In our last episode, I began by asserting that a huge difference exists between being a preacher and being a pastor. Preaching is only one dimension of ministry, while being a pastor is a much more holistic role. When Jesus came into the world, He pursued a holistic ministry, including preaching, teaching, counseling, and addressing the physical needs of people. As we reviewed Hebrews 2:5-18 we discovered the reasons why Jesus was the Greatest Minister.
In the same way, we must realize the difference that exists between pastors and missionaries. Pastors are shepherds living among and nurturing the sheep. Missionaries leave the flock to go create new ones.
One way to think of missionaries is by way of a slogan of a battery vendor with whom my father did business, the EBCO battery company. Their logo as a little boy with a black eye, and their slogan was, “Always starting something!” This is what missionaries do, they go and start something . . . new for God!
In our passage for today, we will find that Jesus is the Greatest Missionary. Let’s read Hebrews 3:1-6:
Therefore, holy brothers and companions in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession; He was faithful to the One who appointed Him, just as Moses was in all God’s household. For Jesus is considered worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder has more honor than the house. Now every house is built by someone, but the One who built everything is God. Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s household, as a testimony to what would be said in the future. But Christ was faithful as a Son over His household. And we are that household if we hold on to the courage and the confidence of our hope.
We Have a Missionary God:
To understand God, and to understand this passage, we must understand the word apostle.
Apostle is a term that is often misunderstood. We often confuse it with the word disciple, but they are very different terms. Part of the confusion comes from us calling the twelve primary followers of Jesus as His Disciples as well as the Apostles. Both terms are accurate, but they describe different roles.
A disciple is a learner, and a devoted follower of a teacher or a master, whereas an apostle is one who is sent out on a mission. So, the Twelve were disciples from the beginning and remained so throughout the rest of their lives, but they were only apostles upon their receipt of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20. Disciples receive instruction and discipline, while apostles give of themselves to accomplish a purpose.
The key element in apostleship is going. When I was a state missionary with the Alabama Baptist State Convention, I remember a colleague telling about a conversation he had with his father. When his father asked him once how his day had gone, he said, “Well, I drove for three and a half hours to the northwest corner of the state to have lunch and counsel with a local church leader for about an hour. Then I drove three and a half hours back home.” His father said, “That’s crazy to drive that far for a one-hour meeting.” His son, my colleague replied, “But that’s what we do. He needed to see me, and so it was worth the trip.” This is the essence of apostolic ministry, going to those who need us.
So, then, what about God? Did He come to us on a mission? Of course He did!
- It was God who took the initiative to create the world and to populate it with all good things. Then He created us, so that we could have fellowship with Him.
- It was God who came looking for Adam and Eve after they sinned. They were ashamed, and they hid from God, but God sought them out.
- It was God who saw that humans were rebelling at Babel and attempting to make a name for themselves instead of exalting God’s name. He intervened and confused their language so that they could not cause themselves more harm.
- It was God who saw that human sin was rampant, and so He sent a flood to purge the world.
- It was God who came to Moses in the burning bush, as well as on Mount Zion. It was also God who came to Egypt in the form of the Death Angel to free His people from bondage.
- It was God who came to Elijah in the still small voice, but it was also God who came in the form of fire from heaven on Mount Carmel.
- It was God who descended upon Jesus like a dove, and who came upon the apostles on Pentecost with a violent wind and tongues of fire.
- It will be God who, at the end of this age, will create a new heaven and a new earth.
Our God is clearly both an active and a missionary God, but He did not keep that role to Himself. We also have a missionary sending God.
We Have a Missionary Sending God:
One of the key techniques followed by missionaries, and by other ministers as well, is to multiply oneself. The idea is to avoid keeping the ministry to yourself, but instead to share it with others. This is a powerful process, because not only does it mean that more work can be done, more small groups can be started, and the Gospel shared more often, but it also helps people feel ownership of the ministry.
A great example of this is found in the Book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah didn’t build the wall by himself, nor did he bring in outsiders to do the work. What Nehemiah did was to involve as many of the local citizens as possible in the task of rebuilding the walls. They did so in record time.
Another example is a trend that can be seen in church plants. Many church plants, when they begin, meet in rented or temporary spaces. Most of them will need to set-up that room for church on Sunday and take it down again after worship. That means that a new church start will recruit people for set-up and take-down. The members of that team or teams become very committed to being present at church because they are needed.
When the day comes that such a church plant can afford having a space to itself, the need for a set-up and take-down team becomes excess to requirements. What commonly happens next is that some ex-members of that team become sporadic in their attendance, and it is common for some to stop attending at all. Setting-up and taking-down is hard work, but they had committed themselves to it, and so their emotional buy-in was high. When the work they were committed to went away, so did much of their emotional buy-in.
The saying “many hands make light work” is not in the Bible, but Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 says,
Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their efforts. For if either falls, his companion can lift him up; but pity the one who falls without another to lift him up. Also, if two lie down together, they can keep warm; but how can one person alone keep warm? And if someone overpowers one person, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not easily broken.
So, who came up with this brilliant idea? God did, of course.
We all know the saying, “Go big or go home,” and God launched His efforts to multiply Himself with a bang, creating a missionary people. When God called Abraham to create a nation, God planned to bless them so that they could be a blessing to the world.
When God’s people lost their way and got in trouble, God sent Moses to redeem them and bring them into the Promised Land. He did this to bless them, of course, but also so that they might pursue the mission of bringing God’s Word and His grace to all the peoples of the world.
When His people were reluctant to follow His lead, God sent individuals out to share His message. For example, God sent Jonah to the Ninevites in Assyria to preach repentance. What today we would call a great revival broke out in the city, and an entire generation of heathens did repent and began to follow God.
Jesus, of course sent out the twelve, and then the seventy, two-by-two. When they came back, praising God for what He had done through them, Jesus told then that He saw Satan falling from heaven like a lightning flash.
Jesus gave us the Great Commission and the Acts 1:8 challenge, and then on Pentecost, the twelve Disciples truly became Apostles. We often forget that Paul wasn’t the only missionary church planter in the First Century. We know more about him because a large portion of his ministry included writing letters, and of course, because Luke was a member of his missionary team. The other Apostles planted churches and shared the Gospel also. We just don’t have the same documentation for them as we do for Paul.
Of course, Jesus did call Paul and Barnabas to go to Asia, and then He called Paul and Silas to go to Europe to share the Gospel and make disciples. Because He did, Christianity has spread across the globe.
Our God is clearly a sending and missionary God, but while the work of those He sent was blessed by Him, there was still one better. It is good for us that we have a missionary Savior.
We Have a Missionary Savior:
The theme of Hebrews, as we have discovered, is that Jesus will out-shine anyone to whom He is compared. For the Jews, their greatest hero is Moses. So naturally, the writer of Hebrews compared Jesus to him.
This type of comparison is very common in our world. In sports, current players are compared to Bo Jackson, or Tom Brady, or Larry Bird, or Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods. Every President of the United States will be compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, especially at the one-hundred-day point of his administration. Many husbands compare their wives to their mom, and strangely, so do many wives compare their husbands to their mom also!
The writer of Hebrews is not denigrating Moses in the passage. You can’t build up heroes by talking down those to whom they are compared. The terms servant used to describe Moses is not the one used for an ordinary field hand. In fact, it is a term used to describe the role that Joseph and Daniel played when they were promoted to lead the nations where they were held captive. In their day, no one was more powerful than them, except for the pharaoh and the king. This same thing is true for Moses, except that his King was the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords. Moses was the number two to the greatest principal in world history. Moses was not just a Prince of Egypt; he was the prince of the Kingdom of God. It is hard to beat that, but someone did.
So, who could be better and more powerful than Moses was? Only his Boss, God himself.
When we think about Jesus as a missionary, we can easily see His superiority to Moses and all other human missionaries.
- Missionaries travel. Moses travelled from the back side of the desert to Egypt and then to Canaan. Jesus travelled through time and space, and He took human form to be a missionary among us.
- Missionaries leave their homes and their families. Moses did also, but he had killed an Egyptian, so he was actually on the run. He reminds me of a church pastor who went to prison for running a Ponzi scheme. He told the church he was going on a six-month mission trip and that he’d see them when he got back! Jesus, of course, left His home in heaven, and in doing so, He left the right hand of God.
- Missionaries work cross-culturally. Moses had one foot in the Hebrew culture and one foot in the Egyptian culture, and a hand in the Bedouin culture of his father-in-law Jethro. He was the first example of a multi-cultural person, but Jesus had to cross a far greater cultural divide. He was perfect and without sin, yet He had to learn to identify and work with frail sinners without becoming one of us.
- Missionaries share the Gospel and plant churches. Moses shared the Word that he was given, but though he reformed Israel as a congregation, he did not create them. Jesus did not receive the Word, He is the Word, and He created the first church and then told the members of that church to go and make others.
- Missionaries multiply themselves. Moses did, but only after he had been corrected by Jethro. Jesus called to Himself disciples from the beginning of His public ministry, and as we will see below, He has also included us in His missionary work as well.
- Missionaries, like Moses, represent God in the world and to the world. Jesus is God.
Our God is a Missionary God, and a missionary sending God, and a Missionary Savior God. He is also a missionary commissioning God.
We Have a Missionary Assignment:
The last words people speak to us have great impact, and the same was true in the case of our Lord Jesus. His last words gave us a missionary assignment just like God’s first words to Abraham did.
Every Christian should be aware of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20. Jesus has assigned the church the task of going into all the world and making disciples of all people.
Likewise, every believer should remember what Jesus said in Acts 1:8. Everywhere we go, and in everything that we do, we are witnesses to Christ. In word, in deed, and in our attitudes, what we are reflects back onto Christ.
Of course, we know that the Twelve transformed from disciples to apostles, and they spread the Gospel across the Roman world. We can also look back in the past and see that Baptists and other evangelical churches have pursued God’s missionary assignment.
In the early 1700’s, a Moravian Bishop in Germany, Nicolaus Zinzendorf (yes, that is a real name and a real person), recruited and trained missionaries to go out into the world and share the Gospel. This is what he told them: Preach the Gospel, die, and be forgotten.
Early missionaries would often use coffins to ship their supplies as they traveled to far away lands. They never expected to return to their homes, and so they brought their coffins with them.
Not long after that, William Carey, a pastor in England, was convicted that British Baptists were ignoring the Great Commission. He began preaching missionary sermons until he preached himself into becoming the first Baptist international missionary, the first missionary to India, and the father of the modern missions movement.
In the early 1800’s Adoniram Judson and his family became the first Baptist missionaries from America. He worked in Burma. It took them 12 years to make 18 converts to Christianity. He spent 37 years overseas with only one trip back to America during that time.
At the same time that Judson went to Burma, Luther Rice was a Baptist minister in America who was called to missionary service as well, but in a different way. He devoted his life to sending missionaries. He traveled across the United States by horseback to raise funds for the cause of sending missionaries. He almost literally died in the saddle. According to an article by Charles Jones in the January 17, 2022, edition of the Christian Index,
Rice was traveling in South Carolina in 1836 when his recurring illness struck him down. He lingered for several days in the home of friends before dying and was buried in a nearby church yard in Edgefield, South Carolina. His only worldly possessions at death were a horse, the sulky, a few books . . . and little more than the clothes on his back.
Of course, Southern Baptists have a long history of missions as well. Like Judson and Rice, we have notable people who have gone on mission, as well as people who have sent out missionaries.
The international missions offering that Southern Baptists receive at Christmas time is named for Lottie Moon, a young woman who was appointed a missionary to China in 1873. She wrote back to America urging greater support of the missionary effort, and in response the Woman’s Missionary Union of the SBC was formed in 1888. Lottie wore herself out for the cause of Christ in China, and when she died in 1912, she only weighed 50 pounds.
The home missions offering that Southern Baptists receive at Easter time is named for Annie Armstrong. She was one of the women who had been motivated by Lottie Moon’s urgent letters, and in 1888 she led the creation of the Woman’s Missionary Union. She dedicated her life to the cause of supporting missions.
Yes, Baptists and other evangelicals have a long history of missions, one we should be grateful for. But the task is not yet complete, and as we look back on our history, we see two roles. One role is the role of going. The other role is the role of sending. This division of effort is not only historical, but also practical, as well as Biblical. Romans 10:13-15 tell us:
For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call on Him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about Him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who announce the gospel of good things!
So, our assignment is simple if it is not easy. We either send, or we go! We have an assignment from our Missionary God. We cannot reject it!
Conclusion:
Our God is a missionary God. He sent us a Missionary Savior. If we are going to honor Him, we must become a missionary people.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.