To prove that it is in the church's missionary activity
that we most supremely see
the traits of our Lord in the church,
I want to paint you a picture
with three brush strokes from church history.
And now, I'm coming to wrap this up.
I want to do this and then just say
a word of application, but first,
let's think of this.
How do we see the Lord Jesus Christ,
the beauty of the Lord in the church,
in its missionary vision and burden and activity?
The first brush stroke is the brush stroke
of extraordinary breadth of love.
It's 1875.
This man is trying to make ends meet.
He has two jobs.
He's a school teacher and he has another job also.
We go into his home and he has a workshop.
There's a few stools there.
There's a cobbler's outfit.
There's a Bible. There's another book.
And there's a strange looking map on the wall.
And on that map, there's writing all over the place
about each country and its spiritual situation.
That man's name is William Carey
and the map is on the wall
because the map is already...
the map is already in his heart
because the Spirit is a missionary Spirit.
And He is the Spirit of Calvary love.
His close friend Andrew Fuller writes this
about him during time when he was a cobbler:
"I knew Carey when he made shoes
for the maintenance of his family.
Yet even then..." he says,
"his heart burned incessantly
for the salvation of the heathen."
It's just beautiful.
"Even then," says Fuller,
"he had drawn out a map of the world
with sheets of paper pasted together
besmeared with shoemaker's wax
and the moral state of every nation
depicted with his pen."
"Carey's pupil," writes his biographer,
"...saw sometimes a strange sight:
their master moved to tears
over a geography lesson.
As pointing to continents, islands, and peoples
he would cry, 'and these are pagans.'"
Pagans.
Now, isn't there a mysterious,
not-from-this-world power at work
in a cobbler that he becomes like that?
And is it not there that I see in a cobbler
more than anywhere else
the trace of the image and the beauty of my Lord
who yearns over a lost world?
Isn't it there that I see Jesus in William Carey
more than anywhere else?
The second brush stroke is the brush stroke
of extraordinary depth of love -
not just breadth of love like Carey with his maps,
but depth of love.
Well, we could take so many examples.
We could take Brainerd.
And you know he's praying in the snow.
And he's spitting up blood
because he's got tuberculosis.
And he writes, "I had no notion of joy from this world.
I cared not where or how I lived
or what hardships I went through
so that I could but gain souls for Christ."
What mysterious power is this?
Have I ever felt that to that depth?
Have I ever said to my wife,
"I care not where or how I live
or what hardships we go through?"
I wouldn't dare say that to her.
But I want to give you another example of this.
Excuse me.
I don't know if you know Jonathan Goforth.
He was a Canadian Presbyterian missionary in China
at the same time as the heyday
of the China Inland Mission.
His wife was a person of great,
great commitment and spirituality.
She wrote several books.
You might want to check into her little quaint book
called "How I Know God Answers Prayer."
And God did an amazing work of revival
through Jonathan Rosalind Goforth,
particularly in Manchuria where the Spirit of God
just fell upon village and town after town,
so much so that some people thought
that Jonathan Goforth had a power of hypnosis and said so.
And they would refuse to come to the meetings
because they would see people lined up -
the Chinese lined up by dozens
waiting to confess publicly
murder and adultery and thievery,
weeping over their sins
as the power of God reached out
and just took these people out of darkness.
But here's the story about the depth of love.
This is Rosalind's account
of the incident during the Boxer Rebellion
when the Empress of China
had sent out the decree to kill all foreigners
and many of the missionaries were killed.
"My husband turned pale as he pointed
to a group of several hundred men,
fully armed awaiting us.
They waited till all the carts had passed through the gate,
then hurled down upon us a shower of stones,
at the same time rushing forward
and maiming or killing some of the animals.
Mr. Goforth..."
Isn't it quaint how you call your husband "Mr." at the time?
But... "Mr. Goforth jumped down from our cart
and cried to them, 'take everything but don't kill!'
One man struck him ablow on the neck
with a great sword wielded with two hands."
Fortunately, it was the blunt end of the sword.
"His thick helmet was cut almost to pieces,
one blow cutting through the leather lining
just over the temple."
She talks about other blows.
They begin to rain blows down upon him
and she says, "Again, he was felled to the ground
with a fearful sword cut
which entered the bone of the skull behind
and almost cleft it in two.
Rising from this blow, he was again struck down by a club."
Now, you're watching your husband endure this.
And a child gets lost in the mayhem of it all also
for a day or so.
"As we neared the village,
men came out to drive us away,
but I begged them to help us.
By this time, Mr. Goforth had sunk to the ground.
Putting the baby in an old woman's arms,
I knelt down beside my husband.
The children were crying bitterly.
Mr. Goforth looked as if he were dying.
And the women standing around us were weeping now.
This was too much for the men
who came forward and said, 'We will save you.'"
Later that day or the next day,
"when we reached the inn,
a wild mob of over a thousand men
filled the inn yard,
and as we alighted from the cart,
these men literally drove us before them
into one room which in a few moments
was packed to suffocation.
For probably an hour, the crowd
kept crushing us into one corner.
Then those outside became impatient
at not being able to get in
and demanded that we be brought out to be killed.
We stood facing that seething multitude
until relief came in the darkness."
Now, in the next chapter of the book,
listen to this. How would you react to all of this?
"One of the results of our gracious
and merciful deliverance..."
because they were delivered
as she lived to talk about it -
"from the hands of the Boxers
was an increased desire to make our lives
tell in the service of God
to spend and be spent for Him.
After the Boxer experience, my husband
returned to China in 1901,
and with my children, I left for China
in the summer of 1902.
Mr. Goforth met me at (unintelligible)
and unfolded to me a carefully thought out
plan for future mission work.
He felt that the time had come
when we should give ourselves
to the evangelization of the great regions
north and northeast of (unintelligible) -
regions which up to that time
had scarcely been touched by the Gospel
because of lack of workers.
What that proposition meant to me
can scarcely be understood
by those unfamiliar with China
and Chinese life.
Smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever,
and other contagious diseases
are chronic epidemics,
and outside the parts ruled by foreigners,
it's absolutely devoid of sanitation.
Four of our children had died.
To take the three little ones then with me
into such conditions..."
Well, this time, it's just because of how little
I feel that I've done.
"...Into such conditions and danger
seemed literally like stepping with them
over a precipice in the dark."
What depth of love!
Is there not a mysterious power,
a Spirit from elsewhere,
this very Spirit of our Lord
who endured such suffering
that He might by all costs
embrace a whole world
and save men from every tribe and people?
The last brush stroke is shorter,
but it's not about a missionary on the field.
It's about a local church at home
that sends and prays and gives.
Well, let me say something
about the pastor of this church.
Jay Oswald Sanders was one of the greatest
proponents of missions in the 20th century.
As a young man, he was told
that his physical constitution
was not fit for missionary work.
But he went anyway.
First of all, he went to Latvia and Estonia.
He fainted away and was brought back to North America.
After some years of ministry in Canada,
he went again.
He went to Spain as a missionary.
He had to come back again because of illness.
In 1928, he founded the People's Church of Toronto.
And four years later,
he couldn't resist the missionary urge.
The world was on his heart.
So he went to Africa.
He collapsed with a serious illness
and was brought back to Canada.
In 1938, he could not resist again
and he went to the Pacific to the Solomon Islands
as a missionary where he contracted malaria
and was very ill on the mission field for three years
until they carted him back.
And so he might have been a bit obstinate,
but now he concluded: I was not made to be a missionary.
And so, he began to pastor that church he had founded,
and it became one of the greatest
missionary sending churches of the 20th century.
He says, "What a delight for me
when I saw the first five men on the platform
being sent out as missionaries."
And when the five became ten,
and the ten became twenty,
and the twenty became fifty,
and the fifty became a hundred,
and the hundred became two hundred,
and the two hundred became three hundred.
And in his forty year pastorate,
that one local church sent out 350 missionaries.
Now listen, not Jay Oswald Sanders -
you can't do that as one person.
There is a church with the hand of God upon it
that is sharing with that pastor
a wonderful, beautiful missionary urge
and burden and vision.
And I would like to just take you with me to a service, okay?
Now, the account is told by Fred Jarvis who was there.
He was a missionary to Japan.
But he gives this account.
And let me just explain.
The way this church did it -
their missionary giving -
was they had one day every year,
and they would have just a day
at the end of the missions convention
where people would give
and where they would make pledges for the next year.
And this is what Jarvis says
about that culminating day
when everyone was going to make
their pledges and their giving.
He says - it's a big church... big.
I think there are thousands.
A couple thousand at least.
"An immense crowd thronged
every inch of space.
Enthusiasm was running high.
It was the fourth service of the day.
Some 9,000 people had attended.
Hundreds were standing."
These people were excited about something.
"As Dr. Smith mounted the platform,
the audience awaited in breathless silence
the announcement of the grand total,
the missionary giving for that one year:
$225,000."
Now this is in the 1960's.
A crescendo of joyful praise
gripped the vast assembly
as the people united in singing
the Hallelujah Chorus."
What sort of mysterious power
has grabbed ahold of these people
that they would be so rejoicing
that this is the biggest day of the year for them?
That they are just overjoyed
that this much money has been lost to them?
That they've given it away
to people they've never seen before
to reach them with the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
He goes on and he says,
"over 50,000 had attended
the three weeks of the convention.
This was the first time in history
that a missionary convention had been held
for such a long period.
There had been no begging for funds,
no solicitors had been sent from door-to-door.
It was God's people -
(at home, not on the field) -
it was God's people getting God's vision
and carrying out God's program.
It was giving to evangelize the world.
It was a red-letter day in my experience,"
says the missionary at home on furlough
learning something about the Holy Spirit
in the sending church.
Wow... what would you give
to see your church even on a small level
brought up by the power of the missionary Spirit -
He was always the missionary Spirit -
breathing into you and I
that sort of redeeming love?
And if you'll just permit me
a little speculation and I'm going to stop.
Imagine that after that announcement of that amount -
and I have to tell you that during the 40 years,
that church gave 12 million dollars in giving
and 8 million was used for missions.
But imagine, after the announcement
and the Hallelujah Chorus,
they join in singing,
"O'er the gloomy hills of darkness;
cheered by no celestial ray."
Think of the hundreds of them together
rejoicing and thinking of the money given.
"Son of righteousness arising,
bring the Bride, the glorious day!"
It's beautiful, isn't it?
"Send the Gospel
to the earth's remotest grounds."
And there, I see something of the image -
the very image and the beauty of my Lord
in that sending church.
And it is found in the missionary Spirit.
Application:
Well, the good news is that the Holy Spirit
is still in the business of doing that today.
I think I'm just going to stop
because I've preached too long.
And I think the application is clear
that we need to long for and pray
and yearn after and talk about
the Spirit of God being a missionary Spirit.
Oh, breathe upon us, breath of God. Amen.
(unintelligible)
I'm sorry.
(from the room) Psalm 126:6
Psalm 126:6
I'm sorry. I don't know it by heart, but I'll read it.
"He who goes out weeping
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy
bringing his sheaves with him."
Amen.