I want to talk to you,
young person.
You've learned doctrines of sovereign grace.
You read the Puritans.
Congratulations.
I will not lose sleep tonight
because people in the world
lack self-esteem.
I will not lose sleep tonight
because they're not having their best life now,
or they're not being all that they can be,
or their checkbook is not balanced.
I will lose sleep tonight,
if I lose sleep tonight,
because men will stand naked before God
and be cast into hell.
When I preach, and when you preach,
whether here or in the mission field,
you cannot simply think that
you're just a communicator of truth
and you leave it there.
You must preach as a dying man to dying men.
And I see that in Paul.
There was a passion.
There was an urging.
He wasn't simply satisfied
if he preached well
or communicated truth.
He longed for God to be
honored among men.
And he longed
for men
to be holy,
to be Christlike,
and to be able to rejoice
in the benefit of their great salvation.
We ought to be a people
given to urging our brethren
to greater and greater godliness,
to greater and greater piety,
to abound further and further in love.
He says, "I urge you, brethren."
What is he going to urge them to do?
To do the most difficult, scandalous,
in some cases, some would say,
preposterous thing
a person could ever urge
another person to do.
To give their life away.
Do you know, even the devil had it right?
In this sense,
you can take away a man's goods,
his houses, his lands,
you can do absolutely anything to him,
but the moment you touch his flesh
is when you're truly going to test this man.
To give away a car,
a home,
a tithe...
is a small thing.
But to ask a man to give away his life...
I know there is so much romantic notion about missions,
but Amy Carmichael,
Elisabeth Elliot's book,
it's right,
missions is only this:
an opportunity to die.
And opportunity to give your life away.
For something much larger than yourself.
Much greater than yourself.
So he is going to ask these people
to do what some would consider
almost cultic,
absurd,
ridiculous,
immoral,
to give their life away,
to offer their life.
Now, you're going to need strong medicine
to motivate a person to something
such as this.
What on earth or in heaven
could ever motivate a man
to give his life away?
I'm going to urge you to
give your life away to God.
To offer it up as a living
and holy sacrifice to God.
Now, I'm going to do so
on the basis of the following:
The first 11 chapters of this book
that outline for you the mercies of God.
And have you decided that you
would submit your life to those directives?
You see, we talk about being biblical
in our worship.
Have you gone through Scripture
to discover what God desires out of worship?
Well, you know, we love worship this way.
I don't care how you like worship.
Because that's not the point.
What has God said?
You see, in this idea,
we can romance this thing to death.
We can spiritualize it to death.
We can say, oh, I've given my life
to the mission field;
that does not mean at the same time
that you have given your heart to God.
Because you can go to the mission field and be godless,
and carnal and trite.
You'd be better off joining National Geographic
than you would a mission agency.
Are you seeking in simplicity
to examine your life?
I'm not talking about finding
legalistic inferences
and forcing them upon yourself.
I'm talking about the great principles
of Scripture dealing in every aspect
of your personal life,
applying them to you,
and seeking to obey them?
Let me ask you a question.
If you go to the mission field,
without taking what I have said
as a serious endeavor,
isn't there the possibility
that the only thing you're going to do there
after you have crossed land and sea,
is make a convert like yourself
that's nothing more than a two-fold son of hell?
There isn't a whole lot of American Christianity,
folks, that needs to be exported.
Unless, like Ravenhill says,
we put it on some kind of a raft,
and send it off to a lone island,
and after it's going away from the dock,
we all sing the doxology.
If we're going to endeavor to work in missions,
then we must be motivated
by a God that we know.
A Gospel that we know.
And we must be a people
who have endeavored with great force
to examine their lives
in the light of Scripture
and conform their lives
to what Scripture says.
How much of what you have -
even the way you sit in a chair -
is formed by those around you,
and not by Scripture?
Something to think about.
Well, I think if you're going to be a missionary of any account,
this is what you must do. Stay in your room.
Not only pray, but study.
So that when you walk out of that room,
you have something to say about God.
And so that you will be able to walk out of that room.
Listen to me.
I've been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
You walk out there in all your zeal,
in the middle of the plaza,
and you begin to preach,
and you think as a young missionary
that angels are going to drop out of heaven,
and the Hallelujah Chorus is going to be sung,
and millions of people are going to be converted,
they're going to toss you on their shoulders
and build a statue of you.
That's not going to happen.
What's going to happen is this:
you're going to go there, and you're going to preach,
and you're going to preach,
and when a crowd starts listening to you,
somebody somewhere is going to rise up
and call you a demon.
The entire crowd's going to turn on you.
They're going to grab your little pulpit
and your makeshift microphone
and all your little tracts
and they're going to throw you out on the street.
It's going to take a lot more
than a romantic zeal for missions
to make you get up, pick up your pulpit,
your tracts and walk right back in there
and preach again.
It's going to take a passion for God
that is created out of knowing Him.
And that's the same for
everything in the Christian life.