MSPG 4 - The Importance of the Gospel

I don't pretend to be a missions expert, but the church has to start somewhere. The Lord has been teaching me more and more about missions since 2015, and I've spent a lot of time in the last two years exploring this important aspect of the church's life.

Since Elynne and I are planning to migrate soon to study at TMS, I don't have much time to share what I've been learning with others. So in the next five months, January to May, I'm holding a weekly "Missions Study & Prayer Group" (MSPG) to equip them to help in the church's developing missions program.

For overviews and links to all the lessons in this ongoing series, click here.

Unfortunately, my equipment failed while recording this session, so there's no video available.

Andy Johnson in his book, Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global, gives this bit of sage advice:

“The heart for God-glorifying missions starts with joy in the gospel. Our churches must first cherish the God who sent his own Son to save sinners like us. The right fuel matters.

“What this may mean is that the best way to encourage your church in missions is to stop talking about missions for a time and, instead, talk more about the gospel. I’ve seen churches that have tried to get their members excited about missions without being excited about the gospel. The result was pitiful. Missions became just one more ministry area competing for everyone’s attention and interest. Guilt, hype, sad stories—none of them motivate in the best way. How do you really sell sacrifice (which is what missions involves) unless the people value supremely the thing for which the sacrifice is made? Do not try to get your church excited about missions until they love and value (really, deeply value) what Christ has done for them in the gospel.”

In fact, Andy Johnson conducts a “Missions Reading Group” in his church. It’s a 10-month course on missions, where they read one book a month and then discuss the readings. Notably, they don’t start with books on missions, but with books about the gospel, evangelism, and the church. Only after six months do they read books on the practice of missions.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. The message of the free gift of eternal life received by faith in Jesus Christ should be the driving force of missions. Which is why today, we’ll be talking about

The Importance of the Gospel

And I will give you THREE REASONS why this is so.

1. WE ARE WEAK AND SINFUL AND WE NEED GRACE DAILY.

I am not saying that believers are totally depraved. We are not. That category doesn’t fit us anymore, ever since we were united with Christ and given a new nature.

2 Corinthians 5:17 – “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

What I am saying is that we struggle daily with sin. John Calvin once said, “the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols”. That was true of us before we came to Christ, and it is still true of us today. That is true of “regular” Christians and it is true for mission workers and missionaries. That’s why the Bible tells us to keep watch over our hearts – not to protect them but to restrain them (Pro. 4:23).

That’s a daily battle we have to fight, and many times, we lose. We get tired. We get discouraged. Our faith waivers. Recently, God has been teaching me to pray regularly for faith. He has made me more and more aware that faith is not a one-time gift. It’s something that needs to be maintained every day. I need daily grace to maintain my faith in Christ and the gospel. I need daily grace to trust that God has a purpose for everything that comes my way, for where I am right now in life, and for how my ministries are going.

When you’re effective in ministry so that people come to rely on you, there’s really a pressure to perform. You have to do this, or else this thing or that thing won’t get done. You have to get it right, otherwise there will be consequences. That pressure can really wear you down. It can wear down your spouse and the people closest to you who have to help carry your burden.
Now, if you haven’t realized it yet, cross-cultural outreach is high-pressure. You’re talking about strategic planning, preparing lessons, building and maintaining long-distance relationships with partners and contacts, praying regularly, organizing events for the church, organizing short-term missions, training or helping to train missionaries and mission workers, attending meeting upon meeting, resolving conflict, all while maintaining accountability with the church leaders and trying to practice personal evangelism!

The missionary-martyr, Stan Dale, once said that missionaries ought to do the work of 2 or 3 men. That’s not a rule, but it definitely reminds us that missions is an inexhaustible field of ministry!

The problem is, you and I are not inexhaustible. We get tired. We fail, and when we fail we get discouraged. And if we stay discouraged for too long, we will burn out.

Thankfully, we have the gospel. The gospel reminds us daily that God is with us, not because we’re doing a good job, but because we’re His children, and we will always be His children. The gospel reminds us that whatever challenges a day may bring, there will be grace enough to meet each one.

(Stephen & Mark Altrogge, Grace for Today) “God gives grace for today. Period. I will meet troubles today and God will give me grace for those troubles. He does not give me grace today for troubles that will come tomorrow. God doesn’t give me grace for imaginary troubles, he gives me grace for real troubles. He doesn’t give me grace for what might happen, he gives me grace for what actually will happen. … When I get to tomorrow’s troubles, God will be there with sufficient grace. The problem with my imagination is that it always leaves God out of the equation. It always imagines a future in which God has forgotten to show up. It imagines a future totally devoid of grace. A future where God has abandoned me. But God showed up today with enough grace to get me through the day, and he’ll show up tomorrow too.”

That’s the kind of confidence we can have if we are mindful of the gospel every day.

2. THE GOSPEL IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES MISSIONS WORTHWHILE.

If you want to help the poor, you can join an NGO.

If you want to help people solve their personal problems, then become a psychologist.

If you want to reform the government, join a political party.

If you want people to find inner peace, teach meditation.

If you want to invest in the future generation, become a teacher.

If you want to address social injustices, start a blog.

If you want to promote family values, show Disney movies (the old ones, at least).

But if you want people to know the living God and find eternal life, then preach the gospel!

The gospel is the church’s unique, priceless possession. God has entrusted to the church the preservation, application and proclamation of the gospel. There is no other institution on earth that is designed to let the whole world know that “there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:5-6).

The church is like Isaiah, when God’s judgment was on Israel, and they needed to know so that they could repent and be saved. God said, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am! Send me.” (Isaiah 6:8-9). You wonder, did he just blurt that out, or did he look around first? When God said, “who will go for us,” did Isaiah look around? Hrm-hrm… there’s no one else here… hmm… well… um… I guess… it has to be me. But it doesn’t really matter. Either way, he figured out that there was a message the people needed to hear, and he was the one God was entrusting that message to. He had to go.

It’s the same with the church. How will lost people know the gospel? If the church doesn’t bring it, who will? The government? Schools? Corporations? NGOs? The United Nations? Hollywood? The newspapers? Social clubs? Celebrities? No, God has entrusted the gospel to the church. The world can have everything else, but we have the gospel!

3. A GOSPEL-CENTERED MINISTRY IS THE ONLY WAY WE CAN COME TO GOD UNASHAMED.

Because God has entrusted the message of salvation to the church, the church is responsible for the cause of missions. We will answer to God. How can we come before Him unashamed if we don’t carry out the ministry He has entrusted to us?

2 Timothy 2:15 – “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

Let’s say we are successful in “missions” that aren’t gospel centered. Let’s say we help the poor, develop communities, promote social justice, etc. Do you think our work will stand before God? It won’t.

1 Corinthians 3:10-15

Verse 10 – “According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it.

Paul started the church in Corinth, but now others are leading the church. His instruction to them is “Let each one take care how he builds”.

Verse 11 – “For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

Paul’s ministry was Christ-centered, gospel-centered, and anything built on that foundation had to be the same.

Verses 12-13 – “Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— 13 each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.”

Not all ministries are equally valuable. What is the measure for a ministry’s worth? Is it how many people it draws, how many professions of faith it can produce? Is it how well it is spoken of by others? What is the standard? The standard is: “How faithful it is to the gospel?” How faithful is it in preserving, proclaiming, defending, and applying the gospel?

Based on that standard, some ministries are gold, some are silver or precious stones, and others are wood, hay, and straw. There will be a testing by fire, and wood-hay-straw ministries will be burned up. They will fail the test because they weren't truly evangelical ministries. And then among the ministries that pass the test, some will be found to be more valuable than others. How can we know which ones? We can’t. Only God knows.

Verses 14-15 – “If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. 15 If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”

Brethren, I don’t want to waste my life making something that God is going to reject. And I don’t think you do, either. What we want is to receive a reward from God for faithful service. Now, how great is that reward going to be? How will it compare to other people’s reward? That’s not for us to know. Whatever our reward will be, it will be much, much more than we deserve. It will be so great that we will praise God forever because of His bountiful grace.

Conclusion

Brethren, we can never grow tired of God’s great plan of salvation. We can never allow it to become stale in our minds. It must always be the center of our lives, and it must always be driving force of missions. Remember that THE GOSPEL IS IMPORTANT FOR MISSIONS...

Because we are weak and sinful,
Because it is the only thing that makes missions worthwhile, and
Because it is the only way we can come to God unashamed.

If God is calling you to pour your life into cross-cultural ministry, then you have to be grounded – and stay grounded, and teach others to be grounded – in the grace of God made available to us in Jesus Christ.

Prayer Items

Higher Rock
Pakistan: Pervaiz Masih
Guiding Light Missions Team
Albania: HeartCry missionary, Xhevat Bytyqi

Upward Call