Missionaries

 April 28, 2022

Talking with my son last week, My friend pastor Tim Burden posts a daily vlog devotional. This morning, he said something that has stuck with me all day, especially in light of my son’s words to me last week. Nathan told me he has no fear regarding the tumors in his brain, and that he felt almost giddy about the opportunities this was giving him to tell people about Jesus. His diagnosis has made him realize all the more how fragile life is, and highlights the urgency he feels to spread the Gospel.

In the light of my conversation with Nathan, pastor Tim’s remarks were particularly telling. His was a simple statement: “A missionary is not someone who crosses the seas, but someone who sees the cross.” 

We tend to think of mission work as traveling to some exotic place where every waking moment is spent speaking to people about Christ, when in fact, much of the work of international missions is quite mundane. Our fantasies about international missions obscures and impedes the work of spreading the Gospel right where we are. As pastor Burden implied, we miss the opportunities all around us because we’re looking at the wrong things. If we truly understood the message of the cross; that in it God provided the atonement for our sins and opened the door to eternal life; if we believed that apart from that cross mankind would be irretrievably lost, but through Jesus’ death God has given us new life, we would realize and embrace the fact that we are missionaries right here at home.