Missions¹

R M M’Cheyne

The Christian mind derives many very great advantages from thinking constantly about missionary subjects.

1. A spirit of intercession on behalf of the heathen is encouraged. It was when Jesus “saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion on them,” and bade His disciples pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth labourers into His harvest (Mt 9:36-38). This shows how completely the Son of God was also the Son of man, for with us it is always the sight of the object that calls forth the emotion. We come; we see; we are conquered. It was when Paul “saw the city wholly given to idolatry” that “his spirit was stirred in him” (Acts 17:16). The eye affected the heart. Just so will it be with every Christian mind. Set him down like Buchanan² among the myriads that shout around the car of Juggernaut,³ or like Gützlaff⁴ among the idolaters of China, and the man who is a follower of Paul, as he was of Christ, will be “stirred in spirit” and “moved with compassion”, and one vent of the full heart will be in prayer to the Lord of the harvest.

But we who sit at home cannot see the spirit-stirring sight; we are cut off from this influence to drive us to our knees. Nor can any written information wholly make up this deficiency. To hear with the ear will never produce so powerful an effect as to see with the eye. Yet, in the absence of the greater influence, how dare we neglect to use the lesser? When we cannot see, how dare we refuse to hear? If we live in ignorance of the state of the heathen world, how can we pray intelligently on its behalf? If we content ourselves with general notions of its idolatries and barbarities and struggles against the

¹Taken, with editing, from The Scottish Christian Herald for 1836.

²Claudius Buchanan (1766-1815), a Scot who was a missionary in India with the Church Missionary Society, an Anglican body.

³An idol of the Hindu god Krishna, in Orissa, India, which was drawn on an enormous cart under whose wheels devotees are said to have thrown themselves to be crushed

⁴Karl Gützlaff (1803-1851) was a German missionary to the Far East.

light, shall not our petitions be general, unfervent and ineffectual? On the prayers of the children of God depends the coming of the kingdom and the conversion of the heathen, as it is said in Psalm 2, “Ask of Me”.

Should not every child of God bring himself under those influences which shall bind him to intelligent, fervent, effectual prayer for this. Come then, true child of God, who are bound to the service of Christ in your native soil; come and let us gather food for meditation from the records of faithful men who have jeopardised their lives in the high places of heathenism, and let us be stimulated to pray. Let us give ear to these spies of the land of darkness, so that when they tell us of some spot where grace is beginning to drop from above like the first drops of a thunder shower, our prayers, mingled with thanksgivings, may arise with interest and information on this in particular. Or when they tell us of some stronghold of Satan, fortified on every side by superstition, self-righteousness and lust, let our united cry ascend into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth: “Have respect unto the covenant, for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty”.

1. Contact with missionary subjects helps personal holiness. We find that God looked upon “forbidding the preaching of the Word to the Gentiles (1 Th 2:16) as filling up the cup of sins – the crowning transgression of the Jewish people. Conversely, to enable faithful men to preach the Word to the Gentiles is one of the essential virtues of the child of God. And if it is a good and gracious thing to send grace, it is the continuation of this grace to look after them, to sympathise with their difficulties and encouragements, to weep with them when they weep over obstinate sinners, to rejoice with them and the angels when they rejoice over one sinner that repents. But love increases and abounds, the better it knows its object; increase of appetite seems to grow by what it feeds on; and the sure effect of an increasing and abounding love to all men is a surer establishment in personal holiness (1 Th 3:12,13).

The very effort of sending a man to convert others makes us ask the question: “Am I myself converted?” The very sight of so many millions left in ignorance of the only name “whereby we must be saved”, whilst we have heard it from our infancy, overpowers the believing mind with an abiding sense of the sovereignty of God and the freeness of electing love. Privileges are used more ardently; thanksgivings are offered more feelingly; the question, What have I that I did not receive? is graven more durably on the heart.

And if God does bless the efforts of our missionaries, how is every grace of the new nature stirred into a burning flame! When a Greenlander, a Hindu, or a Chinese becomes a believer in Jesus, when the same gracious feelings which sparkled in our bosoms when first we saw the Lord have evidently got possession of these once-barbarian souls, when we can trace a kindredness

of sentiment and affection, and a oneness of spirit with them, then we remember that it is written, “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another”. Our lagging faith is by sympathy quickened into active exercise. The flame of our “first love” is rekindled, and we hasten to “do the first works”.

1. Contact with missionary subjects makes us watch more anxiously the coming of the kingdom. When the world “shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them”. To them “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night”. But the children of God “are not in darkness that that day should overtake [them] as a thief”. Does this Bible truth not imply that the saints are watchful and intelligent as to the signs of the times? And is not the state of the Jewish and heathen world the very page to which we must chiefly look for signs of the latter-day glory? “When the branch [of the fig-tree] is yet tender and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh.” So likewise there shall be infallible signs of the coming of the season when the Beloved shall speak and say unto his bride: “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.”

These buddings and premonitions of the coming summer of our world, “none of the wicked shall understand, but the wise shall understand”. And why? Just because “the wise”, those taught of God, are not fools, nor are they slow of heart to believe all that is written concerning the coming of the kingdom of Jesus. They are watching for the first vibrations of that shaking of the earth and the heavens that shall usher in the kingdom “that cannot be moved”. Where is the intelligent child of God who is not even now looking with most intense interest on the movements now taking place in India, and on the strange spirit of enquiry that within these few years has caused such a shaking in the Jewish community, like the shaking of the dry bones in the open valley? Will he not look on them as on the first streaks of the eastern sky before the breaking of the day – the day when, “the fulness of the Gentiles” being come in, “all Israel shall be saved”, the day when the whole temple is completed of which Christ is the foundation stone, cornerstone and top-stone? Then the Lord shall “be glorified in His saints, and . . . admired in all them that believe”.

Child of God, do not sleep as others do but, having your own heart established with grace, go on asking the anxious question: “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?” And then shall the answer be returned to you: “The morning cometh!”

If a man will but seriously consider what it is to have this great God, the Governor of the world, to be an enemy, one would judge that he would think this gospel good news.

John Preston