Oct
25
Do not hold back
Filed Under Around the Church, Christian Living, Missions, The Church
FPC’s 52nd annual World Mission Conference begins tomorrow. The Rev. Les Newsom, RUF campus minister at the University of Mississippi, will be the main speaker (pray that he will be able to speak in spite of throat and respiratory problems!). Below is the exhortation I gave last Thursday evening at a well-attended special prayer meeting for the conference. It contains some thoughts on our theme “Do Not Hold Back”.
“Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your offspring will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities.”
Isaiah 54:2-3
Before going off to Ceylon [Sri Lanka], William Carey made and mended shoes. He also took a few hours of the day to teach some local school children. The students of William Carey’s geography class sometimes saw their teacher weep as he pointed on the map, marked with shoe black, to distant continents, islands and peoples. “And these are pagans, pagans!” he would say.
On May 31, 1792 in Nottingham, England, Carey preached a sermon which has been called ‘a burning bush of missionary revelation.’ He preached from Isaiah 54:2-3 and uttered a resounding plea that the gospel be proclaimed throughout the world. Carey’s message is summed up in these words: “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.”
Carey was bold, wasn’t he? But he understood the Messianic promises, and he understood how to respond to those promises. The opposition of some who claimed they were being faithful to the doctrines of grace was shameful. Carey said,
‘We are sure that only those who ordained to eternal life will believe, and that God alone can add to the church such as shall be saved. Nevertheless we cannot but observe with admiration that Paul, the great champion for the glorious doctrines of free and sovereign grace, was the most conspicuous for his personal zeal in the work of persuading men to be reconciled to God.’
We need to hear that message once more. We need to see the picture the Lord set forth by Isaiah: the desolate woman bearing children, her tent being enlarged, her descendants spreading in every direction and inhabiting the desolate cities. We are wrong if we see its fulfillment only in the return of the exiles from Babylon. This is a Messianic promise. We need to see that the architect of the expansion of the kingdom is our Maker and that for good reason he is called the God of all the earth.
We need these promises of God’s unfailing love and unconquerable purpose so that we will not be afraid and hold back. Standing on these promises we will not fear our neighbor who needs to hear about Christ. We will not fear the forces that wage war against God and his Word. We will not fear Islam or secularism. We will not count our Savior to be too small and too weak to conquer the world.
Assured that our Maker is our husband, that the Holy One of Israel is our Redeemer, we must go ahead and enlarge the tent, to stretch the canopy wide, to lengthen the ropes and strengthen the stakes. Confident that the Lord Almighty is God of all the earth we must not hold back in our efforts to proclaim his message to all. God is declaring here that we may expect great things from him. Let’s also be ready to ask, “But am I holding back?”
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