Oct
24
Mission Conference Lunch Appetizer
Filed Under Christian Living, Missions, The Church
Today we will have Nathan Tircuit speaking at our Missions Conference lunch. Nathan is the Campus Minister for RUF at Mississippi State. Before Nathan speaks I will lead off with the following quote by James Henley Thornwell from a sermon he preached entitled, “The Type and Model of Missionary Effort”.
“When I consider the magnitude and grandeur of the motives which press upon the Church to undertake the evangelization of the world; when I see that the glory of God, the love of the Savior and pity for the lost all conspire in one great conclusion; when I contemplate our own character and relations as spiritual priests, and comprehend the dignity, the honor, the tenderness and self-denial of the office; and then relfect upon the indifference, apathy and languor which have seized upon the people of God; when I look to the heavens above me and the world around me, and hear the call which the wail of perishing millions sends up to the skies thundered back upon the Church with all the solemnity of a Divine commission; when a world says, Come, and pleads its miseries; when God says, Go, and pleads His glory, and Christ repeats the command, and points to His hands and His feet and His side, — it is enough to make the stone cry out of the wall and the beam out of the timer to answer it.
If Jesus should stand again upon the Mount of Olives and summon before Him this venerable court, as He summoned the disciples of His personal ministry and the apostles of His extraordinary call — if He should collect you and me and all the officers and all the people of His Church on earth — what, think you, would be the language in which he would address us? It would be an august spectacle - a solemn, an awful scene. The words that he would speak would pierce our souls and stir the very depths of our being. They could never be effaced from the memory. We should think of them by day and dream of them by night; and the most anxious cares of business could never drown them. The voice would ring in our ears wherever we went - at home, in the market, by the wayside, as we lay down and as we rose up. It would be an era in our history never to be forgotten. Is it presumption to imagine what those words would be? Shall we say that He would reproach us? His nature is made of tenderness, His bowels melt with love. His eyes would only beam with pity, but our own would be busy with upbraidings. My brethren, there is no need for any exercise of fancy. He was once present with His collected Church, and He did give her a parting mandate - Go ye into all the world!
Methinks I see Him here tonight, with His hands uplifted to bless us, repeating the same commission to us; and as here present I cannot restrain the prayer that He would breathe upon us as He did upon the Apostles, that we too may receive the Holy Ghost. With a fresh annointing from Him we will look upon the world with new eyes and a new heart, and an impulse be given to our efforts which shall never falter nor fail until the whole earth is filled with the glory of the Lord. Amen, so may it be!”
(from Volume II of Thornwell’s Collected Writings, pp 448-449)
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