Finish the Mission E-Book

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 299

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This is no ordinary missions book. The theme isn't new, but the approach is refreshing and compelling, as contributors David Platt, Louie Giglio, Michael Ramsden, Ed Stetzer, Michael Oh, David Mathis, and John Piper take up the mantle of the Great Commission and its Spirit-powered completion. From astronomy to exegesis, from apologetics to the Global South, from being missional at home to employing our resources in the global cause, Finish the Mission aims to breathe fresh missionary fire into a new generation, as together we seek to reach the unreached and engage the unengaged.

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“Finish the Mission issues a clarion reminder of God’s enduring passion to glorify himself by blessing all nations on earth. The gospel and mission are inseparable. A clear understanding of the mission of the church is absolutely essential in today’s fast-changing global environment.”

Steve Richardson, President, Pioneers-USA

“What will it take to finish the mission? Gospel seed must fall into the ground and die. Lord Jesus, through these heart-exposing pages, would you thrust out thousands of risk-taking disciples to the ends of the earth? May this compelling admonition jolt the church out of complacency and into the gathering of your sheep from among the earth’s peoples.”

David Sitton, President, To Every Tribe; author, Reckless Abandon and To Every Tribe with Jesus

“God defines marriage and God defines mission. Finish the Mission is a vital proclamation of an emphasis that even evangelicals dodge—mostly out of embarrassment. Putting God’s opinions above all others, the authors portray well God’s rescue operation to the peoples who still have no friend to help them comprehend the Easter story. As John Piper says, ‘We’re concerned for all suffering, but especially eternal suffering.’ Serious disciples will take these declarations seriously.”

Greg Livingstone, Founder, Frontiers; Coordinator, Ministries to Muslims, Evangelical Presbyterian Church

FINISH THE MISSION

OTHER DESIRING GOD CONFERENCE BOOKS BY CROSSWAY:

Thinking. Loving. Doing.: A Call to Glorify God with Heart and Mind, 2011

With Calvin in the Theater of God: The Glory of Christ and Everyday Life, 2010

The Power of Words and the Wonder of God, 2009

Stand: A Call for the Endurance of the Saints, 2008

The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, 2007

Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, 2006

Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, 2005

A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, 2004

Finish the Mission: Bringing the Gospel to the Unreached and Unengaged

Copyright © 2012 by Desiring God

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Matthew Taylor, Taylor Design Works

First printing 2012

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked HCSB have been taken from The Holman Christian Standard Bible® Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2003 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the authors.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3483-6 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3484-3 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3485-0 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3486-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Finish the mission : bringing the Gospel to the unreached and unengaged / John Piper and David Mathis, editors.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 978-1-4335-3483-6 (tp)

1. Missions. 2. Evangelistic work. I. Piper, John, 1946- II. Mathis, David, 1980-

BV2061.3.F56          2012

269'.2—dc23 2012008009

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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For those who have left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands,

CONTENTS

Contributors

Introduction: Remember, Jesus Never Lies

David Mathis

1 The Galactic God Who Invites Us into His Glorious Plan

Louie Giglio

2 The Glory of God, the Lostness of Man, and the Gospel of Christ

David Platt

3 Christ, Courage, and Finishing the Mission

Michael Ramsden

4 From Every Land to Every Land: The Lord’s Purpose and Provision in the Lord’s Prayer

Michael Oh

5 To Our Neighbors and the Nations

Ed Stetzer

6 Let the Peoples Praise You, O God! Let All the Peoples Praise You!

John Piper

A Conversation with the Contributors

Appendix: What Next? Disciple a Few

David Mathis

Acknowledgments

Desiring God: Note on Resources

CONTRIBUTORS

Louie Giglio is pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, Georgia. As founder and leader of Passion Conferences, he travels worldwide challenging this generation, college students in particular, to a passionate pursuit of God. A graduate of Georgia State University and the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, he has been at the forefront of collegiate ministry for over twenty years. Louie is author of The Air I Breathe: Worship as a Way of Life and I Am Not But I Know I Am. His wife is Shelley.

David Mathis is executive editor at Desiring God and elder at Bethlehem Baptist Church, Twin Cities, Minnesota. He is a graduate of Furman University and is completing a distance program with Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, Florida. He has authored articles and chapters and is coeditor of With Calvin in the Theater of God: The Glory of Christ and Everyday Life; The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor: Reflections on Life and Ministry; and Thinking. Loving. Doing.: A Call to Glorify God with Heart and Mind. He and his wife, Megan, have twin sons, Carson and Coleman.

Michael Oh is president and founder of CBI Japan, which includes a graduate-level theological seminary (Christ Bible Seminary), church planting efforts (All Nations Fellowship), and various outreach ministries, including a youth outreach called the Heart & Soul Cafe. Michael is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; he also completed a master’s degree in Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Since 2007 he has served on the Board of the Lausanne Movement for world evangelization. He and his wife, Pearl, have five children.

John Piper is pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church, where he has served since 1980. A graduate of Wheaton College, Fuller Seminary, and the University of Munich, he is author of over forty books, including Desiring God; The Pleasures of God; Don’t Waste Your Life; Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ; God Is the Gospel; Think; Bloodlines; and the widely acclaimed missions title Let the Nations Be Glad!. John and his wife, Noël, have five children and twelve grandchildren.

David Platt is pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham, Alabama. Previously he served as dean of chapel and assistant professor of expository preaching and apologetics at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as staff evangelist at Edgewater Baptist Church in New Orleans. A graduate of the University of Georgia and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, he is author of Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream and Radical Together: Unleashing the People of God for the Purpose of God. David and his wife, Heather, have two sons, Joshua and Caleb.

Michael Ramsden has been the European director of RZIM Zacharias Trust since it was founded in 1997. A passionate evangelist and apologist, he is also lecturer in Christian apologetics at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, where his main involvement is with the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. He travels widely, speaking at universities, churches, and conferences. He and his wife, Anne, have three children.

Ed Stetzer serves as the vice president of research and ministry development for Lifeway Christian Resources. He has planted churches in New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia and trained church planters on five continents. He is the author of many articles and books including Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age, Strategic Outreach (with Eric Ramsey), Breaking the Missional Code (with David Putman), and Planting Missional Churches. He is also a visiting professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Donna, have three daughters.

INTRODUCTION

Remember, Jesus Never Lies

David Mathis

Remember, Jesus never lies. Never.

That God “never lies” (Titus 1:2) was an important reminder for Paul’s protégé, ministering among the Cretans, who were, by the admission of one of their own, “always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” (v. 12). Paul says to Titus: Remember, God never lies.

And it’s an important reminder for us, nearly two millennia later, especially in regard to the mission the God-man started with his own life, inaugurated in his own death, sealed with his own resurrection, launched in his Great Commission, and promised to bring to completion. The Holy Spirit says to the churches: Remember,Jesus never lies.

Jesus himself has promised—just as surely as he declares over his work of redemption, “It is finished” (John 19:30)—that also his one-day-soon triumphant bride will declare with him over the application of that work in global missions, “It is finished.” The Commission will be completed.

THE MISSION WILL FINISH

In prelude to his Great Commission, Jesus says that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him (Matt. 28:18). Having taken our flesh and blood, and fulfilled the destiny of humanity (Ps. 8:3–8; Heb. 2:5–10) along his sacrificial course, the man Christ Jesus now rules the whole universe (our little globe included) with the very sovereignty of God, ensuring the success of his global mission.

Against all suspicions to the contrary, the sovereign Christ will not be thwarted in carrying out his promise, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). The God-man, risen and reigning, most assuredly will make good on the pledge that his gospel “will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). Wielding the indomitable strength of his divinity, he is poised to guarantee—with absolute certainty—the fulfillment of Habakkuk 2:14: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”1

MISSIONS: ALL ABOUT THIS JESUS

At the end of the day, global missions is about the worship of this spectacular Jesus. The goal of missions is the worldwide worship of the God-man by his redeemed people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. The outcome of missions is all peoples delighting to praise Jesus. And the motivation for missions is the enjoyment that his people have in him. Missions aims at, brings about, and is fueled by the worship of Jesus.

Another way to say it is that missions is about Jesus’s global glory. From beginning to end—in target, effect, and impetus—missions centers on the worldwide fame of the Messiah in the praises of his diverse peoples from every tribe, tongue, and nation. What’s at stake in missions is the universal honor of the Father in the global glory of his Son in the joy of all the peoples.

WHAT IS MISSIONS?2

Rooted in the Latin mitto (meaning “to send”), missions is the half-millennium-old English term signifying the sending of Jesus’s followers into his global harvest of all peoples. For nearly three hundred years, the term missions has been used in particular for world evangelization, for pioneering the gospel among the peoples to whom it has yet to advance.

Among others, two passages in the Gospel of Matthew get to the heart of missions. Jesus says to his disciples in Matthew 9:37–38, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Missions means sending out workers into the global harvest.

A second passage is Jesus’s sending out of his disciples in Matthew 28:18–20, the epic-making summons we call “the Great Commission.” Here Jesus’s main command, “make disciples of all nations,” follows the charge to “go”—to be sent out. Sending out and going are two sides of the same coin. Jesus and his established church send out, and those who go are “the sent ones,” or “missionaries.” So missions is the church’s sending out of missionaries (the sent ones) to pioneer the church among peoples who otherwise have no access to the gospel.

THE COMMISSION

Perhaps as good a way forward as any in this introduction is to walk just briefly through this Great Commission that gets at the heart of the missionary enterprise.

And Jesus came and said to [his disciples], “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:18–20)

“DISCIPLE ALL NATIONS” (V. 19)

We’ve noted already Jesus’s claim to “all authority” (v. 18). In view of such unmatched authority, he then draws out an implication for his followers in verse 19—one of the most important therefores in the history of the world. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . .”

The two commands in our English—“go” and “make disciples of all nations”—work together as one charge in the original language. A literal translation would be something like, “having gone, disciple all nations.” The main emphasis falls on discipling, but the going is necessary. In order to engage in this worldwide task of discipling all nations, there must be going. Jesus emphatically does not promise that all nations will come to Jerusalem so that his disciples can merely invest themselves where they are. They will need to go. There are oceans and borders to cross, languages to learn, cultural divides to bridge. Like Paul and Barnabas in Antioch, they should be “sent off” (Acts 13:3) gladly by the church for such work. There must be missionaries.

But even in our current global context, where unreached peoples are clustering in cities where churches already are established, another kind of going must happen: being “sent out” from ordinary, everyday life among people just like us to invest in the difficult spade work of language learning and culture crossing. Even where geography isn’t an issue, culture and language are. So the Commission necessitates goings of all sorts.

Disciple Is a Verb

If Jesus’s charge to “make disciples of all nations” is the heart of the Commission, what does he mean by this discipling? It is clear that he does not mean the mere pursuit of conversion. That won’t work with what follows: “. . . baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Teaching the nations “to observe all that I have commanded you” is not the mere pursuit of conversion. And if discipling all nations doesn’t mean simple classroom information transfer, as we’re prone to think in the West, but “teaching to observe,” what must it involve?

At least it must aim at a kind of lived-out spiritual maturity. This is how many well-meaning Christians today use the term discipleship—as a term for pursuing spiritual maturity. Being a “disciple,” they say, means being a serious, rather than a casual, follower of Jesus. “Discipleship programs” are designed for those intentionally seeking Christian growth, so it goes. Maybe. But something seems to be lacking here, at least as an explanation of what the Commission is getting at.

Jesus’s Example

Within the context of Matthew’s Gospel, is there not more to say? Does “disciple all nations” not call to mind how Jesus himself discipled his men? They were, after all, his disciples. And when they heard him say, “disciple all nations,” would they not think this discipling is similar to the very thing he did with them—investing prolonged, real-life, day-in, day-out, intentional time with younger believers in order to personally grow them to maturity, as well as model for them how to disciple others in the same way?

This sounds like what Paul is getting at in 2 Timothy 2:2, when he instructs his disciple Timothy, “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” Timothy, my disciple, disciple others to disciple others. Four spiritual generations get explicit mention here: Paul, Timothy, “faithful men,” and “others also”—with the implication that further generations are to follow.3

Discipling, seen in this light, means not merely the pursuit of our own spiritual maturity but getting outside ourselves for personal connection and substantial, intentional investment of time in a few others—the kind of investment for which there must be going to accomplish among the nations. Jesus spent over three years with his twelve disciples. He called them to be discipled at the outset of his ministry (Matt. 4:19), and he gave them the lion’s share of his life until his departure in Matthew 28. He invested his life in his men. It is eye-opening to track in the Gospels how much Jesus gave of himself to his disciples. While the crowds pursued him, he pursued his disciples. He was willing to bless the masses, but he invested in the few.

All Nations

But if “disciple” refers not merely to conversion and personal spiritual maturity but to the personal investment of the discipler’s life in others, what about “all nations”? Here Jesus has struck a note that is part of a biblical symphony spanning the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation.

From creation, God has been concerned with “all the nations.” The genealogies of Genesis trace the origin of all nations from Adam through Noah and his sons (Genesis 10). And with his blessing of all nations in mind, God called a moon worshiper named Abram to “Go from your country . . . to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:1–3). Note the word “all.”

From Abram (renamed Abraham, “the father of a multitude of nations,” in Gen. 17:4–5) would come God’s chosen nation called “Israel.” This nation’s special relationship with God was to bring about blessing to those of the rest of the world’s nations who were separated from their creator going back to their father Adam.

For the sake of the nations, God worked on this one nation for two thousand years. He multiplied her number, delivered her from slavery, led her through the wilderness, defeated her enemies, established her in a promised land, and brought her to her highest point of peace and prosperity under the kingship of David and his son Solomon. With foes defeated and the temple complete, it looked as if God’s blessing was now poised to flow to the nations through Israel’s flourishing and the nations’ submission to her.

Come and See

In 1 Kings 4, Israel has become “as many as the sand by the sea” (v. 20). Solomon is ruling “over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt” (v. 21) and said to have “dominion over all the region west of the Euphrates” (v. 24). Is this the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abram in Genesis 12:3 and 15:5 to make his descendants as numerous as the stars and to bless the nations through his offspring? Has God brought all his purposes to pass in Israel’s prosperity so that now climactically “all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God” (1 Kings 8:60)?

But the sin problem that began with Adam still remained, with Israel herself suffering from the same sinful condition as all the nations. Just as the nations needed the blessing of forgiveness, a new heart, final removal of divine wrath, and restoration to God himself, so also did Israel. And 1 Kings 11 to 2 Kings 25 catalogs how sin destroyed Israel over the course of several hundred years, as she fell from the height of Solomon’s reign to the utter depths in the destruction of Jerusalem and in exile under the Babylonians.

But the prophets, even amidst their strong denunciations, promised stunning hope beyond the exile for the remnant that would return to God. And it wouldn’t be the mere restoration to Israel’s former days, for as the prophet Isaiah announced, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6).

God had more in mind for the blessing of the nations than “Come and see Israel and eat from her scraps.” In the Great Commission, we find Jesus’s monumental revelation to his followers—and through them to the world—of the mission for world blessing that God has had in store from the beginning: God’s people knowing and enjoying him in Jesus and going and telling all the nations about him.

As Jesus prepares to go to the cross, he is the one who promises, “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations” (Matt. 24:14). And Jesus is the one who charges his disciples to “make disciples of all nations” and promised them, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

Go and Disciple

Jesus himself has ushered in a new season of world history in which God is no longer focusing his preparatory redemptive action on Israel in a come-and-see fashion (when “in past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways,” Acts 14:16). But now with the full accomplishment of the gospel of his Son, God has widened his redemptive lens, so to speak, to all the nations and inaugurated the Spirit-empowered age of go and tell—or better yet, go and disciple.

The apostle Paul says that the essence of his ministry is “to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of [Jesus’s] name among all the nations” (Rom. 1:5) and that the gospel is now being “made known to all nations” (Rom. 16:26). God’s global purpose, being exercised through the authority of the risen and reigning God-man, is to make worshipers of his Son among all the nations—every tribe and tongue and people.

When Jesus grants John a glimpse of the end, he hears a new song: “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). Two chapters later, he sees “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing [in worship] before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9–10).

The Post-Christian West and the Global South

In the course of pursuing all nations, Paul brought the gospel to Philippi (Acts 16) and beyond, and for the next seventeen-plus centuries, Christianity took root particularly in the West (Europe and eventually North America). The sixteenth-century Reformation deepened the roots in many respects, but the horrific seventeenth-century religious wars fed the eighteenth-century “Enlightenment” and with it, in time, modernism and secularism.

Today the West, once the stronghold of global Christianity, is becoming increasingly (and quickly) post-Christian. There are pockets of significant blessing and great hope for advance in the days ahead, but by and large the church that once stood at the center of Western society is finding herself at the periphery (which, in God’s economy, may be a very good thing for the Western church).

But the decline of Christianity in the West has not meant global decline for the gospel. Jesus will build his church. And remember, Jesus never lies. The last fifty years have produced a stunning and historic global development as Christianity has blossomed in Africa, Latin America, and Asia—in what many are calling “the Global South.” The figures can be misleading since they can report only professing Christians, but even allowing for significant inflation, the general trend is astonishing:

Europe was home to over 70 percent of the world’s professing Christians in 1900, but by 2000, it was less than 30 percent. In the meantime, Latin America and Africa had become home to over 40 percent.

Africa had ten million professing Christians in 1900—about 10 percent of the population. But by 2000, the number was 360 million—about half the African population. This may mark the largest shift in religious affiliation in world history.

4

“The number of practicing Christians in China is approaching the number in the United States.”

5

“Last Sunday . . . more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called ‘Christian Europe.’”

6

“In a word, the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history.”

7

Going with the Global South

This amazing trend raises the question for some as to whether the West is done sending missionaries. Will it not now be left to the Global South to finish the mission? The clear answer is no. First, don’t discount the power of gospel-advancing partnerships between the West and the Global South. But, second, these partnerships should not mean merely sending Western money, but Western people. Going is necessary for discipling.

According to the Joshua Project, which tracks the global progress of the gospel among the world’s unreached peoples, there are an estimated seven thousand unreached people groups in the world out of a total of about seventeen thousand ethno-linguistic peoples.8 The Joshua Project lists over 1,500 of these unreached peoples as unengaged, meaning that there is no current missionary work among them. With so much work yet to be done, it will take the gospel partnership of the whole global church—Western, Hispanic, Asian, African, Eastern European, Russian, Brazilian, Middle Eastern, and more—to take the message about Jesus to the world’s final missionary frontier, the peoples most hostile to the gospel. As Michael Oh shows us in chapter 4, missions today is no longer from West to East, and North to South, but “from every land to every land.”

Not only does this new global situation create promise for new ways of partnering both in sending people and resources, but also it gives rise to new possibilities and problems in the West.

The Promise and Potential Danger of  “Missional”

In the last decade, a new term related to missions has come into use among evangelicals doing domestic ministry: missional. The most insightful of those using the term recognize that the West is quickly becoming post-Christian and that this shift raises important questions about what it means to do domestic ministry. Europe and North America have become more and more like a mission field—but a post-Christian, rather than a pre-Christian, field. Since the term evangelism carries for some the baggage (and narrowness) of Christendom days when the general biblical worldview was prevalent enough in society that street-corner confrontations and stadium crusades found more traction and produced more genuine converts, the emergence of the term missional (somewhat in place of evangelistic) signifies that the times are changing in some significant degree, calling for new missions-like engagement and evangelistic holism. This fresh thinking is a good development, but with it comes a danger.

The danger is that with the discussions about “being missional” and “every Christian being a missionary,” the pursuit of all the peoples by prioritizing the unreached can be obscured. The contributors to this book are eager for us both to live “on mission” among our native people and to preserve a place for the biblical category of reaching the unreached. The biblical theme is not merely that God reaches as many people as possible, but all the peoples. He intends to create worshipers of his Son from every tribe, tongue, and nation. The push for being missional captures something very important in the heart of God, but this is dangerous when it comes at the cost of something else essential in the heart of God: pursuing all the nations, not merely those who share our language and culture.

Prioritizing the Unreached

As Ed Stetzer will argue in chapter 5, we need a solid both-and. Our churches should pursue both mission among our own people and missions among the world’s unreached peoples. One way to sum it up is to say that we can’t be truly missional without preserving a prominent place for the pursuit of the unreached. It doesn’t matter how much a church may say that she is being missional; she is not fully missional in the biblical sense if she is not pursuing mission at home (traditionally called evangelism) among her native reached people as well as being an engaged sender in support of missionaries to the unreached.

As the West grows increasingly post-Christian, it is easy to see the obvious need for the gospel opening up around us to the neglect of the frontiers. Missions is a summons to the frontiers. And more and more those frontiers aren’t savages living in the woods that make for the missions stories of the previous generation, like Bruchko, Peace Child, and Through Gates of Splendor. Today’s “frontiers” are home to those most hostile to the gospel. Don’t think jungles and loin clothes. Think flat, hot, and crowded in the world’s urban mega-centers. It seems God is bringing the unreached peoples out of the woods and into the cities for the finishing of the mission.

There Will Be Suffering and Martyrdom

All this means there will be suffering. Many of the estimated seven thousand unreached peoples (and the more than 1,500 unengaged peoples) are unreached (and unengaged) for a reason. They are profoundly hostile to the gospel. But the suffering and the martyrdom to come—and they will come9—will not be a setback for our sovereign Savior.

Not only is suffering the consequence of finishing the mission, but it is God’s appointed means by which he will show the superior worth of his Son to all the peoples. Just as it was “fitting that he . . . should make the founder of [our] salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb. 2:10), so it is fitting that God save a people from all the peoples from eternal suffering through the redemptive suffering of Jesus displayed in the temporal sufferings of his missionaries.

This is why Paul could rejoice in his sufferings—because he knew that in them he was “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24). What is lacking in Jesus’s sufferings is not redemptive value but personal presentation to the peoples he died to save. And in the sufferings and martyrdoms of missions, “the sent ones” fill up what is lacking by showing Jesus’s superior value and pointing to his sufferings in their own.

So the call to finish the mission is unavoidably a call for martyrs—not a call for kamikazes but a call for missionaries bent on Jesus’s worldwide fame and satisfied so deeply in him that they can say with Esther, “If I perish, I perish” (Est. 4:16) and with Paul, “To die is gain” (Phil. 1:21).

JESUS WILL BE WITH US (V. 20)

The power for life-reorienting giving for missions and life-risking going in missions, for suffering and for martyrdom, is the enjoyment of the One whom we preach. Not only is missions powered by Jesus’s universal authority, founded on his finished work, and modeled in his ministry, but also missions is sustained by the promise of his presence and the pleasure we have in him. He says “behold” to make sure he has our attention, because this is really precious. “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

He will be with you. At the border of the “closed” country, in the learning of an arduous language, and in the disorientation of a new culture, he will be with you. In speaking the gospel when your hearers may turn on you, in persecution, and in jail, he will be with you. And when you’re pressed to renounce the faith or die, he will be with you. He loves to be with his people to give them the grace to say with Martin Luther, from the heart,

Let goods and kindred go,

This mortal life also.

The body they may kill;

God’s truth abideth still.

His kingdom is forever.

Missions is about the worship of Jesus and the joy of all peoples. And as surely as Jesus is Lord of the universe, the mission will finish. He will build his church. He will be worshiped among every people. And in him will his redeemed people, from all the peoples, forever “rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Pet. 1:8).

LET’S FINISH THE MISSION

With this awe-inspiring aim in view, our contributors take up the mantle of the Great Commission and its Spirit-powered completion. The theme isn’t new, but you might find the approach refreshing.

Chapter 1 is a surprising start to a book on missions. We’ll join Louie Giglio as he takes a step back from the global-missions summons to adjust our perspective about the bigness and supremacy of our galactic God. He notes that Isaiah amazingly overheard the God of unparalleled majesty ask, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (Isa. 6:8), and Giglio awakens us to how the heavens are telling the glory of the mind-bogglingly impressive and powerful God behind the missionary invitation—the one who gives the mission and promises to finish it is utterly unmatched in his grandeur and strength.

David Platt (chapter 2) then sobers us with the biblical and terrifying reality of hell and the tragic lostness of billions worldwide who do not know the living God through the gospel of his unique Son. Platt serves us with the thoroughness of a careful theologian, providing biblical text after text, mixed with the gentleness and concern of an experienced pastor.

You don’t typically expect much by way of apologetics in a missions book, but then Michael Ramsden is no typical missionary. Ramsden’s approach (chapter 3) to the theme of courage is substantively inspiring. He doesn’t just tell us to be courageous, as such a mission requires, but he builds courage into our minds and hearts as he addresses the reasonableness and solidity of biblical revelation and the Christian worldview, all set carefully within the context of global mission by a worldwide traveler who goes regularly on gospel mission into places he can’t mention publicly.

Michael Oh (chapter 4) then comes to us from Japan, living among one of the world’s hardest-to-reach peoples. As he walks us through a powerful exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, he seeks to awaken us to how non-Western nations (Korea, Brazil, and others) are surpassing most Western locales in sending power for Jesus’s global cause. The mission force is perhaps much larger than we’re prone to think.

Chapter 5 reminds us that we’ve been sent. There’s no getting around it. No matter what city, state, or country you’re residing in as you read this book, you haven’t always been there. At some point relatively recently, whether days or decades ago, God in his exhaustive and excellent sovereignty sent you to the community in which you now live, work, and play. Ed Stetzer refuses to let us off the hook for laboring toward the finishing of the mission just because we live safely tucked among our native people. He argues for the importance of both global missions to the unreached and unengaged and intentional local mission wherever God has placed us.

Finally, in chapter 6, John Piper unpacks for us the great missionary song of Psalm 67. Not only does he have for us a particular word about Islam (that Christians do not worship the same God as Muslims), but also what may be an unexpected word about God’s purpose in the material wealth of Christians, perhaps especially in the West. “God gives his people material wealth for the sake of the world’s spiritual worship