Let me tell you in advance how I’m going to close lest it come abruptly and you’re put on the spot and feel pressured to make an unpremeditated decision. I’m going to give you a chance at the end of the service to come forward for prayer, but not all of you. It’s just a certain group, and I want you to be praying about whether you’re in that group or not.

The group would be defined something like this. If you already know that God has called you to change the place, the culture, and the job that you presently have, to align yourself with his mission across the culture in a different way and you’re headed that way. But more broadly than that, I’m very interested in praying over whoever would assemble here at the end of the service who perhaps just in this conference, perhaps in recent months, God has awakened something new by way of real, serious openness to cross-cultural, vocational missions, whether in support or in direct church planting or some way, but you’re not sure.

The prayer would be aimed toward bringing conviction and clarity to that sense of new openness, desire, and eagerness that has awakened and you’re not quite sure what to do with it. So that’s who we’ll pray over at the end of the service. And you can be pondering. If you’re sitting beside a spouse and you didn’t have a chance yet to tell her what God’s been doing, it might be good to whisper to one another about what your plan is at the end of the service.

No Purpose of God Can Be Thwarted

Before I pray and ask God to help us one more time here in this wider conference, let me tell you this. We’ve been together twice now, talking about the goal of God in making himself to be known, praised, enjoyed, and feared among the nations. And we talked this morning about why that mission must exist in terms of missions because there’s so much sin and so much failure to relate to God that way in the world. And I just want to strike the note tonight before I begin on this topic that this is going to get done. This is not up for grabs, this mission. This is not hanging on whether I’m effective here, or whether this church is committed here. This is going to happen. If you don’t get involved, he will pass this church over. If I don’t get involved, I’ll just be left behind. This is going to happen because it’s God’s mission. He has simply said:

And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come (Matthew 24:14).

That is not saying, “If this happens or if that happens.” That’s what God’s going to get done. So I don’t want to leave you with a sense of, “Oh poor God, we can’t get Baptists or Presbyterians on the page here.” That is not the mentality of our sovereign God at all. The question is, do you want to be left behind in the most glorious enterprise in the world, dinking around in your job, or do you want to be on board with God in his great enterprise? That’s the only question for you, and you can be on board as a sender and you can be on board as a goer.

I’m specifically fishing for goers tonight because Jesus said, “Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers” (Matthew 9:38). And he knew that some would’ve to stay in order to send them and he knew that some would need to go. And I have no qualms about saying some of you are called by God to be goers and some are definitely not to be goers. So I intend at the end of the service that everybody in the pew not standing here have a clean conscience, but that some of you should not have a clean conscience if you’re not standing here. God has to decide which is which. So let’s pray and ask him to get to work to continue doing what I don’t doubt that he’s been doing for months in some of your lives, and perhaps 20 years in others.

Living in Light of the Resurrection

Richard Wurmbrand, one of my heroes, tells the story of a Cistercian monk in Italy. The Cistercians are an order of the Catholic Church in which they spend their life in silence, except when they come together in corporate worship. They go into their little cubicles and they pray and they serve and they don’t ever talk except when they praise or pray, a remarkable kind of discipline. And one of them was asked on a television interview in which he was allowed to speak — I guess it was an Abbot or something like that had the right to do it — this question, “What if you were to realize at the end of your life that atheism is true and there is no God? Tell me what if that were true.” And the answer came, “Holiness, silence, and sacrifice are beautiful in themselves. Even without the promise of reward, I still will have used my life well.”

Zig Ziglar said the same thing recently when he was asked, “What if Christianity turns out not to be true?” And he said, “It’s a good life anyway.” When I read that I was deeply troubled for this reason. It’s exactly the opposite of what Paul says. First Corinthians 15:19 says:

If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

That’s exactly the opposite of what the Cistercian monk and Zig Ziglar said. Paul is saying, “If there’s no resurrection, the life I have chosen to live is pitiable and I would never choose it.” That’s shocking. That’s really shocking.

Why didn’t Paul say, “Even if Christ is not raised from the dead, even if there is no God, even if there’s no resurrection, a life of love and labor and sacrifice is a good and beautiful life, and I would choose it”? The reason it is so shocking is because I believe that all over American evangelicalism, that’s exactly the way Christianity is sold. People say, “It’ll be a good life. Marriage will go better, raising kids will go better, health might even go better, and your job will go better. Things go better. It’s a good life. If it proves to be a delusion in the end, it doesn’t really matter because if you never wake up, who cares? It’s been a good life.”

Comfort on Every Side

Why does Paul not talk that way? Why does Paul say, “If there’s no heaven, if there’s no resurrection, we Christians are fools to live the way we live?” Does that trouble you when you consider your lifestyle? Paul said, “If there is no resurrection, then we are of all men most to be pitied.” Do you know what Paul said we should do if there’s no resurrection? First Corinthians 15:32 says:

Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

What did he mean by that? He didn’t mean, “Let’s all become debauched. Let’s all become drunks and gluttons,” because drunks and gluttons are just as much to be pitied as Christians if there’s no resurrection from the dead. What he meant by that was not, “Let’s all become drunkards and let’s all become gluttons.” He meant, “I’m not going to pummel my body anymore. I’m not going to turn down gifts from the churches anymore. I’m not going to risk my life day after day in angry mobs and on the sea anymore. I’m not going to endure backsliding, hypocritical, hard-to-get-along-with Christians anymore. I’m not going to go without food and sleep day and night anymore. I’m not going to go to any hard places anymore. I’m just going to have a normal, American, middle class, safe, secure, comfortable, suburban lifestyle. That’s all I’m going to have.” That’s what “eat, drink, and be merry” means.

“Let’s just eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow, we die,” means, “Let’s just live like all the advertisements tell us to live.” Paul didn’t talk that way. He never said, “The key to maximizing worldly, material comforts is to become a Christian.” He taught just the opposite. Paul’s relationship to Christ was a call to suffer. My main point tonight is that the Great Commission will not be finished without the suffering of God’s people. It’s not just because from time to time persecution arises, but because it is in the design of God that the way the gospel will spread is by means of suffering. It’s a design. It’s an evangelistic, missiological strategy that comes from God that the gospel will spread through suffering. And if we say we will do all we can to minimize and escape our suffering, then we will not participate in the spreading of the gospel to the unreached peoples of the world.

Filling Up What Is Lacking in Christ’s Afflictions

Now my text is not 1 Corinthians 15. My text is Colossians 1:24, so I invite you to please turn there with me. While you’re turning there, I’ll read you one more verse from 1 Corinthians 15:30–31. Paul said:

[If the dead are not raised] why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!

Do you hear him protesting? Do you hear him saying what his life is about? He says, “I bear in my body the marks of Jesus. I die every day. I make choices in my ministry to lay some comforts down and some conveniences down and some securities down every day that I would never lay down if there were no resurrection from the dead.” Well, that’s quite a call. Let’s look at the missionary and ministry significance of Colossians 1:24. He says:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings . . .

This is a crazy man because almost every one of us would have to write, “I murmur when I suffer. I complain when I suffer. I bellyache when I suffer. I blame when I suffer, especially when it comes from another person. I blame, criticize, and take vengeance when I suffer.” This is a different kind of human being. This a Christian here. He continues:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church . . .

What does it mean when he says, “I, in my body and in my sufferings, fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”? Jesus chose to suffer. Philippians 2:5–11 says that he laid aside everything, embraced humanity, and was obedient even unto death on the cross, the most excruciating way to die ever devised by human beings. He designed his whole life to get there, and Paul is saying something was lacking. It’s almost blasphemous, isn’t it? This is heresy to talk like this. You mean to say there’s something lacking in the afflictions of Jesus? Well, surely it does not mean something is lacking in the worth and the atoning value of the cross. No, no, no. There is nothing lacking in the worth and value of the atoning work of Jesus. Nothing. Well, what’s lacking? What could the sufferings of Paul fill up in the sufferings of Jesus? Let me give you an answer and then show you where I’m getting it.

A Personal Presentation of Dying Love

My answer is this: the thing that is lacking in the sufferings of Jesus on behalf of those for whom he died among all the peoples is a personal presentation of his love through suffering. Those who were there for the three years of his ministry saw him deny himself, lay down his life, and ultimately hang on the cross voluntarily when he could have called 12 legions of angels to do vengeance on these enemies, but he chose to stay there to save the world. They saw it. But what was lacking was the extension of it and the presentation of it in some kind of visibly manifest form of suffering so that people could see the suffering of Christ and the love of God in Christ touching their lives. That’s what’s lacking and that’s what we are called to give the world.

We are not called mainly to be a comfy religion whereby we have a nice lifestyle, a nice comfortable situation, a nice marriage, nice kids, nice health, and a nice retirement program so maybe somebody will envy us for what our religion is. That’s not Christianity. Christianity is to lay things aside that the world depends on and at some cost to ourselves be the suffering of Jesus, to extend the love of God through our sacrifice to others, and in doing it, rejoice. Now, where do I get that answer? Am I making that up? Is that in the Bible, that interpretation?

I’ll show you where I’m getting it. I’m going to get it from Philippians 2, very nearby in your Bibles if you want to look at it with me. Here’s the way I’ve tried to answer the question. This is a methodological lesson for you here. I took the phrase “fill up what is lacking,” and I looked up in Greek the term “filled up” and I looked up “complete”, and I said, “Now are there other places in the Bible where those two ideas come together — filling up what is lacking and completing — in the Greek?” If you do a little word search on your computer you find them. And there are not many. The clearest one is right here in Philippians 2. And you watch what light this sheds on our text.

There’s a man named Epaphroditus here in this paragraph. Epaphroditus is from Philippi. The Philippian Christians love Paul. Paul is in Rome. They want to send material support to their missionary, Paul, sustaining him in his imprisonment in Rome. They love him. They’re not goers, they’re senders. That’s good. Paul never criticizes them for it. Epaphroditus takes the goods, maybe money, maybe books, maybe food. I don’t know what it was, but he took it. And at the risk of his life, Paul says, at the cost of almost dying, he brings it to Paul.

Do you see Philippians 2:27? Epaphroditus was sick unto the point of death, and God spared him mercifully lest Paul would have grief upon grief in his imprisonment. Then in Philippians 2:29, Paul tells the church in Philippi to honor Epaphroditus when he comes back to them and he gives his reason in Philippians 2:30. Let’s read it. This is the key place, and it parallels Colossians 1:24. He says:

[Because] he nearly died for the work of Christ, risking his life to complete what was lacking in your service to me.

Suffering as Christ’s Body

Here we have it. Here we have the parallel. Now the question is, what did it mean here? If Paul says, “My desire and call is to fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ,” and here it says, with the same Greek construction, that Epaphroditus’s mission was to fill up what was lacking in the service of the Philippians to Paul, what did he do? I went to a commentary to see if anybody saw what I saw because I don’t like to be alone in my interpretations. That feels risky. So I went to an old one, Marvin Vincent, from 150 years ago, and here’s what I read. And I said, “Yes, yes, this is it. We have it here.” It’s not an unusual interpretation. It’s recognized. It’s normal. Here’s a quote from Marvin Vincent:

The gift to Paul was a gift of the church as a body. It was a sacrificial offering of love. What was lacking was the church’s presentation of this offering in person. This was impossible. And Paul represents Epaphroditus as supplying this lack by his affectionate and zealous ministry.

Do you get it now? Do you see what’s going on here? Do you see the analogy? Here you have a sacrificial love being manifested, but they’re a thousand miles away, or whatever it is from Philippi to Rome. I don’t know how far it is, but it’s a long way away. And they want somebody who’s way far away from their love, who can’t see their love, can’t touch their love, and can’t feel their love to know their love, to feel their love and to touch their love. So they send an emissary, a representative embodying their love, and he almost dies in the process. And when he gets there, Paul sees their love in Epaphroditus’s love and the gifts come to him. And the Philippians’ sacrifice is completed by the presentation to those for whom they sacrificed.

Now just translate that into Colossians 1:24. Christ dies on a cross for all the sheep scattered throughout all the nations of the world. You’ll never go to a people group where there are no people for whom he has died. And you then have him saying, “As the Father has sent me, so send I you.” And he also says, “If they call the master of the house Beelzebub, what will they call those in his household? (Matthew 10:25). Now go and complete what is lacking.” Well, what’s lacking?

What’s lacking is that Jesus would love to get his arms around people in Uzbekistan. He would love to bleed in front of them. He would love to present himself crucified before them, but he has ordained, for wise and sovereign purposes, not to do it in person, but to do it through his people called “the body of Christ”. Remember, he said, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me when you strike a believer?” (Acts 9:4). And therefore, how do we complete this lack? Answer: Paul says, “I rejoice in my sufferings on behalf of that body of Christ and thereby fill up what is lacking in his afflictions.” This is the design of God to finish the Great Commission among all the peoples of the world, in all the closed, or rather, creative access countries of the world.

The Cruciform Path of Obedience

There’s no such thing as a closed country. You can get in, you just may not be able to get out. But you can get in. There’s all this crazy American talk today, “Will my kids be safe?” What’s that have to do with it? Or people ask, “Is it against the law to preach the gospel?” I think if you asked Paul that question, “Is it safe in Philippi?” he would say, “What is that? I don’t understand the question.” And maybe you would say, “Well, I mean, is the likelihood high that you could be beaten and imprisoned and maybe die?” He’d say, “I don’t understand your question. What does that have to do with it?”

Something is wrong with us. There’s something wrong with us here in America. You can’t imagine how acculturated you are in this Disneyland called America. You can’t imagine how Americanized you are. And maybe this one little chirp of this cricket in this pulpit will do one little millimeter to wake you up to the fact that New Testament Christianity is, “He who would be my disciple must take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). You are called to die. The gospel will not reach the unreached peoples without martyrs. It won’t reach the unreached peoples without the death of a husband and the death of a wife and the death of some children. What’s that got to do with it? Paul said, “I rejoice.” He could rejoice in it because he rejoiced in hope.

Beautiful Feet

Let me draw this to a close with some illustrations. Maybe stories are better than expositions sometimes. I was in Deerfield, Illinois at Trinity Seminary several years ago, working on that missions book. I was hiding. I didn’t want anybody to know I was there because I was working all day long, every day, and I was away from my family and kids for one month. I was just going to get this thing done. They had given me a little room there.

I heard that J. Oswald Sanders, an old great missionary statesman, was over at the seminary in the chapel. And I wanted to hear him because I take opportunities to hear my heroes. So I snuck in the back and I listened to this 89-year-old missionary statesman, still functioning strong, though he’s died since then. He spoke and he closed his message with a story. Incidentally, I’ll tell you what he said about his age. For all of you older folks, this is very shocking and very stirring. He was 89, fully functional and traveling. There was no let up at 89. He was articulate, clearheaded, and challenging me. I was maybe in my late forties or something. And he said, “God has been so good to me. I love being involved in the missionary enterprise. And since I was 70 (looking back 19 years) God has given me the strength to write a book a year.”

And I thought, “I’d love to write a book before I’m dead.” Here was a man pushing 90 who at 70 didn’t go to Arizona to golf. He didn’t buy into this crazy, wicked, American retirement scheme by which people prepare to meet King Jesus by fiddling their life away in RVs all around the country. It is a tragedy. It is such a waste of humanity to take a 65-year-old man or woman, strong and intelligent, and tell them to play. Boo! Why do you think senior discounts on airlines exist? I’ll tell you, it ain’t to get to Arizona; it’s to get to Afghanistan cheap, or some other place.

Well, here’s the story he told. That was a parenthesis. He told the story of an indigenous missionary who walked barefoot from village to village in India that he had known personally. His hardships were many. And after a long day, he arrived at a village and he walked through the village sharing the gospel. He was tired. He originally thought maybe he’d sleep and wait until the next day, but for some reason he felt driven. So he walked in the village and he gathered a little crowd and he told them the gospel, and they were really quite unkind and disrespectful. They booed, hissed, laughed, and drove him out of the city. They didn’t want him in the city. And he felt miserable and rejected and hopeless, and he laid down under a tree and went to sleep exhausted.

As the dusk came, the whole city came out and he woke up suddenly and the chief men of the city were looking down at him, and he thought, “Well, this is it. They’re going to do something terrible here.” And one of the chief men said, “We came out to look at you. And when we saw your blistered feet, we decided you must be a holy man and that we did a bad thing by not listening to your message. And we would like you now to tell us, as a holy man who blistered your feet to get here, what you wanted us to hear.” And he said that many received Christ.

Now that’s just a picture. It’s a picture of the beautiful feet spoken of in Isaiah 52:7, and it’s a picture of completing in your sufferings the lack in the afflictions of Jesus. It was the feet, it was the blistered feet that looked like holiness, that looked like the cross, that looked like love, and that opened the hearts to receive what God was doing.

Bleeding Love

Here’s one other story and then I’ll close. Michael Card, a well-known singer, told this story and wrote it up in Virtue Magazine. He got it from the Billy Graham Amsterdam Itinerant Evangelists meeting, not the most recent one last July, but rather several years ago. It was about Joseph, the Maasai Warrior. And this is what he said. I’ll read it to you:

One day, Joseph, who was walking along one of these hot, dirty, African roads met someone who shared the gospel of Jesus with him. Then and there he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. The power of the Spirit began transforming his life. And he was filled with such excitement and joy that the first thing he wanted to do was return to his own village and tell them the good news to the members of his own tribe. Joseph began going from door to door, telling everyone he met about the cross of Jesus and the salvation it offered, expecting to see their faces lighten up the way his had. To his amazement, the villagers not only didn’t care, they became violent. The men of the village seized him and held him to the ground while women beat him with strands of barbed wire.

He was dragged from the village and left to die alone in the bush. Joseph somehow managed to crawl to a water hole and there, after days of passing in and out of consciousness, found the strength to get up. He wondered about the hostile reception he had received from the people he had known all his life. He decided he must have said something wrong, and that he told the story of Jesus incorrectly. And after rehearsing the message he had first heard, he decided to go back and share his faith once more. Joseph limped into the circle of huts and began to proclaim Jesus. “He died for you so that you might find forgiveness and come to know the living God,” he pleaded. Again, he was grabbed by the men of the village and held while the women beat him, reopening the wounds that had just begun to heal.

And once more, they dragged him unconscious from the village and left him to die. To have survived the first beating was truly remarkable, to live through the second was a miracle. Again, days later, Joseph woke in the wilderness, bruised, scarred, and determined to go back. He returned to the small village and this time they attacked him before he had a chance to open his mouth. As they flogged him for the third time, and as he began to speak of Jesus Christ the Lord, and before he passed out, the last thing he saw was the women beginning to weep. This time he awoke in his own bed. The ones who had so severely beaten him were now trying to save his life and nurse him back to health and the entire village had come to Christ.

Now I don’t want to overstate the case here. There’s a time to flee and there’s a time to die. And Paul did both. Sometimes he escaped in a basket, and sometimes he walked right into the mob. And only God knows when it’s time to flee and when it’s time not to flee and to suffer. So I don’t want to overstate the case. The call is not to become a masochist. The call is to become a person of radical love with an understanding that the path of love regularly leads through pain. Whether you live in Dallas or whether you live in a harder place, if you make it your life’s aim to minimize pain, you will be an unfaithful disciple at best.

We must embrace pain. When it comes, we must embrace it not as a surprise, but as normal — indeed, as a strategy which God has for the nations. And when it comes, because of the great reward we have in heaven, we should rejoice. Remember what Hebrews 13:13–14 says? It says:

Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.

Let’s go. Let’s go with him outside the camp, outside the comfort zone. We used to have Bethlehem t-shirts, and written on the back was Jim Elliot’s quote: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” That’s the kind of spirit I try to breed among our teenagers, our young people, our middle aged people, and our older people. He is no fool to give what he cannot keep — your life — to gain what you cannot lose — eternal life.