GOD’S END GOAL for THE WORLD

Lyndon Gan, MMS ExCo Member. He serves as a Lay Ministry Staff at Kampong Kapor Methodist Church. Over 30 years ago, he told God he would be happy to do Christian mission anywhere except in country X. He has since been involved in Christian mission in country X for over 30 years and enjoying it.

One of the key goals of MMS Vision 2025 is to enlarge the Tent of God among the unreached or least reached peoples of the world so that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9, NIV)

MMS is currently involved in seven countries in Asia. Within these countries and others in Asia, the harvest is plentiful and there are still vast numbers of unreached people in our region.

This region includes some places that are challenging to access and where there may be higher inherent risks for traditional missions activities. Add on the current pandemic with its restriction on travel, and there seems to be a host of obstacles to our goals of bringing the gospel to the least reached people.

“Take your stumbling-blocks, and turn them into stepping-stones.” John R. Mott (1865-1955), Evangelist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Mott was a Methodist layman and one of the key organisers of the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, Scotland in 1910. Over a hundred years later, we see plenty of obstacles to missions and yet each of these obstacles can be God opening our eyes to new opportunities. Opportunities we would not have considered if the obstacles were not there. Perhaps the presence of obstacles to Christian missions forces us to look again at what the Bible picture of the Mission of God is.

The Bible sees that the goal of God’s mission is for the new heaven and new earth to be joined together in a single whole.

The final scene in the Bible is that of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, so that “the dwelling place of God is with man.” (Revelations 21:1-3, ESV)

Since it is God’s mission to put the whole world right in the end by the power of the gospel so that He can dwell with humans, it follows that God places human beings who have been made right with Himself in this world with a mission to become part of his putting-right project for the earth. And the putting-right project must include putting right everything that is wrong with creation.

This understanding of the mission of God will help us to move beyond the tendency to focus the gospel only on the heart and the mind. The ‘heart’ could be moved to tears by the thought of Jesus standing knocking on the door, or the father embracing the prodigal son. The ‘mind’ could be persuaded by the clever apologist. But Jesus taught us to love God with our heart, mind, soul, and strength. The church can best represent the mission of God when it holds all four together. The ‘strength’ could be the energy that goes into works of justice and mercy. And the ‘soul’ could be works that reflect beauty and truth in this world. We need all four.

The early followers of Christ understood this and were able to live out the Mission of God, so that the gospel of Jesus was articulated loud and clear by their new patterns of life and community.

On page 20 of his book ‘Evangelism in the Early Church’, Michael Green said this of the early Christians: “They made the grace of God credible by a society of love and mutual care which astonished the pagans and was recognised as something entirely new. It lent persuasiveness to their claim that the New Age had dawned in Christ.”

In his book called ‘Who Is This Man?’, John Ortberg showed how the followers of Jesus completely changed the way the world approached education, medicine, and care of the poor, orphans, sick, and dying. Attitudes towards children, women, and slaves are radically transformed. The good news was subversive in that it helped to challenge the evil and put things right socially, culturally, economically, and politically. People could sense the warmth of the Creator’s love seeping into heart, mind, soul, and strength.

For too long, religion had become relegated to the private sphere and God was not necessarily welcomed in the public life. Christian missions too had followed and operated largely in the private sphere. Yet today, more than ever, the whole church of God needs to recover the early Christians’ ability to live out the mission of God in putting right the evil in every private or public sphere. Jesus in proclaiming the good news confronted not just the sinner, the demon-possessed, and the sick. His was a good news that reformed the way outsiders were treated, women were viewed, and citizens were obliged to society and authority, etc. If Jesus had good news for every sphere of life, Christian missions too needs to bring that good news in all walks of live.

The first followers of Jesus and the subsequent history of Christian missions appeared to have defined missions activities much wider than what we did in more recent times. Unless we extend the scope of mission to cover all spheres of life, we may be restricting the impact the good news of Jesus could have in putting things right in the world.

May each one of us have a clear view of God’s end goal for the world.

As we look to extending the scope of missions, may each one of us have a clear view of God’s end goal for the world and then prayerfully seek to know the part we must play in God’s Mission.