"Lighting the Fire"
Jotting – Week 35

Send Gifts

“Send missionaries to those places where you cannot go yourself to proclaim the Gospel.” This is the fifth mission response to Ablaze!

How do we do that? How do we send people to do work in faraway places–places we might like to visit–or not, places where we would never be able to go?

When Jesus sent the 12 disciples to preach to the lost sheep of Israel and say that the Kingdom of God was near, He told them, “Provide neither gold nor silver nor copper in your money belts, nor bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor staffs; for a worker is worthy of his food” (Matthew 10:9-10). Very likely, Jesus wanted these men to know that they could depend on Him to provide for their daily needs through the donations of those to whom they preached.

In many areas of our world today, people are so poor they barely have enough to feed themselves. Missionaries in those places must rely on their salaries and on gifts from the church at large not only to put food on their tables, but to supply the needs of others as well. Often church homes are started before a building is erected. Money must come from somewhere to build–and it’s more than probable that gifts are made by people like you and me in order for this to happen.

Your gifts help train pastors, teachers, and lay people to go into places in foreign countries–even in our own country–to preach the Gospel, to teach others the saving work of Jesus, to love others in Jesus’ name. Your gifts support them while they are there, help them reach out to those who have never heard of Jesus, help establish congregations around the globe.

Your gifts help raise up native missionaries in countries where the Gospel is being preached. This is necessary for several reasons: People within a culture understand and work within a culture more efficiently than those who come from the outside. They understand their people’s economic and social conditions, they already speak the language, their witness is more acceptable to the people who are like them in almost every way. Their training is less costly than for those who come from outside the culture, for they don’t have to learn a new language; they already live at the economic level of many of the people they are trying to reach; and they don’t leave after a specified number of years.

Sometimes, those from the outside go in to help those who are within become established. Many countries are curtailing the number of foreign workers in their countries. New missionaries have been discouraged from going to India since the 1960's. In China, over 100 foreign missionaries have been expelled from the country between April and June of this year as a result of the government’s efforts to stop the spreading of the Gospel before the Beijing Olympics.

Tim Nickel, missionary in Kyrgyzstan, recently wrote: “The Parliament has decreed a quota of the number of foreigners that are allowed to work in the country. They reduced the quota to 4200, meaning that perhaps 1400 foreigners will have to leave and that it will be almost impossible for new missionaries or volunteers to come.” In that same letter, however, Tim also wrote of how the grace of God is blessing the national church in its growth and leadership, and that this “maturing church body is ... preparing to leave the nest and become more and more independent.”

Also reported was that at the first Annual Central Asia Lutheran Conference, “about 50 people pledged to witness to almost 10,000 unreached people during the next year, by April, 2008.” They are taking the mission of Ablaze! seriously. (Information from “Kyrgyzstan Konnection,” April 20, 2007.)

It’s your gifts that make this kind of mission work possible: sending people out to help establish churches in countries where people sit in the darkness of sin, hopeless and without a future. It’s your gifts that help train native pastors and other workers so that, when the Western missionaries leave, the work of the Lord will continue in that place.

Sometimes your gifts sponsor short-term missionaries who go into a country for 10 days to three weeks. “Teams teach English primarily in Lutheran schools, where the curriculum is Bible-based, and typically only about 20 percent of students are Christian” (from “Serve on a Short Term Mission Trip: http://www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=9999).

Your gifts produce resources and materials that missionaries use in their work. Your gifts support mission projects (see http://www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=6410). Your gifts support mission work done both nationally and internationally. Today The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod is working, has working partnerships, or has historical work in about 85 countries, including the United States.

The state of Texas is growing by more than 400,000 people each year, many of whom do not know Jesus as their Savior. Your gifts help establish new missions, help congregations begin second sites or daughter congregations, support mission personnel in various areas of work around the district–all to reach people with the saving news of the Gospel.

A number of years ago, a great effort was made by those in the entertainment world to gather monies for an African country stricken from famine. One thing that stuck with me was that those who gave the most had the least to give. I believe that’s because they knew what it was like to go hungry, to be without. They discovered that someone had even less than they did, others were even more deprived. (Sounds a little like the widow who put two mites into the treasury (see Matthew 12:41-44).  I believe that God blesses us with much so that we can give much.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “Moreover, brethren, we make known to you the grace of God bestowed on the churches of Macedonia: that in a great trial of affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded in the riches of their liberality. For I bear witness that according to their ability, yes, and beyond their ability, they were freely willing, imploring us with much urgency that we would receive the gift and the fellowship of the ministering to the saints. And not only as we had hoped, but they first gave themselves to the Lord, and then to us by the will of God” (2 Corinthians 8:1-5).

So give, first of yourselves to the Lord, then ask Him to use the gifts He has given you in order that His great commission might be carried out, that workers would be sent into the harvest, reaping souls for an eternity of joy with Him.

Pray: Father in heaven, You have blessed us with so many earthly gifts. Let us truly use them for the purpose You meant them to be. Give us hearts, Lord, to see how the darkness of sin is keeping captive not only bodies, but souls of people, people You love and for whom You sent Jesus to die. Open our hearts, Father, open our hands, so that we become cheerful givers, wanting and enjoying giving for the purpose of sending others into the harvest fields where we ourselves cannot go. Bless the gifts we give, then, for the sake of Your Kingdom. In the name of Jesus. Amen.