Rev. David Holwick
First Baptist Church
West Lafayette, Ohio
April 14, 1985
Go Into All the World
Matthew 28:18-20, NIV
In Zaire; Lester Green, a missionary, climbs out of his Land Rover near the village of Lolwa, deep inside the Ituri rain forest. In fluent Ki-Swahili, he asks where he can find the Walese Pygmy tribes. Soon a guide is hacking his way through the dense undergrowth, while Lester follows, Bible in hand.
He told a Time magazine reporter, "Many pygmies have never heard of God but when I preach they respond immediately."
In Nicaragua, Doug Heniesse, an American Baptist missionary, is working among people in the rural areas, where guerilla warfare has become a fact of everyday life. Last year the CIA-backed Contras who are fighting against the left wing government, destroyed several Baptist churches and executed some members. In spite of all this, the Evangelical churches in Nicaragua are growing at such a rapid rate that in five years their number has doubled to 3,002.
Around the world there has been a dramatic surge in Christian missions. The church is sending out more missionaries, translating more Bibles and reaching more people than at any other time in history. Don't take my word for it - in the last two years even major magazines like Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report have done special reports on the missionary movement. In a way it's ironic, because all of this is nothing more than simple obedience to Jesus' command.
Our scripture today focuses on this command which has become known as the Great Commission. The Great Commission has four components:
1. Go
2. Make disciples
3. Baptize
4. Teach
The first component is the easiest to avoid. Even the apostles tried to sidestep it. To see how, turn to Acts 1. This passage takes place just after the one in Matthew and would be Jesus' last words before he ascended into heaven.
In verse 8 he says:
"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
This is the earliest missionary strategy and is still the best one. Jesus is telling them to start in their hometown, Jerusalem. Then they are to move out into Judea, which was the Jewish area surrounding the capital. Samaria is not much farther away in miles but culturally there was a big separation because the Samaritans were a different religion and race. Samaria for us would be to go into Harlem or the black ghettos of Cleveland. Finally they are to move out to the ends of the world. So the mission of the church is to expand into different areas and into different cultures, which is even harder.
What did the apostles do?
They glued themselves to Jerusalem. God finally sent persecution so they had to leave but even then it was the lay people, and not the apostles, who acted as missionaries. The apostles were dragged along afterwards to see what had happened. By the end of Acts, dramatic progress had been made even in the far corners of the world, but most of it was due to a few dedicated individuals.
How does our church stack up against the Great Commission?
Over the years the Missionary Women's Society has contributed their time and money to missions here and overseas. Sometimes it wasn't much but, especially in the early years, this was the only far-reaching mission program our church had. By the 1930's mission giving was put in the church budget. We gave a grand total of $25 a year. This amount has steadily increased, but it is still nowhere near what it could be.
We believe in missions. But what kind of priority is it for us? In the one hundred and fifteen years this church has been in existence, only one person is on record as having answered the call for foreign missions. Her name was Irene Biss and we commissioned her back in 1926.
The second component of the Great Commission is to make disciples of all the nations. The King James version of Matthew 28:19 says "teach", but this is a different word from the "teach" found in verse 20. The "teach" in verse 19 refers to preaching the gospel so that people will commit their lives to Jesus Christ. It involves more than just giving an invitation to be saved. What Jesus wants us to do is what he did. He took twelve average people and transformed them into dedicated disciples. This component leaves us with individual converts who can hopefully reproduce themselves by witnessing to others.
The third component involves molding the individuals into a church. This is the true significance of baptism. It does identify us with Christ's death but in the Bible it also incorporates us into a group of believers. Christians are not meant to go it all alone - God wants us to have strength in numbers.
Sometimes the numbers aren't very large. The nation of Algeria in Northern Africa had a strong church 1,500 years ago but it was totally wiped out by the Moslems. If any of these Moslems became Christians they were in danger of the death penalty. Until 1978 there was no local church for Algerians. Not even one. But in 1979 a handful of believers met in the capital and established a church. It may not be much but Jesus says "Wherever two or three gather in my name, I am in the midst."
Other missions have been far more successful. J. Russell Morse left Oklahoma in 1921 and took his family to Tibet, in the mountains of Asia. He was nearly killed by feuding warlords and so he moved into a rugged area of China near the Burmese border. When civil war broke out in 1927 he was ordered to leave, so he took his family on a seventy-day trek through the snow-capped mountains and malaria-infested forests into Burma.
The family eventually returned to a remote area of China which was overrun with cannibals, bandits and opium-smugglers. The nearest hospital was four weeks away by foot. In ten years Morse established thirty churches and baptized 2,000 people, then World War II intervened.
After the war the communists took over in China. Morse was held in solitary confinement and tortured for more than fifteen months. When the Chinese finally kicked him out, he settled his family back in Burma. Several thousand converts followed them and they created one of Burma's most prosperous areas. It eventually became ninety percent Christian. In a valley where there had been only jungle, 35,000 members of the Lisu and Rawang tribes created thirty villages. They even wiped out malaria.
In 1965 they were kicked out again. With thousands of their followers they created yet another Christian Utopia in an uninhabited valley near Burma's border with India. In 1972 the missionaries were ordered out for good. They settled in Northern Thailand for the final phase of their career.
One of Morse's sons is a teacher and translator there. The other trains evangelists to reach the 13,000 Lisu people in Thailand. Eight of the twelve grandchildren are missionaries in Thailand while the other four are studying in the United States.
In 1982 J. Russell Morse was still going strong at the age of eighty-four. Because of that family's efforts, 120,000 Asians are believers in Jesus Christ.
Americans have been the driving force in the modern mission movement but the new churches are rapidly taking charge. In five years the majority of Christians in the world will live in Asia, Africa and Latin America. As one example; the Assembly of God in Guatemala are growing at forty-four percent a year. Twenty-five percent of that nation is now evangelical.
In Nigeria, one local believer planted two hundred and fifty-eight new churches in five years. That averages out to one a week! The total number of believers is over thirty-four thousand. Ezekiel Guti of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) has been vigorously planting churches for fifteen years. He is now the leader of a new denomination with 85,000 Christians and two hundred and forty churches.
One hundred years ago there were no churches in Korea. Today in the capital of Seoul alone there are six thousand. In 1970, ten percent of South Koreans were Christians. By 1980, there were twenty percent. Today, four years later, they are thirty percent of the population. Half of the Army is Christian and a third of the Parliament. The world's largest Methodist, Presbyterian and Assemblies of God churches are all in Korea. The largest Korean Assembly of God church has over 300,000 members. Their sanctuary seats twenty-five thousand and they are putting up an adjacent building where another forty thousand can watch on close-circuit television. Pastor Paul Cho packs out that church seven times every Sunday. They are growing at a rate of ten thousand a month and soon hope to have half a million members. Pastor Cho doesn't credit their size to a big building or great preaching but to the nineteen thousand home Bible studies that are the core of the church. In these cell groups, people are nurtured and cared for.
I realize that in describing the work of God around the world I have had to use a lot of large numbers and percentages. Keep in mind that each number represents a person who has been transformed by Jesus Christ. Even the book of Acts resorts to numbers to describe the fantastic growth of the early church.
Some people think the early church represents the greatest moving of the Holy Spirit. They are wrong. More is happening today than ever before!
Invitation:
For Missions -
Give your resources
Give your sons and daughters
Give yourself
________
Typed on February 19, 2005, by Sharon Lesko of Ledgewood Baptist Church, New Jersey
Copyright © 2024 by Rev. David Holwick
Created with the Freeware Edition of HelpNDoc: Free help authoring environment