Matthew 28:18-19

THE LAST COMMAND

‘All power … go ye … all nations.’

Matthew 28:18

Here we have (1) The Command and (2) The Reason for it. Let the command be obeyed in remembrance of—

I. The sender.

II. The promised power.

III. All that the missionary commission means to the heathen.

IV. What that commission means to the organised Church.

V. The Great Day of Account.

Illustration

‘The Rev. W. Carey, of Dacca City, writes: “And Jesus went about all the cities, and the villages, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom.” And the villages—that was the word that rang in our ears. How many villages would there be in this one district of Dacca? We looked at the map, unrolled it, and spread it on the table. It was just a black mass of names, and every name a village. Had these villages been visited with the Gospel?… We put the map in the pulpit, and there were great searchings of heart under the sermons it preached. The Church took up the matter, and prayed and planned, and planned and prayed, till something definite was done. A letter was written, and printed, and addressed to the principal men in all the villages of a certain section of the district. It was a call to repentance and the fear of God, and it was followed by a band of preachers who spent a month going from village to village with the life-giving message of the Cross. They were well received. They sent in glowing reports as they went along, and the Church sustained them with prayer. It was a new experience and a new joy. They went in the faith that God had prepared hearts in every place, and so it fell out. They visited twenty-two villages, and preached to 2900 people, most of whom had never heard the way of salvation before. But if they continue the tour, spending one day only in each village, and working all through the year, it will take them fourteen years to complete the task,” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF MISSIONS

The Christian man, anxious to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in him, ought not to overlook the evidential value of foreign missions.

I. Consider the commission given by Christ to His Church as impossible on the theories that (a) the Apostles were fraudulent persons; or (b) were the victims of hallucination. Persons consciously engaged in a fraud would surely devise some commission which was within the range of obvious possibility, perhaps attainable within their own lives. Their plans would be comparatively modest. There would be nothing to alarm the timid or invite criticism. Persons who were the subjects of hallucination would certainly be affected by the nature of the commission given to them. They would speedily be restored to their senses by the conflict with what seemed the impossible. Their hallucination would hardly survive torture or other experiences which fell to the lot of the Christians in apostolic times.

II. Observe the nature of Christ’s commission.

(a) It is a message to the whole world, to Jew and Gentile, to the keenest intellects, the proudest philosophy, and the highest civilisation then known, and to the deepest ignorance, the cruellest barbarism. What a task for the exponents of fraud or the victims of hallucination!

(b) It was a message contemplating a universal brotherhood: All its members to be received by the same symbol, all to accept the same creed, all to obey the same moral law, all—Jew and Gentile, learned and simple, master and slave—to be brothers. How absurd as the project of fraud or hallucination! No, the task to which the infant Church set itself is in its nature one which witnesses for the truth of the message it has to set before the world.

III. The enormous difficulty of the task must not, however, be accepted as an excuse for indifference to it or for slackness in carrying it out. There must be no saying—‘Well, the task is so overwhelming that we may be forgiven if we take it slowly.’ Rather must the Church of to-day mark the example of the Apostolic Church—the promptness, the simplicity, of its obedience to Christ’s command; the immensity of its sacrifices in proportion to ours; the sternness of the conditions under which it worked compared with ours.

Reflecting on these, the Church of to-day should address itself with new energy to the task of carrying out its Master’s command. Its zeal in so doing supplies one measure of its belief in Him as its own Saviour.

(THIRD OUTLINE)

AUTHORITY, COMMISSION, AND SUPPORT

The apostles are sent with (1) authority, (2) a complete commission, (3) the assurance of Divine support.

I. The authority ends all doubt as to whether missionary work should be undertaken.

II. The commission fits out the worker with a clear conception of his duty—(a) to preach Christ, (b) to offer a covenant, (c) to unfold a code of conduct.

III. The assurance of Divine support meets the necessities both of sorely tried evangelists and pastors in the mission-field, and of the waiting Church at home, also tried, though in other ways, in regard to this work.

Illustration

‘Of another man, Khaleel, and his wife, the Rev. W. H. T. Gairdner, of the Egypt and London Mission of the C.M.S., says:—“He had been to the Azhar as a youth. Six years he learned the Koran by heart, and six years more he studied in the Azhar. Yet when he left, at the age of about eighteen, he found that he had no satisfaction, no satisfying idea or knowledge of God. He tried complete agnosticism for four years; that did not satisfy either. Then, and not till then, did it occur to him to try the utterly despised Nazarene religion: a desperate resort! He got hold of the Bible, and, Egyptian-like, began at the first page. At the end of Genesis 1 he said to himself, ‘Very good!’ Then slowly, but apparently very surely, he went solemnly through the whole Old Testament. It took him years! The end of that stage was that he developed into a sort of Unitarian, but with a great love for all manner of Christian fellowship. Finally, fuller reflection convinced him of the full Apostolic faith, and I have not yet met an Egyptian with a clearer grip of that faith. He has a perfectly Ignatian desire for martyrdom, which he quite believes will fall to him, and I once heard him earnestly addressing his wife (squatting in front of him) in these terms: ‘Now then, woman, when I am gone you just remember one thing—Jesus is alive and Mohammed dead. What have you to do with a dead man?’ The ‘woman’ nods sagely, and for the hundredth time gets her mind round the fact that ‘Jesus is alive and Mohammed dead.’ I have heard quite independently that when the Mohammedan women came around, having heard that she was going to be baptized, and heckled her as to her reasons, she replied with but the one statement, ‘Jesus is alive and Mohammed dead; how can a dead man save?’ When they came for baptism they made their answers in a loud voice, first Khaleel, then the wife, then the godparents for the children—in succession answering each question. Then Khaleel entered the water and was baptized with great joy. Then Rifka (Rebekah), with prodigious self-possession, entered the water. So keen was she that she gasped out, ‘And of the Holy Ghost,’ as she emerged and heard the last words of the solemn sentence. So she also went up out of the water. Then came the children.” ’