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These words from Jesus and John in Scripture are guarantees. By the power of His Spirit through the testimony of His church, Christ will be proclaimed as Savior among all the peoples of the world.
“Boys, when we lived back in America, even before you were born, your mama and I had to answer a very important question: Were we willing to live our lives for Jesus? You know that your mama made that decision as a little girl. And you’ve heard me tell the story of how I was eighteen before I decided that I would follow Jesus and live my life for him. Then before your mama and I got married, we made certain that we agreed and we decided that we were willing to live for Jesus together—as a couple and as a family.” “Later, when we were thinking about being overseas workers, we had to answer
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When they asked me the same question about when I had received my call, I looked around the meeting room and simply said, “I read Matthew 28.” They thought that maybe I had misunderstood the question. They patiently explained that a special calling was required before someone could go out into the world and do this kind of work. I was not trying to be clever or disrespectful, but I responded, “No, you don’t understand. I read Matthew 28 where Jesus told his followers, ‘GO!’ So I’m here trying to go.”
“Well, it appears to me,” I told them, “that you all have created a ‘call’ to missions that allows people to be disobedient to what Jesus has already commanded all of us to do.”
He simply talks about where you go! God may have to give instructions about the location—the where. But there is nothing to negotiate about the command to go—God has already made our primary task perfectly clear.
“Serving God is not a matter of location, but a matter of obedience.”
We wanted to be obedient to our sense of call—wherever it led.
The warm welcome and instant sense of belonging that we had felt in Malawi reflected the heart and spirit of its people who were some of the kindest, most generous, accepting, and loving human beings on the planet.
A very similar experience in Nepal.
Jesus’ Great Commission in Matthew 28 meant that we needed to follow the examples of the apostles in the Book of Acts. We felt strongly that we needed to go where the gospel had not yet gone, where people had little or no access to Christ. While there was certainly important work yet to be done in South Africa, neither one of us felt called to continue working in a country where Jesus had already been proclaimed for centuries.
Quickly, I learned that I could never divorce my decisions from my prayer time and my relationship with God. I guarded against assuming a level of responsibility and authority that was not mine to assume.
The Jesus who I encountered in Scripture taught His followers to provide food for the hungry, water for the thirsty, healing for the sick and wounded, and care for the suffering and persecuted. That was our explicit purpose in Somalia, and I felt that we had done those things well. At the same time, Jesus also instructed His followers to go into all the world and make disciples. We had done well with the “going into all the world” part of His assignment. But when it came to the “making disciples” part of our purpose, we had failed.
How is it possible to give bold verbal witness to Jesus in a country where sharing Jesus is against the law? How is it possible to lead friends to become followers of Christ knowing that their newfound faith could lead to their deaths? We had debated questions like these long before we ever got to Somalia—but, suddenly, they were not theoretical questions any longer. Suddenly, we were talking about real people and real lives. If sharing with a friend could lead to my friend’s death—will I share my faith anyway? And am I willing to live with what might happen next?
