A little musing from a couple of years ago. 

There are billions of people around the world in thousands of unreached people groups with little or no hope of hearing the Gospel in their lifetime. What are you prepared to do?

This sort of appeal to the immensity of the Church’s task in fulfilling the Great Commission has become the stock-in-trade of the global missions movement in the past few years. The scope of the demand is true, of course. We shouldn’t lose sight of Christ’s promise that “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations” (Matt. 24:14) or the faithful and courageous efforts of missionaries and organizations working in every corner of the world.

Often, however, this appeal has the opposite effect—the call is so great, so all-encompassing, so abstracted in the minds of most Christians, that they end up doing nothing (or very little) because they cannot do everything. There is a growing body of research from the psychological realm that points to the simple fact that we have trouble feeling responsible to do things we feel we are powerless to accomplish.

How does this square with clear commands of Scripture? Surely God would not call us to do that which He knows we are incapable of…or would He? Actually, He does that all the time, calling dead men to live. The trick is that God gives the life He asks for. Our making disciples is entirely contingent on His Spirit bringing both us and those we reach to life. The power for the action of our obedience and the results of that obedience come from Him. He is the one who makes possible the impossible (Mark 10:27).

If you think about it, how much more unattainable must the Great Commission have seemed to the first disciples, still digesting Christ’s words as He hurtled into the Judean sky? For us, it starts with millions of faithful believers in multiple countries and cultures, billions of dollars in resources, the Scripture in thousands of languages—all incredible advantages. The apostles had obstacles to the goal we could never imagine. There were 11 of them (12 when Paul was “recruited”) and an entire world of unregenerate souls. And yet they obeyed, the truth prevailed, and caused the dry bones of sinful men to become as flesh.

The temptation to give in to the apathy of the overwhelmed, I would submit, comes because we have forgotten the truth of God’s power embedded in the Scriptures—not just when taken as a whole, but in the very passages that call us to the task.

“And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age’” (Matt. 28:19-20).

“For I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16).

“Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:18-20).

This Gospel is the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24), and He who made the world and all that is in it will accomplish His task. Our participation at whatever place He leads us is part of His plan. We obey, but the work is His, the results are His, and the glory is His. Ours is not to change the hearts of men, but only to tell them of the One who will. Reaching the nations begins with reaching your neighbor. In any good-sized Western city, reaching your neighbors often is reaching the nations—with people from many tribes, tongues, and nations moving in to seek a better life for their families.

We may want to throw in the towel (or, on the other hand, attempt own the task and own some of the glory), but our desire for success and significance beyond obedience is in vain. As T. S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets:

“These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

Photo: Boys on Horseback, Department Nord Est, Haiti, April 2008.