Adapted from the session as a book chapter, in the speakers' own voices: Jonathan Master's address, then Sinclair Ferguson's closing “Sending Vignettes.” It keeps the argument, stories and wording where possible, but it is an edited retelling, not a transcript. Tap a time in the margin to hear that moment.
Before the talk
Chad VegasOver lunch at an Italian restaurant in Bakersfield, I told Jonathan Master that several of our graduating Radius students felt they didn't know the Bible well enough. He said, “What if Greenville started a Master of Divinity that partners with Radius, so they do their seminary education at Greenville and the missionary church-planting part on campus at Radius?” He pressed Greenville in that direction and pressed us, and now students have gone through that program both ways. He told me he wanted Greenville to be a nursery for missionaries; it was already known as a place that trains pastors seriously, in partnership with their churches, to make Christ known here and among the nations. He's my boss at Greenville, and I can say that he makes many of us on the faculty aspire to be better men and better pastors.
Set Apart to Be Sent · Jonathan Master
“Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had John to assist them.” (Acts 13:1–5)
This text has come up again and again over these two days; yesterday it figured in every address except the biographical one. That is because it is so significant for our understanding of sending missionaries.
Something Charles Spurgeon said has stuck with me since my mid-twenties. Describing John Bunyan, the author of The Pilgrim's Progress, Spurgeon said that if you pricked him anywhere you would find that his blood was “Bibline”: the very essence of the Bible flowed from him. Bunyan was so steeped in Scripture that if you cut him open, Bible came out. What a description of a Christian, and particularly of a minister of the gospel. We want to love and trust the Bible. We want the message we proclaim to be the message of God's word, and the Christ we proclaim to be the Christ the Scriptures make clear. We want our heroes to be men and women who obeyed God's word, often at great cost. We want our minds so full of the word that it is what we think about when we go to bed and when we get up. And we want our work done in the power of God's Spirit as he works through his word in the church.
So when it comes to sending missionaries, I want us to think that way. What does the Bible say? I want to bleed Bibline when I talk about sending. That means looking carefully at this text, in which the church at Antioch sends out missionaries: the church as a sending agency, according to Scripture.
To understand Acts 13 we need to cast our minds back. In Acts 1 Jesus says, “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.” Earlier still, in John 20: “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you”; and this morning we saw how John 17 binds that sending language up with the work of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Then, in the early chapters of Acts, the Lord fulfills Acts 1:8 in remarkable ways. Christ builds his church, often miraculously, making it unmistakable that the gospel is going to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and on toward the ends of the earth.
A refrain runs through those chapters: the word of God increased, in ever-widening spirals as men proclaimed it. And as the word increased, so did persecution. In Acts 8 a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout Judea and Samaria, and those who were scattered went about preaching the word. The Lord was keeping his promise.
Then come three extraordinary conversion stories, each involving a miraculous encounter, with an angel or with the risen Christ, that leads to further proclamation. An angel sends Philip to the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, where he meets a eunuch reading Isaiah 53, in fulfillment of Isaiah 56: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths… I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.” In Acts 10 an angel visits Cornelius and Peter receives a vision from heaven, and Gentiles are converted. And sandwiched between those two is the conversion of Saul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a persecutor of Christ's church. Acts is establishing that the Holy Spirit is clearly at work fulfilling Jesus' promise, and that there is no place the gospel will not reach. It reaches a eunuch, a Gentile, and, in the middle, a Pharisee of Pharisees.
That brings us to Acts 12:24: “But the word of God increased and multiplied.” Virtually every commentator I have consulted sees a transition between Acts 12 and 13. By chapter 12 the gospel has spread to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and is beginning to spread through the Gentile world, and we have seen the Spirit's power in conversion, which teaches us about the power of God and the scope of Jesus' authority. But in Acts 13 we see something new: the first recorded organized effort by the church to fulfill Christ's Great Commission. That is why this passage keeps being cited. It is the template for sending, a new phase in Acts and in history, and it begins in the church at Antioch. So let's move slowly and methodically through it, because we don't want to miss any detail the Lord has given us.
The broadest statement I can make about this text is this: sending missionaries is necessarily a work of the church. It centers on the church of Jesus Christ, not on an independent organization.
The church at Antioch
What do we learn about this church in verse 1? Three details.
First, it was an identified, established church. Scholars, and perhaps people in this room, differ on whether “the church at Antioch” means several congregations in a region or a single congregation. But whichever view you take, this is clearly an identified, established church. It is even clearer in the Greek; woodenly translated, verse 1 says something like “in Antioch, in the church that existed there.” The emphasis falls on its being a real church of Jesus Christ. Why labor the point? Because the text makes clear that Great Commission missions, the Holy Spirit's work of sending missionaries through the church, never flows from a false church, or from something other than the church, something extra-ecclesial. It flows from a genuine, established church of the Lord Jesus Christ, a local or regional branch of his church, with the kind of leadership the New Testament outlines.
Second, it was a word-driven, word-regulated church. Jesus Christ is Lord of the church and rules it through his word. We see that in the description of its ministers as “prophets and teachers,” language that may puzzle us. I think the grammar shows these are two sides of one coin. An older commentator gets it right: these are two words for the same persons, one denoting their divine authority as God's spokesmen, the other the way that authority was exercised, by teaching. They were God's mouthpieces to the people, and they exercised that office by teaching his word. Read the Reformation books of church order and you will often find the pastor defined as God's spokesman to the people through the preaching of the word, and the people's mouthpiece to God in prayer, following Acts 6. That is what we see here. The Bible drove this church's teaching, worship and practice, including its understanding of sending.
What did that look like? We were reminded yesterday of Paul's ministry as he reviewed it with the Ephesian elders: teaching publicly and from house to house, holding back nothing profitable, innocent of the blood of all because he faithfully declared the word, with a life that backed it up. That is why, warning Timothy of troubles to come, Paul reminds him that the word of God has power, that it makes us wise to salvation, that it is breathed out by God and profitable, and so: “Preach the word.” That is the pattern of biblical church leadership, and we see it in Antioch.
Let me pause and ask: could one reason our churches don't see themselves as God-ordained sending agencies be that we are inattentive to God's word in all its particulars? If we have ignored this, is it because we are ignoring the word of God? Wouldn't one measure of our commitment to Christ ruling his church through his word be that we share its priorities and follow its pattern?
Third, this church, even in its leadership, embodies the reach of grace. Look at the five prophet-teachers. Barnabas is listed first, probably the senior in experience and authority. He was a Levite, but not from the Hebrew-speaking side of the Jewish world; Acts 4 tells us he came from Cyprus. His birth certificate would have said Joseph, but “Barnabas,” son of encouragement, stuck. Early on he sold a field and gave the money to the apostles. He mentored and supported Paul after his conversion and brought him to Antioch. He was a great man of God.
Simeon we know less about. He was called Niger, meaning black, which probably refers to his skin color or his origin, and strikingly, that was no barrier in the early church to serving alongside the other leaders. Lucius of Cyrene: Acts 11 tells us that men from Cyprus and Cyrene came to Antioch and preached to the Greeks, and since Acts 13 happens only a few years later, Lucius was probably one of those who left Cyrene and planted the church in Antioch. Lucius is a Roman name, so his background and culture were likely Roman. Already the differences among these men are vast.
The fourth is more distinct still. Manaen, a Greek form of a Hebrew name, was probably a Hellenistic Jew, and he was “a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch.” Isn't it striking where those two childhood friends ended up? Herod Antipas killed John the Baptist. His lifelong friend Manaen, from the same social stratum, was saved by God and is here faithfully serving the church at Antioch. Raised in the highest echelons of society, he probably knew some of the most powerful people in the world, yet there is no hint that this gave him a special place on the pastoral team. He worked alongside the others as a servant of the word. And then there is Saul: once a Pharisee of Pharisees and a persecutor of the church, present at the stoning of the first Christian martyr, and gloriously saved by God.
What should we make of this? We should be stunned, overwhelmed, by the grace of God and the diversity of this group. And we should remember what Acts has already taught us: God's purpose in the church extends to all nations. Their backgrounds undoubtedly brought interesting features to their work, but that was not the main thing. They had been saved by the Lord Jesus Christ.
And in a sense this is always on display in Christ's church. Have you considered that all of us are gathered here in Fort Worth, Texas, reading about promises made in Jerusalem, in a place the earliest Christians could hardly have imagined existed? We are living examples of the grace of God. It is no accident, I think, that the church with such an obvious display of God's manifold, expansive grace was the first to send. Could our inattention to sending stem from our not thinking of ourselves as remarkable recipients of God's grace? Do you think the gospel is native to Fort Worth, Texas, or Greenville, South Carolina? No. This is the ends of the earth. We are all here because people sent by the church and empowered by the Holy Spirit shared the gospel, and translated the Bible into what was once an unknown language. And there is a lesson here for those not in this kind of leadership: never assume Christ would not use you in a powerful way.
Worshiping, fasting and sending their best
With those details in mind (an established church, a word-centered church, a church displaying God's grace), what was it doing? Verse 2 tells us: they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, earnestly seeking him. We saw the same pattern with Peter and Cornelius. They were single-mindedly seeking the Lord in prayer, doing what the Old Testament, describing tabernacle and temple worship, calls drawing near, as Hebrews also urges us. They were actively bringing their requests to him and seeking his will.
So when you think of the church as the centerpiece of sending, where does its attention go? To meetings designed to generate enthusiasm? No. They were seeking the Lord in worship, prayer and the hearing of his word. Are you prioritizing the public worship of God in your church? Are you drawing near to the throne of grace personally? Does your intercession, as a church and as individuals, regularly include the needs of the world, the command of Christ and the promises of God's word? Are you seeking him, even at the expense of other good and necessary things, to see how he might use you? Pastors, does your teaching press these things home against this backdrop?
It is no surprise, then, that in this context the Holy Spirit set men apart to be sent. The text doesn't say exactly how he made his will clear. Acts 15 may give us a window. There some of these missionaries return with questions and bring them to the church; the apostles and elders discuss them from the word of God and pray and seek the Lord, and when they reach a conclusion reasoned from Scripture they can say with confidence, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” However the Spirit made this choice clear, it is absolutely clear that it was not driven by self-interest or merely by the men's inner aspirations, though they seem to have accepted it gladly.
And we know the church sent its very best. In one sense this may not have been how the church wanted things to turn out. They sent two key teaching elders: Barnabas, their most senior leader, and Saul, who by then had behind him three years in Arabia, perhaps a dozen years in Tarsus, and two years in Antioch. That is long preparation, and he was a very useful servant of Christ. They did not send the unprepared or untrained, or people with no role at home who could be shuffled off to missions. They sent trained, proven men, men they could hardly imagine losing, and they sent them anyway.
We too must prioritize training, experience and testedness. We were reminded very persuasively yesterday of the need to send our best. And if you are already serving, even in pastoral ministry, be prepared to go. If you are training for ministry and expect it to lead you to a certain place, hold that loosely. The Holy Spirit sent these men, and the church sent them, which reminds us that every candidate for gospel ministry must be dedicated to Christ without reservation or exception.
Then we come back to verse 3: “After fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.” I don't know how the text could emphasize it more clearly: sending is the work of the church. It is the same word group we explored this morning, “As the Father has sent me,” and now the church sends them off. We cannot outsource this, and if we want to be faithful to Scripture, we cannot avoid it. In a sense the whole church at Antioch was involved, in different ways: gathered for worship and fervent prayer, no doubt giving financial support. The elders and pastors were involved in a special way, because they had trained these men and led the church and taught God's word throughout, including what it says about these things.
The church sends
Think through how much clarity this brings. It brings clarity to those who are sent. Who sent you? To whom are you accountable? Ultimately to God, yes, but through the means God uses, to the church of Jesus Christ. It is striking that in Acts 15, when Paul and Barnabas face a complex question, they take it to the church, to no one outside it. We don't want to put those we send into extra-ecclesial structures that look an awful lot like bishops and archbishops. We don't want churches, even their ordained leaders, to give the impression that missionaries answer to professionals outside the church. I have seen agencies act this way: “We're the experts.” Agencies serve many needs, and we love them and pray for them; they provide training and support. But they serve the church. The church sends.
It brings clarity for churches too, and this is where the main application lies. This must be a priority. If your church is doing well, one key measure should be how well it exercises oversight not only of its staff on site but of those it has sent and supports. If we took the hours needed to go around this room, I'm confident each of you could tell me what church you attend and who your pastor is. But if I asked, “Which missionaries do you support? Tell me about them. Who are they? What are their families like? Where do they serve? What does progress look like? What problems are they facing?” I think even in a room like this our score would not be high.
Shouldn't our membership classes cover not only doctrine, programs and child protection, but the biblical reality that members are joining a missionary society, a sending and supporting body? That is what you are signing up for. Churches so often mistake writing checks for exercising responsibility, oversight and care. This biblical picture is not hostile to agencies and the good they do, but it restores the proper order. Sending remains the church's responsibility.
There are somewhere over nine hundred congregations represented in this room, nearly a thousand bodies charged with a task by the Lord Jesus Christ. Think of the potential for training, raising up and sending wave after wave of workers to the least reached peoples. The church is to be the sending agency, following the commands of its Lord.
The Lord who sends
One more thing we cannot miss. This text brings clarity, perhaps correction, to our priorities and methods, but it is not only methodological. It is theological. The church is the Lord's instrument for sending and supporting, but it is the Lord who sends. Follow the divine action. In verse 1 the teachers proclaim God's word, which gives us both the command to go and the promise that Christ will be with us. In verse 2, as they worship, the Holy Spirit is explicitly at work, calling some to missions. In verse 3 the setting apart happens not in an HR office but in the church, with the laying on of hands amid fasting and prayer. In verse 4 they are sent out by the Holy Spirit. And in verse 5 they proclaim the word of God.
Read on in chapter 13 and the first encounter is with a magician, a bearer of false, satanic power, who opposes them, as if the church's sending of missionaries were being tested against the power of the devil from the start. But when the proconsul of Cyprus believes, verse 12 says, “he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.” God is the one at work. He ordains the end, and he ordains the means, and the means is the church sending out trained workers.
You will know your church is on the right path when it is focused on meeting God in worship, committed to prayer, seeking God's truth in his word, and asking: How can we devote ourselves to sending? Lord, whom can we send? Whom would you send from this congregation? How can we resource and help those who are sent? On the pages of Scripture we see people genuinely transformed by knowing God through Jesus Christ: men who knew what it was to be forgiven, to have fellowship with others totally unlike them culturally and economically, who staked their lives on Christ's death and resurrection and his return in glory.
That is why this conference is called The Lord Who Sends. You don't send yourself. You are not sent by some other body. In the ultimate sense you are not even sent merely by the church. But the church is what the Lord uses to do the sending. So perhaps this is the final question: are we persuaded that all of this really is the Lord's work, and should therefore be done in the way the Lord sets out in his word? The template for fulfilling Christ's commission is ultimately supernatural: a work of God through the church of Jesus Christ. That is why, when we enter heaven and see the great multitude gathered from every tribe, tongue and nation worshiping Jesus, glorified forever, we will say, “To God alone be the glory. Hallelujah, what a Savior!” because he has chosen to do his work in his way.
Father, thank you again for your word. We need its instruction, correction and encouragement. It is not a dead letter but living and active. Use it even now to transform us and give us the mind of Christ, that we may be guided and governed by your word. In Jesus' name, amen.
Sending Vignettes · Sinclair Ferguson
Ian HamiltonWhen I think of Sinclair Ferguson, I think of the sacred weight of character, forged in his devotion to the Lord, his ministry of the word, and his faithful service to the church of God over many years, and no less in his lovely family: his wife, children and now grandchildren. What he is before you is exactly what he is with his family. My dear friend, Sinclair Ferguson.
In case any of you are worried that another fifty-minute address is about to begin, let me reassure you: think of what follows as a closing devotional to this great day. I've been asked to speak under the title “Three Vignettes,” and I've not only been given three vignettes, I've been told what they are. So I'll give you a text I have chosen myself, with a comment or two; then the three vignettes the organizers chose; and then some brief reflections.
The theme is that there have been places where the seeds of a missionary vocation grew, and from which young men, largely young men, went out. Those of you who remember your high-school Latin will know that seminarium, seminary, means a seedbed. Each of these places was, in one form or another, a seminary from which men went to the uttermost parts of the earth.
“And he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. But when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking evil of the Way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus. This continued for two years, so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks.” (Acts 19:8–10)
Paul took the disciples and reasoned with them daily in the hall of Tyrannus: presumably a professor of philosophy whose real name we don't know, but whose nickname, I suspect, was “the tyrant.” If you have a modern Bible, you will probably find a footnote from an old manuscript tradition. It isn't regarded as original, but translators don't usually include notes like that, and many commentators assume it approximates what happened. In the ESV it reads, “Some manuscripts add from the fifth hour to the tenth,” that is, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. So Paul rents Tyrannus's lecture hall during the siesta hours, when no one wants to study philosophy. Do the arithmetic (those of you who have been seminary students will get it): over two years, allowing two hours of reading for every hour of lecture, that is roughly the semester hours of an entire Master of Divinity.
And notice what follows: “all the residents of Asia” heard the word. That's not the Far East; it's what we think of as Turkey. Because of what happened in that little lecture hall, the gospel spread in ways Luke doesn't describe, so that the word of the Lord prevailed and all Asia heard it. I think we see that pattern in these three vignettes: three places, in different times and parts of the world, where there were seedbeds like this. The word of God was taught to the people of God through what we often call the ordinary means of grace, no special meetings required. To borrow Bunyan's expression, the children of God were “biblinized” by exposure to the whole counsel of God that Paul tells us he expounded to the Ephesians. And when that happens, in the power of the Holy Spirit, there are striking results. All Asia heard the word.
Three seedbeds
If I named these three places and asked for the first word you associate with each, I think you would get it wrong. John Calvin's Geneva in the sixteenth century: predestination. Princeton Seminary in the nineteenth century: orthodoxy. St Andrews in the nineteenth, or any, century: golf. But I want to suggest that, from God's movement in history, we can say of each: Geneva in Calvin's day, seedbed of missionaries. Princeton in the days of Archibald Alexander, Samuel Miller and Charles Hodge, seedbed of missionaries. St Andrews in the days of Thomas Chalmers, seedbed of missionaries.
Geneva. Calvin went to Geneva and had, from one point of view, a disastrous first pastorate. He was called back, and in 1541 began a new phase of ministry marked, in his regular exposition of Scripture, his lectures on the Old Testament and his writing of the Institutes, by a vision for churches planted all over the known world. At the end of his lectures he would pray that the gospel would go to the ends of the earth. When his texts allowed, he preached about it. And when in the Institutes he teaches what it means to pray “Thy kingdom come,” he says we must daily desire that God would gather churches to himself from all parts of the earth, and spread and increase them in number.
That was no pipe dream. I am almost certain that, between the Reformation and at least the twentieth century, John Calvin trained more missionary pastors almost single-handedly than anyone else anywhere in the history of Christianity. Men came to study under this little asthmatic, tightly wound man as he opened the Scriptures to them in lectures and daily expositions, and they went out to Scotland, England, the Low Countries, Italy, what we call Germany, Poland, and once, as some of you know, on an expedition to Brazil: to the ends of the earth as they knew it. The fruit was astonishing. In France, Calvin's special burden, as far as he knew there was only one fully organized Reformed church in 1551. Ten years later there were more than two thousand. In 1561 alone, 150 men were sent out from Geneva as missionary pastors, not least to France, where out of a population of twenty million there came to be perhaps three million evangelical believers, a proportion never reached again. Many of these men emerged from the seedbed of Calvin's ministry and that of one or two others in Geneva, who prayed daily that God would gather churches in every part of the world. And it was not without great cost. Within fifteen years of Calvin's death, perhaps thirty thousand of them had been martyred for the sake of Jesus Christ.
Princeton. Early nineteenth century; three great theological figures, Archibald Alexander, Samuel Miller and Charles Hodge; and in almost every book about Princeton, some form of the word orthodoxy. Yet into the Plan of the Seminary in 1811 were written these words: it is “to found a nursery for missionaries to the heathen, … in which youth may receive that appropriate training which may lay a foundation for their ultimately becoming qualified for missionary work.” That is carefully worded Presbyterian language. It doesn't say seminaries make missionaries. It says a nursery, a seedbed, to lay a foundation for ultimately becoming qualified.
Almost as soon as students arrived, they joined the “concert of prayer” that went back to the First Great Awakening. Within a few years they had formed their own missionary society, which, like the one at St Andrews, was a group of young men eagerly gathering information about the spiritual condition of every country in the world, in order to pray together that God would raise up men and send them to the farthest corners of the earth. Some of them even formed (I don't know whether this was because Princeton is in the Northeast) a missionary mafia, a little secret society whose aim was to keep the needs of the world and the importance of the missionary calling before all their fellow students.
Fascinatingly, the three professors, like Calvin himself, never went to the mission field. But men flooded out of Princeton (I mean flooded) to India, Africa, China, Thailand and Korea. As late as 1918, at the end of the Great War, 20 percent of Princeton's graduates went overseas, and, as Jonathan mentioned the other day, a third of the first 2,500 graduates served in other parts of the world. And all that was happening was that they were being instructed in the Scriptures. As their teachers read the Bible with them, they held out what it teaches about the glory of God extending to the ends of the earth, and about the means by which that would happen: men like them going to the farthest parts of the earth with zeal to see God's glory established, the name of Jesus Christ known, and young and old, boys and girls, brought to faith in him.
They saw it in the homes and family life of these men too. One of the sweetest, if slightly amusing, letters you could read was written by Charles Hodge's son, A. A. Hodge, at nine or ten, to a minister he knew who was a missionary. It begins, “Dear Heathen.” “My sister and I have made little sacrifices, and we are now sending you two dollars” (perhaps seventy-five dollars in today's money). “What we want you to know is the great God who created all things, and the way of salvation in his Son. And we would like you to have a Bible, and books that would help you come to know him. Yours sincerely, A. A. Hodge.” It wasn't only the lecture hall; it was the home and the family. And the place became a great seedbed for world mission.
St Andrews. I need say little, because we have heard so much about it this week. Interestingly, Samuel Miller at Princeton said there was no one in the world he would rather meet than Thomas Chalmers. And these young men were meeting him every day in the classroom and on the Lord's Day in his home, as he nurtured and nourished them and made their few years at St Andrews a wonderful seedbed for their future ministry to the ends of the earth. On the one hand, think of Alexander Duff, who could hold the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland spellbound for two and a half hours speaking on world missions. My favorite story about Duff is of a teenage Hindu couple who began reading The Pilgrim's Progress secretly at night, until the young wife turned to her husband and said, “We are living in the City of Destruction, and we need to flee.” And they turned up at Duff's door, and he took them in. And on the other hand, think of John Urquhart, dead at eighteen, who seems, under Chalmers's influence, to have been the catalyst, and the lasting memory, that kept their attention fixed through the years on the church's responsibility to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, to every man and woman, boy and girl, and to point them to Jesus and say, “He is able to save you to the uttermost, and you may come to God through him, every single one of you.”
Five reflections
First, when John Knox returned to Scotland after sitting at Calvin's feet and was asked to explain the Reformation, he said what I think is true of all these seedbeds: God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance. Not simple in the sense of foolish, but most of these men came from very ordinary homes. God gave them his Spirit. Just as it was the Holy Spirit who said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul,” it was the Spirit who, through the means of grace, said to these young men and their churches, “Set these men apart for me to serve elsewhere.”
Second, they all had an amazing sense of the brevity of life and the magnitude of eternity, and that carried them through the extraordinary price they were willing to pay to go to the ends of the earth. In some respects it is almost impossible for any of us to pay that price now. Forgive a personal illustration. The evening of January 13, 1983, is indelibly printed on my mind. It was the day we came to the United States, where I had come to teach in a seminary. We had four young children. We put them to bed and got into bed ourselves, and I turned my back on my wife, got as far to the edge of the bed as I could, pulled the blankets over my head, and wept like a child at the pain of what I had done in leaving behind my mother, who had been twice bereaved. I could hardly bear it. And yet I could have got on a plane the next day and gone home. These men were leaving family, sometimes family at odds with their calling, and it took them four to six months, with the danger of shipwreck, to reach India, and as long again to come home. They were willing to pay any price and go anywhere, as long as they could obey the command of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Third, especially the Scots among them, because they knew the words, were committed to the principle Samuel Rutherford expressed so wonderfully in one of his letters: “Duties are ours; events are the Lord's.” We do not calculate what we will do on the basis of what will happen, but on simple obedience to the Lord Jesus. We cannot teach the nations to observe everything Jesus commanded unless we ourselves observe everything he commanded. For some, that meant their hopes, even their expectations, were dashed, like those of young John Urquhart, who died before he could go, or of the thousands of evangelicals martyred in France in the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” In many ways that fruit is being borne here, in our time together.
Fourth, the Lord molded these men into brotherhoods. He gave them an affection as fellow students and a bond that seemed to last forever, so that even when they were alone, they never felt lonely in the work of Jesus Christ, because not only was he with them, but those who loved him were their blood brothers.
Fifth, and last: none of this was primarily the fruit of seminary education. It was the fruit of the local churches to which these men belonged. They had been brought to new birth by the seed of God's word, under the ministry of God's word, in the context of congregational prayer, affection and love. Then they were, as it were, transplanted into the seedbed where they were shaped, matured and began to grow, and then, having been tested, sent out to the ends of the earth, because the word of God had been at work in them. It is a beautiful thing to see that, as far as I know, none of these men went to the mission field because of any high-pressure technique, but out of the simple awareness, in themselves and in those who knew them best, that the word of God was at work in them, producing the conviction that this was God's purpose for their lives.
I'm not sure how completely happy E. M. Bounds would have been in Geneva, or at Princeton, or in St Andrews. But I am pretty sure the men who taught these young men would have been very happy with his most famous statement: men are God's method; while the church is looking for better methods, God is looking for better men. As we think about the history of the church and reflect on seasons like these, we need to turn to him and say: Lord, will you not do it again in our day, for your glory and for the honor of your Son, Jesus? We need the Holy Spirit to come upon simple men and women in great abundance if the Great Commission is to be fulfilled. Will you not do it again, and do it in the churches to which we belong?
Lord, we come to you as your people, your servants, looking to you as servants look to the hand of their master and maidservants to the hand of their mistress, until you have mercy on us and on our world. Thank you that you have given us not only the history of your redemption in Scripture but such wonderful illustrations of how your word works in the lives of men and women and young people who have gone before us, of whom the world was not worthy. We are encouraged, even inspired, and given hope, because you who did these things in the past are able to do them in the present and again in the future. As we gather to think about sending, we pray, Lord Jesus, head of the church: call out and send people like this to the ends of the earth for the glory of your name. Help us to spot them, encourage them, direct them, pray fervently for them, sustain them, and hold the rope for them when they go. As we come to the end of our day together, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.