Let the Nations Be Glad!
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So when Paul tells us to pray for peace precisely because God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth, he is not picturing prayer as a kind of harmless domestic intercom for increasing our civilian conveniences. He is picturing it as a strategic appeal to headquarters to ask that the enemy not be allowed to draw any firepower away to decoy conflicts of flesh and blood.
The Crying Need of the Hour
So the truth is reaffirmed: God has given us prayer because Jesus has given us a mission. We are on this earth to press back the forces of darkness, and we are given access to headquarters by prayer to advance this cause. When we try to turn it into a civilian intercom to increase our conveniences, it stops working, and our faith begins to falter. We have so domesticated prayer that for many of us it is no longer what it was designed to be—a wartime walkie-talkie for the accomplishment of Christ’s mission.
We simply must seek for ourselves and for our people a wartime mentality. Otherwise the biblical teaching about the urgency of prayer and the vigilance of prayer and the watching in prayer and the perseverance of prayer and the danger of abandoning prayer will make no sense and find no resonance in our hearts. Until we feel the desperation of a bombing raid or the thrill of a new strategic offensive for the gospel, we will not pray in the spirit of Jesus.
The crying need of the hour is to put the churches on a wartime footing. Mission leaders are crying out, “Where is the church’s concept of militancy, of a mighty army willing to suffer, moving ahead with exultant determination to take the world by storm? Where is the risk-taking, the launching out on God alone?”3 The answer is that it has been swallowed up in a peacetime mentality.
We are a “third soil century.” In the parable of the soils, Jesus says that the seed is the Word. He sows his urgent Word of kingdom power. But instead of taking it up as our sword (or bearing fruit), we “are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:18–19).
This is why Paul says that all of life is war—every moment. Before we can even engage in the mission of the church, we have to fight against “the deceitfulness of riches” and “desires for other things.” We must fight to cherish the kingdom above all “other things”—that is our first and most constant battle. That is the fight of faith. Then, when we have some experience in that basic battle, we join the fight to commend the kingdom to all the nations.
God Will Win the War
Now, into this warfare God asserts himself for the triumph of his cause. He does this in an unmistakable way so that the victory will redound to his glory. His purpose in all of history is to uphold and display his glory for the enjoyment of his redeemed people from all the nations. Therefore, God engages in the battle so that the triumphs are manifestly his. As we saw in chapter 1, the chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy his excellence forever. This is what guarantees the victory of his cause. In order to magnify his glory, he will exert his sovereign power and complete the mission he has commanded.
Power of the Puritan Hope
This confidence in the sovereignty of God and the triumph of his cause is essential in the prayers of God’s people and the mission of the church. It has proven to be a powerful force in the history of missions. The first missionary endeavor of the Protestants in England burst forth from the soil of Puritan hope. The Puritans were those pastors and teachers in England (and then New England), roughly between the years 1560 and 1660, who wanted to purify the Church of England and bring it into theological and practical alignment with the teachings of the Reformation.4
They had a view of God’s sovereignty that produced an undaunted hope in the victory of God over all the world. They were deeply stirred by a passion for the coming of God’s kingdom over all the nations. Their hearts really believed the truth of the promises that Christ’s cause would triumph. “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). “All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name” (Ps. 86:9). “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). “I will make the nations your heritage” (Ps. 2:8). “All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Ps. 22:27). “All the earth will worship You, And will sing praises to You; They will sing praises to Your name” (Ps. 66:4 NASB). “To him shall be the obedience of the peoples”(Gen. 49:10).5
This tremendous confidence that Christ would one day conquer hearts in every nation and be glorified by every people on earth gave birth to the first Protestant missionary endeavor in the English-speaking world, and it happened 150 years before the modern missionary movement began with William Carey in 1793.
Between 1627 and 1640, 15,000 people emigrated from England to America, most of them Puritans, carrying this great confidence in the worldwide reign of Christ. In fact, the seal of the colonists of Massachusetts Bay had on it a North American Indian with these words coming out of his mouth: “Come over into Macedonia and help us,” which was taken from Acts 16:9. What this shows is that in general the Puritans saw their emigration to America as part of God’s missionary strategy to extend his kingdom among the nations.
The Prayers and Pain of John Eliot
One of those hope-filled Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in 1631 was John Eliot. He was twenty-seven years old and a year later became the pastor of a new church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, about a mile from Boston. But something happened that made him much more than a pastor.
According to Cotton Mather, there were twenty tribes of Indians in that vicinity. John Eliot could not avoid the practical implications of his theology: If the infallible Scriptures promise that all nations will one day bow down to Christ, and if Christ is sovereign and able by his Spirit through prayer to subdue all opposition to his promised reign, then there is good hope that a person who goes as an ambassador of Christ to one of these nations will be the chosen instrument of God to open the eyes of the blind and to set up an outpost of the kingdom of Christ.
And so when he was slightly over forty (not twenty but forty!) years old, Eliot set himself to study Algonquin. He deciphered the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax and eventually translated the entire Bible as well as books that he valued such as Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted. By the time Eliot was eighty-four years old, there were numerous Indian churches, some with their own Indian pastors. It is an amazing story of a man who once said, “Prayers and pains through faith in Christ Jesus will do any thing!”6
The reason I tell this story is to highlight the tremendous importance of solid biblical hope on the basis of which we pray in the cause of world missions. God has promised and God is sovereign: “All the nations . . . shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name” (Ps. 86:9).
This is what gripped the Puritan mind and eventually gave birth to the modern missionary movement in 1793. William Carey was nourished on this tradition, as were David Brainerd7 and Adoniram Judson, Alexander Duff and David Livingstone, John Paton8 and a host of others who gave their lives to reach the unreached peoples of the world. The modern missionary movement did not arise in a theological vacuum. It grew out of a great Reformation tradition that put the sovereignty of God square in the center of human life. In the warfare of world missions, God bares his arm and triumphs for his own glory.9
Missions Is Supremely the Work of God
It is even more important to see how God triumphs for his own glory in Scripture than in the faith of great missionaries. The New Testament makes clear that God has not left his Great Commission to the uncertainties of the human will. The Lord said from the beginning, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). World missions is supremely the w
ork of the risen Lord Jesus.
“I Have Other Sheep . . . I Must Bring Them Also”
In the Gospel of John, Jesus put it like this: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice” (John 10:16). This is the great missionary text in the Gospel of John. It is full of hope and power. It means that Christ has people besides those already converted. “I have other sheep that are not of this fold.” This is a reference to the doctrine of election.10 God chooses who will belong to his sheep, and they are already his before Jesus calls them. “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37; cf. 6:44–45; 8:47; 10:26–27; 17:6; 18:37). These sovereign “wills” of the Lord Jesus guarantee his invincible engagement in world missions.
There will always be people who argue that the doctrine of election makes missions unnecessary. But they are wrong. It does not make missions unnecessary; it makes missions hopeful. John Alexander, a former president of Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship, said in a message at Urbana ’67 (a decisive event in my own life), “At the beginning of my missionary career I said that if predestination were true I could not be a missionary. Now after twenty some years of struggling with the hardness of the human heart, I say I could never be a missionary unless I believed in the doctrine of predestination.”11 It gives hope that Christ most certainly has “other sheep” among the nations.12
When Jesus says, “I must bring them also,” he does not mean that he will do it without missionaries. That’s plain from the fact that salvation comes through faith (John 1:12; 3:16; 6:35), and faith comes through the word of his disciples (John 17:20). Jesus brings his sheep into the fold through the preaching of those whom he sends, just as the Father sent him (John 20:21). So it is just as true today as in that day, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). It is Christ who calls in the gospel. Christ gathers his sheep in world missions. That is why there is complete assurance that they will come.
Clothed with Power for Missions
When Jesus ascended to heaven, he told the disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. . . . I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18, 20). That’s the authority with which he calls his sheep.
Then to make it plain that it would be his authority and his presence that would give success to the mission, he told his disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they were clothed with his power from on high (Luke 24:49). He said that the coming of that power through the Holy Spirit would enable them to be his witnesses “in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). When the Spirit comes, it is the Lord himself fulfilling the promise to build his church. Accordingly, Luke says, “The Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). The Lord did it. And he continued to do it by converting the greatest missionary of all time (Acts 26:16–18) and directing the missionaries in their travels (Acts 8:26, 29; 16:7, 10) and giving them the words that they needed (Mark 13:11; Acts 6:10).
“Not I, but the Grace of God That Is with Me”
Paul was deeply aware that the success of his mission was the Lord’s work and not his own. He said, “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God” (Rom. 15:18–19). Paul’s passion, as always, was to focus all glory on the supremacy of Christ in the mission of the church. The Lord was building his church.
How did Paul then speak of his own labors? He said, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10). Paul worked. Paul fought the fight and ran the race. But he did so, as he said in Philippians 2:13, because beneath and within his willing, God was at work to will and to do his good pleasure. Using a farming image, Paul put it like this: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6–7). Paul was jealous to uphold the supremacy of God in the mission of the church.
This jealousy for the glory of God in the mission of the church drove the apostles to minister in a way that would always magnify God and not themselves. For example, Peter taught the young churches, “Whoever serves [should do so] as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:11; cf. Heb. 13:20–21). The one who gives the strength gets the glory. So Peter drove home the absolute necessity of serving in the strength that God supplies and not our own. If God did not build his church, he would not get the glory, and all would be in vain, no matter how “successful” the work may look to the world.
New Covenant Confidence in the Sovereignty of God
The apostles knew that what was happening in their mission was the fulfillment of the promises of the new covenant. “[God] has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:6). And the new covenant promises were that God would overcome hardness of heart and make people new on the inside. “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules” (Ezek. 36:26–27).
So as Luke tells how the Christian movement spread, he repeatedly records God’s sovereign initiative in the growth of the church. When Cornelius and his household are converted, it is described as God’s doing. “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18). “God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name” (Acts 15:14). When the gospel broke loose on European soil in Philippi beginning with Lydia, it was God who did it: “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14).
In all these ways the supremacy of God in the mission of the church is clear. God does not put his gospel and his people in the world and leave them to wage war on their own. He is the main combatant, and the battle is to be fought in a way that gives him the glory.
Prayer Proves the Supremacy of God in Missions
This is why God has ordained prayer to have such a crucial place in the mission of the church. The purpose of prayer is to make clear to all the participants in this war that the victory belongs to the Lord. Prayer is God’s appointed means of bringing grace to us and glory to himself. This is crystal clear in Psalm 50:15. God says, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” Charles Spurgeon makes the point unavoidable:
God and the praying man take shares. . . . First, here is your share: “Call upon me in the day of trouble.” Secondly, here is God’s share: “I will deliver thee.” Again, you take a share—for you shall be delivered. And then again it is the Lord’s turn—“Thou shalt glorify me.” Here is a compact, a covenant that God enters into with you who pray to Him, and whom He helps. He says, “You shall have the deliverance, but I must have the glory. . . .” Here is a delightful partnership: we obtain that which we so greatly need, and all that God getteth is the glory which is due unto His name.13
Prayer puts God in the place of the all-sufficient Benefactor and puts us in the place of the needy beneficiaries. So when the mission of the church moves forward by prayer, the supremacy of God is manifest and the needs of the Christian troops are met.
Prayer Is for the Glory of the Father
Jesus had taught this to his disciples before he left. He had told them, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). In other words, the ultimate purpose of prayer is that the Father be glorified. The other side of the purpose comes out in John 16:24. Jesus says, “Until now you have asked n
othing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” The purpose of prayer is that our joy may be full. The unity of these two goals—the glory of God and the joy of his people—is preserved in the act of prayer.
The zeal that the apostles had for the exaltation of God’s supreme influence in all their missionary work was built into them by Jesus. In John 15:5, Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” So we really are totally ineffective as missionaries in ourselves. We may have many human strategies and plans and efforts, but the spiritual effect for the glory of Christ will be nothing. But according to John 15:5, God does not intend for us to be fruitless but to “bear much fruit.” So he promises to do for us and through us what we can’t do in and of ourselves.
How then do we glorify him? Jesus gives the answer in John 15:7: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” We pray. We ask God to do for us through Christ what we can’t do for ourselves—bear fruit. Then verse 8 gives the result: “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.” So how is God glorified by prayer? Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. And prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that he will provide the help we need. Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as all-sufficient.
This is why the missionary enterprise advances by prayer. The chief end of God is to glorify God. He will do this in the sovereign triumph of his missionary purpose that the nations worship him. He will secure this triumph by entering into the warfare and becoming the main combatant. And he will make that engagement plain to all the participants through prayer, because prayer shows that the power is from the Lord. The range of his powerful engagement in the warfare of missions becomes evident from the range of things that the church prays for in her missionary enterprise. Consider the amazing scope of prayer in the vibrant missionary life of the early church. How greatly was God glorified in the breadth of his provision!