might will God’s will? That I might love God’s will, that it might be my passion and joy even in the face of the lion to do God’s will. That didn’t seem to ring. So I’ve devoted my energies for 20 years to develop this thing called Christian Hedonism, which basically says, you better not be indifferent to whether you love to do God’s will or not. You better really delight to do God’s will.

Behold, I delight to do thy will of God . . . (Psalm 40:7).

And that means in missions that the way you allure people out of security, out of comfort, and out of the lake and the cabin is by holding out a superior pleasure to them. A superior pleasure. Toward the end of the address to the Ephesians in Acts 20, Paul said, “Remembering how the Lord Jesus said it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35)

It is more happy, more satisfying, and more producing of wellbeing to give, to spend, pour out your life than to constantly be protecting it with more insurance policies, more cars, more boats, more houses, and better neighborhoods. It’s more blessed to pour it out and take risks. Now here’s the word that shocks you in that verse. It’s the word remembering, because there are a lot of people today who say, “Blessedness, happiness, joy, fulfillment, satisfaction, and a sense of wellbeing is an okay result of obedience, but you shouldn’t be motivated by it and pursue it.” Does that sound familiar? That comes from Immanuel Kant, not Jesus Christ.

Paul said, “Remembering what the Lord Jesus said that it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Now think what that means. He is saying, “Don’t forget this. Don’t put this out of your mind as though it would contaminate your motives.” You see, this person over here would say, “You shouldn’t think much about how blessed it is to give because it’ll contaminate your motives. You’ll do something for the blessedness in it, and if you do something for the blessedness in it, you’ve ruined its moral virtue. So Jesus is against moral virtue then by saying, “Remember, it is more blessed to give. Remember it’s more blessed.” So when you get the phone call in the pastorate on your day off that somebody is about to commit suicide, or that so-and-so’s in the hospital, or there’s a crisis at church, you’re supposed to, at that moment, fight the fight by remembering the word of the Lord, it is more blessed to give right now up your day off in order to meet that need. It is more blessed, it is not an evil motive. It’s not evil. It doesn’t corrupt.

Practice Joyful Obedience

Here’s the proof of that from experience. You go to the hospital, right? And you want the person you’re visiting to feel loved. What makes them feel loved, a pastor who walks in and they look up and they say, “Oh, Pastor John, you didn’t have to do this,” and you say, “I know, but I’m a pastor and it’s my duty. I came in obedience to God. Is there anything I can do for you?” They don’t feel loved. What would you need to say for them to feel more loved when they say, “Oh, Pastor John, you didn’t need to come.” You could say, “Well, I know I didn’t need to come. I wanted to come.”

Now at that moment, when you say, “I wanted to come,” they could say, if they were Kantians, “You’re always doing what you would. You’re always trying to find your satisfaction. Why don’t you do something out of duty for my sake for once?” Nobody in 1,000 years would think of saying that. If you stand over their bed and say, “I wanted to come, nothing would make me happier this afternoon than standing by you to meet your needs.” Why do they feel loved when you say something so hedonistic? The answer is that the only obedience that has virtue in it is joyful obedience — loving to do God’s will, not just doing God’s will. It’s loving to bless people, not just blessing them.

Love Mercy

How does Micah 6:8 go?

He has told you, O man, what is good;
     and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
     and to walk humbly with your God?

You should love mercy. Love it. And if you don’t love it, get on your face until God zaps you with hedonism. Do you love to do righteousness? And it is your passion to do the will of God. Now that’s what I sound to my people in regard to missions and everything so that missions then shines, not like it did for me when I was growing up. Missions was the alternative to my will; it was God’s will. Instead, I’m saying you can’t even not begin to touch God’s will unless your aim is to be happy in God and in his will. There’s a very freeing thing that happens in missions when you know you’re going for your own sake.

Never a Sacrifice

Let me close with a text. It’s found either in Matthew 19 or Mark 10. It’s the story of the rich young ruler. And the rich young ruler comes and he says, “What must I do to enter eternal life?” And Jesus says, “You know the commandments? Keep them, sell your goods, and follow me and you’ll have treasure in heaven.” And he had riches and he went away sad. He wouldn’t do it. Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “It’s really hard for a rich man to get into the kingdom, it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” meaning it’s impossible. And they just are taken aback and say, “Well, then who can be saved?” And Jesus says, “With men, it is impossible, with God, all things are possible.”

So humanly it’s impossible for him to walk away from his riches. It’s like a camel going through the eye of a needle, but with God, the heart can be changed. And he could go through the eye of a needle and lay down his riches and come to me. I wish I could see the video of this event so I knew the tone of voice in Peter and Jesus. I’m risking some tones of voice here that may not be there. But here’s what I think happened. Peter says, “Lord, we’ve left everything and followed you. What about us?”

Jesus says, “Peter, nobody has left houses, lands, or brothers, sisters, mother, and father, which will not receive back mothers, lands, brothers, and sisters in this life a hundredfold and in the age to come, eternal life. Get off this self-pity thing.” Do you see what he’s saying? Jesus is saying, “What do you mean? What do you mean you’ve sacrificed for me? What do you mean you gave up. You laid down your tin pan of mush and picked up a steak? Tell me about it. Like C. S. Lewis says, you left your mud pies in the slums for a holiday at the sea. Whoa, what a sacrifice. Poor Peter.” I don’t know what Jesus’s tone of voice was. He was tougher than people think he was. But the point is that when you call a person to missions to leave their mother, father, lands, sisters, brothers, and maybe even children, when you send them away, which is a heart-wrenching thing for missionaries, you don’t present that as some terrible sacrifice. You say you’re going to get back 100 fold and you are going to have eternal blessedness.

So rejoice and be like Hudson Taylor, and be like David Livingstone. And when you come to the end of your life, say, “I never made a sacrifice,” even though they’d lost everything for him. Here’s one more verse. I just read it in my devotions this morning. So it’s on my front burner, I think the Lord does this sort of thing in devotions. He says:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field (Matthew 13:44).

That’s the message of missions and the gospel wherever you go, in whatever context. We say, “I offer you a treasure of obedience, I offer you a treasure of forgiveness, I offer you a treasure of meaning, I offer you a treasure of eternal blessedness at the right hand of God. Now go ahead, make a sacrifice.” And it says “in his joy,” he sold everything. He sold his wedding ring off his finger, his house, his car, his excess clothing. And he had a staff and his sandals on his feet, and he followed for the joy of having that treasure. Preach to your people that being missionary-minded and taking radical risks for God, whether it’s home or overseas, is no sacrifice. It’s finding the hidden treasure and the fullest experience of it.