At the Heart of the Mission

Have you ever been reading the Bible and a passage just stops you dead in your tracks? You almost have to put it down for a moment because the weight of what you have read is just that great?

A little over a month ago I was preparing to begin my one summer semester course - my fifth and final formal semester of Greek training at DTS. Drawing on everything we have learned we studied Paul's letter to the believers in Rome, examining everything he said straight from the Greek text that we have been learning to understand and interpret. But before the class began I wanted to review the letter in English just to re-acquaint myself with it.



So I start reading chapter 1...and I don't make it out of the introduction. That's right, the introduction. The part that generally goes "Hi, I'm Paul. God's called me to tell the world about him, including you guys in [insert city here]. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." Except Paul doesn't exactly do that in Romans. Instead his intro for this letter is the longest of any he writes, primarily because he has never been to Rome he is not known to those there who believe in Jesus.

So he spends a bit more time introducing himself, his message (the gospel), and his mission before greeting those in Rome with his standard greeting. And so I read start reading and there it is: "through [Jesus] we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations" (Rom 1:5, ESV).

Did you see what he just said? God showed him grace and called him as an apostle for the purpose of the obedient response to the gospel of faith among all the nations. But that is not the ultimate purpose. The end is not that there will be believing Gentiles. The end is not that heaven will have more people in it. Paul says that his apostleship, his proclamation of the gospel, his efforts as a slave of Christ Jesus, his pointing of Gentiles to salvation through faith in Jesus is all on behalf of the name of Jesus.

One commentator put it like this: "The ultimate reason for a mission to the Gentiles was not the salvation of the Gentiles but the proclamation of the name of Jesus Christ. What was fundamental for Paul was the glory and praise of Jesus Christ" (Schreiner, Baker Exegetical Commentary of the New Testament: Romans, 36). He goes on to cite the same passage from John Stott's commentary on Romans that John Piper references in the intro to his book on missions, Let the Nations be Glad:

"The highest of missionary motives is neither obedience to the Great Commission (important as that is), nor love for sinners who are alienated and perishing (strong as that incentive is, especially when we contemplate the wrath of God,...) but rather zeal--burning and passionate zeal--for the glory of Jesus Christ."

What, then, is the implication for us as believers from this truth that the ultimate end to which we seek that others come to faith is the greater desire to see Jesus' name and renown exalted in every corner of the earth? (I will grant that Paul is perhaps being descriptive here in Romans 1:5, but considering that there hasn't been a greater missionary than Paul we would do well to see prescriptive elements in what he says he does as he fulfills his calling)

I think of my own church affiliation - the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC has long had as a core central focus the "Great Commission" (Matthew 28:19-20), so much so that at their annual convention in 2012 Southern Baptists approved the use of the alternative name "Great Commission Baptists" to refer to themselves. At my church we say that our mission is the Great Commission - that we are focused on going and making disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded.

I think it is great that we are committed to the Great Commission. It's one of the last directions that Jesus gives His disciples before His ascent into heaven - the weight of that moment gives weight to the command (and it was a command that the disciples took seriously according to the account in Acts). But what if, not diminishing our emphasis on the Great Commission, our churches made a intense, focused effort to press in even harder on the Great Commandment (Matt 22:37)? What if our churches taught and preached and prayed and ministered and cried out to God with the heart-burning desire that they might be filled with people that are absolutely BLOWN AWAY by God, who He is, His love for them, and their love for Him?

I'm not talking about just people giving affirmative answers to the question "Do you love God?" I'm talking grabbed by the ears, eyes-wide, jaw-dropped, mouth-stopped, can't-breath, barely-standing awe, wonder, adoration, fear, love for and delight in the GOD OF THE UNIVERSE. People who've caught a glimpse of the glory of God and fell down as though dead...then got back up with a singularity of focus, purpose, and love for God and a sense of mission that nothing on earth can stop them in because THEY. MUST. DECLARE. THE. GLORY. OF. GOD. People don't know about God, they don't know God, and because God is God and there is nothing, NO-THING, like Him it is absolutely unacceptable that God is not known to these people yet and they aren't able to praise, honor, worship and love God with all of their beings as He is owed because HE. IS. GOD.

What if believers prayed and cried out to God and fervently desired to be people filled with the Holy Spirit, disgusted by sin, left speechless by grace, abounding in mercy, generous beyond their means (but not God's - Ha!), Bible-saturated, standing firm in truth, overflowing with love, shouting praise till their voice stops, working as slaves of God with all that they are until the day that God grants them to breathe their last, enter His presence (after maybe one parting "take that!" to satan), hear "Well done my good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of your master!" and realize that all they experienced, all that they saw, all that they felt, all that they read, proclaimed, preached, prayed, sang and suffered was so incomprehensibly insignificant compared to eternal, infinite, magnificent weight of the glory of God and the soul-saturating and soul-satisfying joy of seeing Him face to face and forevermore knowing only the love that is Holy God.

Just twelve people like that would accomplish infinitely more than 12,000,000 or 1.2 billion ever could for the obedience of faith among the nations on behalf of the name of Jesus.

May God raise up countless numbers of people like that.

May God raise up this one like that.

To Him be glory forever. Amen.
αὐτῷ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν.