The Purpose of This Blog

In response to the challenge by the Southern Baptist Convention that churches take on the task to share the gospel with unengaged unreached people groups, the missions team of Harmony Pittsburg Baptist Association felt the need for a way to focus prayer on the task. This blog is intended to facilitate prayer for those contemplating their role in fulfilling the Great Commission. This on-line prayer guide may prove useful to those exploring a call to missions involvement as well as to those who have sensed a call to pray for those who will go to the front lines.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Jonah: The Reluctant Missionary Part 4

Jonah and the Lord are in a contest of wills.  It is God's will that Jonah preach to a people not his own.  Jonah doesn't want to.  Jonah knows what God wants him to do, but he would rather follow his own desires.  How far will Jonah take his resistance?  How far will God go to get His man on mission?  I believe it was my dad who told me when I was a teen-ager, "I can't make you do anything, but I can make you wish you had."  He told me he learned that lesson in the army.  I doubt that Jonah had even an inkling of what God was prepared to do to get his participation in the plan.

God doesn't always use such extreme measures as He did with Jonah to get us to do His will.  Sometimes His punishment is to let us have our way (with all the consequences that that choice entails).  We can't know for sure what God will do if we ignore His call to the nations, but we can see through Jonah's example what resistance to God's will brings us to: self-destruction.  In his showdown with God, Jonah preferred to be thrown into the sea in the middle of a raging storm rather than to repent of his self-will.  He would rather have died than do what God wanted him to do.  He shows us that to choose our way over God's leads in the end to disaster.  "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death" (Proverbs 16:25 NKJV).

How many parents have endured the anguish of seeing a child ignore their wisdom to pursue a course of action that leads to pain and suffering?  How many teachers have experienced the frustration of seeing a student waste his life by making choices he/she was warned against?  How many pastors have watched their clear teaching of the Bible be ignored by church members who pursued their own desires to their detriment?  Any time we choose our way instead of God's way we have chosen the path of destruction.

But there is a further lesson.  In a spiritual sense, Jonah shows us what we must do.  We must die.  We must die to self.  Jesus was clear that this kind of death is not optional for His followers (Luke 9:23-24; 14:25-26; John 12:24-25).  The apostle Paul (Galatians 2:20) shows us what the Lord can do with a life that has died to its own willfulness in order to follow His bidding to the nations.  What keeps us from doing whatever it takes to carry the gospel to the 3,800 unengaged unreached people groups?  Is it not our preference for our own comfort and pleasures?  Or perhaps it is a stubborn persistence in our own way of thinking that refuses to acknowledge God's desire for His name to be known among all peoples?

How long will we continue to ask God to bless our way instead of asking Him to use us in His way?  As we pray today, we will choose one or the other.  Let's be careful what we pray for.

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