The Call to Missionary Work
By A. T. Pierson
AND what about the being “sent”? The duty of the church to send out missionaries is often urged on the basis of this expression, but personally I doubt very much whether it refers to the church at all except in a very secondary sense. Jesus Christ taught us a great lesson in Matt. 9:36-38, when he looked abroad and saw the multitude fainting, being harried as by wolves, as sheep that had no shepherd, and his great heart went out in infinite compassion for them. What did he say? “Go and urge men to tell the story?”—Not a word of the sort. “Go and make missionary appeals, and what some people call ‘rousements’?”—No. “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest.” If I, by the turning of my hand, could induce every one of you to go to a foreign mission field, I would not dare to do it; it might be a damage for some of you to go. I am not saying this except in deepest seriousness. No man is competent to judge of the gifts and graces of any believer, and especially of the field to which any believer might appropriately go; but our Heavenly Father makes no mistakes. He knows the man, the woman, the field, the circumstances, the exposure—climatic exposure, exposure in the way of false faiths, persecutions, oppositions. God alone knows the needs, he knows the demands, the requirements, and he knows the capacity—mental, physical, and spiritual—of any disciple to meet those demands. Therefore our Lord turns all attention to him who alone can thrust forth into his harvest-field laborers that are fitted to endure the burden and heat of the day. And in the thirteenth chapter of the Acts the principle of the ninth of Matthew is illustrated and enforced. The church at Antioch was spending its time in fasting and praying, and during this period the Holy Spirit said: “Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them,” and when the Spirit had first designated Barnabas and Saul, then the church sent them forth with blessing. But the last glimpse we have of them is in these words: “So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed.” One great mischief and mistake of the church’s history has been that of deciding too much on the qualifications of candidates by human wisdom, and not sufficiently waiting on God to know what men and women he had sealed and anointed and is ready to send forth. There is no time when the church needs to wait on God in lowliness of spirit, and with profoundest prayer and most humiliating fasting, more than when looking around for men and women to go to the foreign field. One of the greatest of modern missionaries told me that, in a projected tour round the world, which I had in mind at that time, I would be bitterly disappointed. And he said: “I want to prepare you in one respect for disappointment. A great many, attracted by the romance of missions, have gone out to missionary fields without proper waiting upon God and without any true anointing of the Spirit; and when the romance fades away, and they have to face the bold, bare, rugged crags of what had been to them a violet-clad prospect in the distance, they are too proud to acknowledge that they are not in their place and come home, and so they stay, and go round in a perfunctory fashion doing the duties that require an angelic devotion to perform properly.” God’s method of missions is for him to do the sending, and for you and me to do the waiting to find out whom he will send; and there is no question that if he sends, he will raise up the means to support.—Rev. A. T. Pierson, D. D.