p. 8 | Home and Foreign Work

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 7, 1901

Home and Foreign Work

W. A. Spicer: I have often felt that we make too much of a distinction between home and foreign work. We feel that it is something very strange to go abroad. I believe that every worker in a

foreign land has seen persons come into the field whose usefulness was marred, perhaps fatally, by a feeling of inflation,—“I have been chosen to go abroad; I have been chosen to go into foreign fields.” And we at home help that on by keeping up that distinction, and putting around the foreign work a sort of halo of romance and glory. It makes me feel ashamed every time anybody talks to me that way.

The foreign work is just the same as any other part of the Lord’s work. We have such a spirit of provincialism that we sometimes think it is a tremendous feat to go somewhere. But the world is really very small. The Lord counts all the nations of the earth “as the small dust of the balance; behold, He taketh up the isles as a very little thing.” But sometimes men get an idea that the earth is so big, that it turns their heads to go halfway around it. We simply want to go at the work quietly, without talking nonsense about it, and have good, simple, saving sense. The Lord’s work is the Lord’s work; saving souls is saving souls; and I can not feel the way some appear to feel about different spots on this earth. I never have been in a place yet, traveling about, but what I felt as if I would like to stop there and go to work.

If God sends you somewhere, go to that place, and go to work. That is all there is about it. Really, the most important thing in a foreign field is not the particular training the man has had (that is important), but it is the simple question as to whether he has good-sense. It is just what the man is himself, just the influence and force that he himself carries. That is what makes the man. Let him, then, be a medical man with a medical education, or let him be a preacher with experience in preaching the truth publicly; but no matter what the training, if there is not, down deep in the heart, a basis of good sense, just a settling down to the work of God without any nonsense, there will be a crushing, depressing failure. God calls us to take hold of this foreign work in a simple way, without recourse to methods and ideas, which popular religion sometimes resorts to in sending men and money into foreign fields. It is often taken up as something aside from their regular work. We are to do the work as the regular work of God, because the message is to go to every nation before the Lord comes.

We who are in America ought not to have the thought that the foreigner is a strange being; for America is made up of “foreigners.” We get rid of that after we get out for a few years among other people, and we find that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” Here in America the little children wonder why the children in India do not tumble off the earth, because, as it is thought, their heads are down. Over in India the children may think the same about American children. Sometimes you will see Americans abroad who say: “Why, how strange everything is! How strangely they do this! How strange that man looks!” I have heard people talk that way, who were not conscious at all that the crowd was eyeing them because they looked so strange. We are just as strange to other people as they are to us. If the Lord will take away the self-consciousness that ruins us, He can help us to reach the people a great deal better than we have allowed Him to do very often.

That thought of Americanism, of nationalism, is something to reckon with. I was born an American. I am not ashamed of it; but I am not proud of it; and that makes all the difference in the world in being able to help people outside of America; for any man who is proud of the fact that he is an American, has erected a barrier between himself and every soul who is not an American. Anybody who has been in a foreign field has observed that difficulties, which perhaps it has taken years to clear away, have been created by those who kept that national spirit forward. It is a part of the old paganism of Rome, which caused men to worship the genius of the empire, instead of God. That thing is so drilled into men that it clings to the natural heart. It was sometimes taught us in our schools, in the little school histories of the United States. It was worked into us, and made our hearts thrill with the fighting spirit. That same spirit keeps on thrilling in minds and hearts, even after men have entered the work of God, and gone out into foreign fields.

The Lord wants to take that spirit out of our hearts. We are to give this message of God in the spirit and power of Elijah. How did John the Baptist go forth when he bore the message of the coming Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah? We read in the first chapter of John: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.” He was “sent from God.” It makes all the difference in the world whether a man is sent from God, or whether he is sent from America or from some other land.

You find this spirit of nationalism in all lands. Wherever you go, in every nation you will find that same national conceit, and every man feels like praising and glorifying his country. Why?—Simply because it has produced “such a great man as I am;” that is all. It is simply the conceit of the individual in all the people, that creates that national spirit of rivalry and self-exaltation that is at the bottom of nearly every war that stirs our world.

That man John was “sent from God.” Oh, let us be sent from God! That is the way Jesus came on His mission. He knew that “He was come from God, and went to God,” and He could say: “He that sent me is with me.” It does one no good to take along from America a national feeling into the fields; but if you can be sent from God, and can say, “He that sent me is with me; the Father hath not left me alone,” you have something a great deal closer to you than America. When Jesus knew He was sent from God, and went to God, He knew something that we also need to know. Too many are sent from America, and they go to America. We want to be sent from God, and to have God’s house as our home. [Voices: Amen! ]

Abraham, the “father of the faithful,” who was sent out, “not knowing whither he went,” went simply because God called him to go. He did not care where he went, so long as God was with him. God said of him that he and his children “were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” He might have returned into the country out of which he came, we are told, if he had desired to do it; but he and those who had his faith testified that they were seeking “a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for He hath prepared for them a city.”

Many times friends have asked me if I were not glad to be back again in my native land. I can not feel that way at all. I am glad to see friends, glad to see my aged parents; but about the land, about the earth, how can I be glad about that? It is mainly like earth in any other place. If my work were here, I should be glad to be here; but my work is outside, and I am glad to be outside. I do believe if we let the Lord separate us from that provincialism, that spirit which the world calls patriotism, God will give us sentiments of another kind. The man going abroad who fosters that thing down in his heart, even though he may say to himself, “I will keep quiet about that; for I believe it will be discreet to do so, and not let the people know of it,” will find that it will come out in spite of his efforts to hold it inside, and that it will create in the foreigners’ hearts that same spirit of nationalism and opposition; it is a barrier to separate men.

I pray that the Lord will give us His love from heaven, that we may see the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and may understand that we have been born again. You remember what David says, in the eighty-seventh Psalm: “Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. I will make mention of Rahab [Egypt, a great land, a magnificent country, so proud of itself] and Babylon [that was “the glory of kingdoms”] to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there.” I suppose it would have been accounted a great credit to a man to have been born in Babylon, or to have been a member of the Egyptian kingdom. But what does the psalmist say?—“And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the Highest himself shall establish her. The Lord shall count, when He writeth up the people, that this man was born there.”

Oh, we want to be born again! I do not know of any more intensely practical issue in the consideration of the details of foreign missions than just that; and I believe every worker from abroad would say so. We have seen ruin just upon that point. I believe that when the Pentecostal blessing comes, it will come into some of these details, and straighten them out. We shall get hold of God. I do not care, when the Lord writes up His people, whether He puts it down (of course He will not do it) that I was born in the good State of Minnesota; but if He will put it down that I was born from above, born into the heavenly Zion, then He will establish me with His people. We need to be so thoroughly born again that we shall leave out these little trappings of nationalism.

This may be a suggestion to teachers in our schools, in the teaching of history, to beware lest they train the youth and children into these things that have made it so hard for multitudes to go out into the work of God.

As to the question of training workers, it is evident that the worker must be trained at home in the work itself. It is not that the man can get the training at home that may fit him for special details abroad; but still it is a fact that while the cry from abroad is not for clever, brilliant men at all, but for simple men, it is a cry for seasoned men. A stick of timber may be good and all right; but if it is not seasoned, it may give way, when the strain is put upon it. Just so with workers. We want to be seasoned in the work of God, that we may know in our hearts, and in our lives, and that the brethren may know, that we have settled down to God’s work in a sober, sensible, serious way. You can risk such a man almost anywhere.

The needs of the field are great; but it is not simply numbers that are needed in any field, but it is the right ones, the simple ones. We need not think that it requires some great human qualification to work abroad. Just simple sinners, such as we are, saved by the power of God, in the place where God wants them, can do His work. And so the Lord’s Spirit must seek out and choose His own workers. We need to be yielded to Him, so that, as He chooses, there may not be in any one of our hearts a holding back, but that we may say, when the Lord calls us, “Here am I; send me.”