He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" - Romans 8:32

Wednesday, November 28, 2012 

Now Why This Fear?

from Sovereign Grace Music:

VERSE 1
Now why this fear and unbelief?
Has not the Father put to grief
His spotless Son for us?
And will the righteous Judge of men
Condemn me for that debt of sin
Now canceled at the cross?

CHORUS
Jesus, all my trust is in Your blood
Jesus, You’ve rescued us
Through Your great love

VERSE 2
Complete atonement You have made
And by Your death have fully paid
The debt Your people owed
No wrath remains for us to face
We’re sheltered by Your saving grace
And sprinkled with Your blood

BRIDGE
How sweet the sound of saving grace
How sweet the sound of saving grace
Christ died for me

VERSE 3
Be still my soul and know this peace
The merits of your great high priest
Have bought your liberty
Rely then on His precious blood
Don’t fear your banishment from God
Since Jesus sets you free

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 

Don't Complicate the Missionary Call


The following article is written by David Sitton, a dear friend of the FAI family. It was included as an Appendix in Dalton Thomas’ book Unto Death. David is the founder of To Every Tribe and the Center for Pioneer Church Planting.
~
I chuckle when I hear missionaries say they “surrendered to the call” of ministry. I always want to ask, “After you surrendered, were you waterboarded, or just hauled off in handcuffs and leg irons?” Was it really necessary for you to be abducted by a heavenly vision before you would go joyfully into the work of the Gospel in unreached places?

The missionary call is not like a prison dog that tracks us down, sniffs us out, and hog-ties us for the nations. That kind of talk bugs me! It’s bad theology. Nowhere in Scripture is a “mysterious (supernatural) call” a prerequisite before we can respond to the Great Commission.  The opposite is actually true.

Don’t Wait for a Call
No aspect of mission is more bogged down with extra-biblical baggage than the “Missionary Call.” The clear command of Christ “to go” should be, by itself, sufficient to set you on your way to unreached regions.
You can’t go wrong by trying to go. Be aggressive to go. The Lord will direct your moving feet.
Do you know how 99% of the cross-cultural workers for the Gospel in the book of Acts got to the unreached places? In a detailed missiological study of the book of Acts, Bob Sjogren breaks it down for us.
- 99% of the missionaries in Acts went cross-cultural because of one reason: Persecution.
What about the other 1%?
- 74% served cross-culturally because the apostle Paul challenged them to go.
- 18% went because their local churches sent them.
- 7% went simply because of their zeal and desire to do it![1]
Dramatic calls to ministry are the exception. If you have it in your heart to go, then go. And lean on the sovereignty of God to get you where He wants you in the harvest.
Try to Go

Paul tried to go into Asia, but the Lord wouldn’t let him. He then tried to go to Bithynia, but “the Holy Spirit forbade him.” Still, he kept trying to go. I count at least six cities in Acts 16:1-6 where Paul tried to take the Gospel. It was only then that the Lord gave him a vision of the Macedonian. He woke up the next morning and immediately headed for the regions north. The point? Get radical with the going and God will get radical in the specific guiding.
I was never called to be a missionary. I wasn’t drafted. I volunteered. No special call was needed. I chose to go. I want to go. I am compelled to go. Where I go is determined by an open Bible (Romans 15:20-21) and a stretched-out map of unreached regions where Jesus isn’t known.  Going for Jesus and with Jesus to the ends of the Earth is the privilege of a lifetime.


[1] Bill and Amy Stearns, Run With The Vision, (Bethany House Publishers), 125-126.

Monday, November 19, 2012 

How God Makes a Pencil

Brilliant.

Saturday, November 17, 2012 

The Hour that Shook Japan


Sunday, November 11, 2012 

Reconsecration by Ralph Winter

The essence of the Great Commission today is that the survival of many millions of people depends on its fulfillment. But obedience to the Great Commission has more consistently been poisoned by affluence than by anything else. The antidote for affluence is reconsecration. Consecration is by definition the“setting apart of things for a holy use.”

WILL WARTIME PRIORITIES WORK?
The missionary tradition has always stressed a practical measure of austerity and simplicity as well as a parity of level of consumption within its missionary ranks. But the same lifestyle is often seen as impractical among the people back home. Widespread reconsecration to a reformed lifestyle with wartime priorities is not likely to be successful among home-front believers:

• So long as the Great Commission is thought impossible to fulfill;
• So long as we think that the problems of the world are hopeless or that, conversely, they can be solved merely by politics or technology;
• So long as our home problems loom larger to us than anyone else’s;
• So long as people enamored of western culture do not understand that Chinese and Muslims can become evangelical Christians without abandoning their cultural systems—just as the Greeks did in Paul’s day;
• So long as modern believers, like the ancient Hebrews, think that God’s sole concern is the blessing of our nation;
• So long as well-paid evangelicals, both pastors and people, consider their money a gift from God to spend however they wish on themselves rather than a responsibility from God to help others in spiritual and economic need;
• So long as we do not understand that he who would seek to save his life shall lose it.

Ours is a save-yourself society if there ever was one. But does it really work? Underdeveloped societies  suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, and so on. Affluent North America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, etc. And we’re more than ever plagued with the social diseases of drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, abused children, suicide, murder.

Take your choice. Our divorce courts, prisons, psychiatric offices and mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves, we have nearly lost ourselves.

HOW HARD HAVE WE TRIED TO SAVE OTHERS?
The 8000 members of the Friends Missionary Prayer Band of South India support 80 fulltime missionaries in North India. If my denomination (with its unbelievably greater wealth per person) were to do that well, we would not be sending 500 missionaries but 26,000. In spite of their true poverty, these Indian believers are proportionately sending 50 times more cross- cultural missionaries than we are!

The statistics are always embarrassing: We spend as much on chewing gum annually as we do on missions; our annual giving to foreign missions is equal to the amount we spend in a 52-day period on pet food. The comparisons aren’t fair, of course, since fewer of our society are giving to the fulfillment of the Great Commission than are buying pet food. But the pattern of our society is clear—we’re much like Ezekiel’s listeners:

“They come as though they are sincere and sit before you listening. But they have no intention of doing what I tell them to; they talk very sweetly about loving the Lord, but with their hearts they are loving their money.…

“My sheep wandered through the mountains and hills and over the face of the earth, and there was no one to search for them or care about them.… As I live, says the Lord God …you were no real shepherds at all, for you didn’t search for them [my flock]. You fed yourselves and let them starve.… Therefore, the Lord God says: ‘I will surely judge between these fat shepherds and their scrawny sheep… and I will notice which is plump and which is thin, and why!’”
—Ezekiel 33:31; 34:36; 34:8,20,22b.

We must be willing to adopt a wartime lifestyle if we are to play fair with the clear intent of Scripture. God is speaking here of more than just food for the hungry; our whole lives may be “plump” while others’ are “scrawny.”

We must learn that Jesus meant it when He said, “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.” I believe that God cannot expect less from us in our Christian duty to save other nations than we in wartime require of ourselves to save our own nation.


This means that we must be willing to adopt a wartime lifestyle if we are to play fair with the clear intent of  Scripture that the people who sit in darkness shall see a great light. Otherwise, as Isaiah said, “I faint when I hear what God is planning” -- Isaiah 21:3.


WHAT DO WE DO?
The essential tactic in adopting a wartime lifestyle is to build on pioneer mission perspective by a very simple and dramatic method. Those who are awakened from the groggy stupor of our times can, of course, go as missionaries. But they can also stay home and deliberately and decisively adopt a missionary support level as their standard of living and their basis of lifestyle regardless of income.

This will free up an unbelievable amounts of money—so much so that if a million average Presbyterian  households, for example, were to live within the average minister’s salary, it would create at least two billion “new” dollars annually. What a mighty gift to the nations if carefully spent on developmental missions!

To reconsecrate ourselves to a wartime lifestyle will involve a mammoth upheaval for a significant minority. But with ends as noble as the Great Commission, a wartime lifestyle is an idea whose time has come. †

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