Here, There, and Everywhere
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Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations & Quotes Those of You Who Know
At an old seminary, there was a custom that the president could call on any student on any day for that morning’s chapel sermon. One young man was petrified, and each day he dreaded going to chapel for fear he would be called upon. Sure enough, one day the president rose, looked over the audience, pointed directly at him, and said, “Young man, you are to preach our sermon today.”
The student rose, but as he ascended the platform he was a nervous wreck. Looking over the congregation, he couldn’t speak. His mouth was dry, his knees were knocking together, his hands were shaking, him mind was reeling, and he felt he had a biscuit stuck in his throat. Finally he stammered, “How many of you know what I am going to say today?”
Nobody raised a hand.
“Then neither do I,” he said, and sat down.
The next day as the students filed into chapel, the president again pointed to the young man, giving him a second time. But again, the young man was gripped with stage fright, his hands and knees shaking. With a tremor in his voice, he finally stammered, “How many of you know what I am going to say today?”
This time everyone raised their hand.
“Then if you already know, I don’t need to tell you,” the young man said and promptly sat down.
The president of the seminary was angry, but he decided to give the young man one last chance. The next day, he again called on the student, and this time the student was even more nervous than before. His mouth was thick and dry, and he felt he was going to faint. At last he muttered, “How many of you know what I am going to say today?”
This time, half the students raised their hands and the other half didn’t.
“Then those of you who know,” he said, “please tell those of you who don’t!”
And …
And that is what a missionary is. Those of us who know telling those who don’t.
Today, we’re going to talk about missionaries.
Some of you were at the Supply and Multiply dinner on Saturday and got a report about the ministry being done in Montrouis, Haiti, even in the midst of that nation’s current political upheval.
Supply and Multiply still has an American missionary on the ground there, even during this unrest, even in the midst of fuel and food shortages, gunfire and other violence around the nation and all the general turmoil.
I have a lot of respect for that missionary, Landon Violette, the young man with whom I served while I was in Haiti. And I have a lot of respect for the Haitian missionaries who are bringing the Good News of Jesus Christ to their lost countrymen.
Many of these folks have become family to me and to Annette, and part of the purpose of today’s message is to give you a report about my January trip.
SLIDES
Some of you may recall that I told of a young woman who gave her life to Christ while I was in Haiti.
That’s the reason we are there.
It’s the reason the Witts, whom this church supports, are in Africa. It’s the reason missionaries from this nation and others have left their homes and traveled to strange, exotic and sometimes dangerous places around the globe — to share the Good News of our Savior, who died so that we could live.
A couple of months ago, the name John Allen Chau was all over the news. Some of you may remember that he was the young man who was killed by the tribe he had gone to evangelize on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean.
The Sentinelese people — experts think there are only a few dozen of them — have made it clear they do not wish to have contact with the outside world, and most of the world seems eager to give them their wish.
But Chau believed in the Great Commission.
Matt 28
And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
He believed that this was a commandment given by Jesus Christ to His followers — not simply to churches, but to each person who calls Jesus “Lord.”
Even in his death, Chau has been roundly criticized, he has been called vicious names that his surviving family has had to witness, and the Great Commission itself has been mocked and ridiculed.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, published a surprisingly sensitive account of his life and his decision to go to a place where he wasn’t wanted, and I want to read a paragraph from it for you.
“Chau’s decision to contact the Sentinelese, who have made it clear over the years that they prefer to be left alone, was indefensibly reckless. But it was not a spontaneous act of recklessness by a dim-witted thrill-seeker; it was a premeditated act of recklessness by a fairly intelligent and thoughtful thrill-seeker who spent years preparing, understood the risks, including to his own life, and believed his purpose on Earth was to bring Christ to the island he considered ‘Satan’s last stronghold’.”
Chau believed that going to this place where he was not wanted was “his purpose on Earth.”
But was it?
Let’s look at Luke’s account of Jesus’ last words before He was taken up into the heavens.
but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”
Acts 1:8
I’d say that North Sentinel Island could clearly be defined as “the remotest part of the earth.”
Do you think Jesus loves the Sentinelese people?
Of course He does.
Do you think Jesus died so that THEY might have the opportunity for salvation?
Of course He did.
So how will they know this if someone doesn’t tell them?
How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?
So how will they
How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!”
The Sentinelese people did not recognize the beauty of this person who had come to bring them good news of good things.
The world does not recognize the beauty of those who share good news of good things.
But we who follow Christ should recognize it. We who follow Christ should do everything in our power to enable it. We who follow Christ should PARTICIPATE in it.
But look back at that verse in Acts, because there’s something important that you should not miss.
but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”
For Jesus’ disciples, hearing this pronouncement on the Mount of Olives and preparing to return to Jerusalem, where Jesus had told them to wait for the Holy Spirit, Jerusalem was “here.”
Most of us know that. But it’s easy to miss the context of what “here” meant for them.
Just 40 days earlier, Jesus had been crucified by the Roman occupiers of Jerusalem at the demand of an angry mob of Jews.
These people with whom the disciples were being told to share the Good News were a lot like the Sentinelese people — they didn’t want to hear from these missionaries. And it must have seemed to the disciples that Jesus was giving them a dangerous job.
But when the Holy Spirit came — the same Holy Spirit who inhabits each of us who has been saved — all 120 people who had been gathered in that upper room went out and began telling everyone they could find about the salvation offered by Jesus Christ.
They were the first missionaries, and their mission field was right outside the door of that house.
We recently hosted a group of homeless people for a week at this church. This was our Jerusalem for the week, and one of our guests told me that he had accepted Christ one night after someone had shared the Gospel with him.
Some of these folks did not want to hear this Good News. To them, we simply offered the love of Jesus Christ, demonstrated in hot meals, warm beds and clean showers.
A small group of people from this church recently visited the Autumn Care nursing home, where we had a beautiful, short service with a number of elderly people there.
We sang with them, I gave a blessedly short message, we talked with them, and then we spread out through the building to give away roses and little foam hearts and to pray with some of the residents who do not normally get visitors.
We showed them the love of Christ.
The truth is that this is much of what missionaries do, whether they are in Haiti, in Africa or in Suffolk.
We get to know people, we look for ways to serve them and we pray for opportunities to share the saving message of Christ’s atoning death, His resurrection and His ascension with hearts that have been made soft by the Holy Spirit.
So we know about Jerusalem, and we know about the remotest part of the earth. What about Judea and all Samaria? Were the people in those places eager to learn about Jesus from the new missionaries?
Well, it’s good to remember that many of the people of Judea had been in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, and they would have been part of the crowd that demanded his death for what they considered to be heresy.
So clearly they were another dangerous group for the missionaries to approach.
As for Samaria, the people there were distant relatives of the Jews. They were the descendants of those Jews that had remained in the land and intermarried with foreigners while their blood relatives were in exile in Babylon.
Ever since the Jews had returned to Israel after their exile, there had been bad blood between the “pure” Jews and their mixed-heritage neighbors.
You’ll recall, for instance, that the Samaritan woman at the well was shocked that Jesus would even speak to her.
So the new missionaries would not have expected to have a great welcome there, either.
But they went anyway.
Just like John Allen Chau, they believed they had clear marching orders from their Savior. They believed that THIS was why they had been put on earth.
And what was the result?
The book of Acts — especially the first few chapters — is an incredible account of how the church grew from 12 to 120 to 3,000 to 5,000 men (not counting women and children) to numbers too great to count.
And each one of those people is one person who will spend eternity in Heaven with Jesus, rather than in hell.
Make no mistake: THIS is what is at stake when we debate over whether we will be a church that takes missions seriously. THIS is what is at stake when we weigh the relative merits of keeping our investments secure or funding new ministry opportunities.
But more to the point of today’s message, THIS is what is at stake when you get home and see that neighbor you barely know. THIS is what is at stake when that person with the cartful of groceries at Walmart gets in front of you in the 10 items or less line and you think, “Aww, the hell with them.”
Now, I sincerely hope that nobody here would ever react that way, but the fact is that the law of averages — not to mention the law of human nature — suggests that most of us have had some similar thought before.
Scripture describes hell as:
The place of “eternal punishment”
“The lake of fire”
“The lake of fire and sulfur” where the lost “will be tormented day and night forever”
The place where, for the lost, “their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night”
A place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth”
And a place where the lost will “suffer the punishment of eternal destruction”
This is not a fate that Christians should wish for anybody, not even those who hate them and kill them, not even in jest.
John Allen Chau clearly desired to tell the people of North Sentinel Island how they could avoid the eternal torment of hell and come into the rest of their Father in Heaven.
Here’s a quote from a friend of Chau’s:
“'His motivation was love for the [Sentinelese] people. … If you believe in heaven and hell, then what he did was the most loving thing anyone could do.’” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/03/john-chau-christian-missionary-death-sentinelese#img-1)
And I submit to you that if these descriptions of Hell do not cause you to want to go out and tell someone about the Jesus who died to save them from it, then you do not have a very good understanding of either Hell or the matchless grace that saved you from it.
In his History of the Christian Church, Phillip Schaff wrote about the earliest believers, and what he wrote should give you a new perception about what it means to be a missionary.
“Every Christian told his neighbor, the laborer to his fellow laborer, the slave to his fellow slave, the servant to his master and mistress, the story of his conversion as a mariner tells the story of the rescue from shipwreck.” (Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol 2: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1910), 20–21.)
Missionaries are those of us who know telling those who don’t.
We who follow Jesus are called, in the words of a post on John Piper’s website, Desiring God, “to preach Christ to everyone, everywhere.”
The Great Commission is not a call only for your pastor. The Great Commission is a call for each person who has been saved by grace.
We who follow Jesus are called, as someone said recently, “to preach Christ to everyone, everywhere.” (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/he-knew-too-much-to-stay?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Email&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=69963472&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-85D6WHkG64KNbQ0CB5tb7ZiACMeApt4vNqh4sNVCiyWqn5cNoY1hvJwhvkZIaC6i9GfmKwyM7M-CBbc0Nj1OG5loWoAA&_hsmi=69963472)
Maybe you will never go with me to Haiti. I hope some of you will, but I also recognize that not everyone can make that trip.
But you can tell someone somewhere about Jesus. You can tell someone somewhere about the Savior who rescued you from the shipwreck of your lost life.
Where is your Jerusalem? Right outside that door. Right next door to your home. Right at work.
Where is your Judea? Maybe it’s Autumn Care. Or maybe it’s at your summer place. Or maybe it’s at the family reunion with those distant relatives who think they have no need of this Jesus or anybody who wants to talk about Him.
Go to Haiti. Or don’t. But go somewhere and tell someone.
Go and tell.
Go and tell.
Go and tell.