CHAPTER 10
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
Enough talk. Go live this.
You will be my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth.
JESUS (ACTS 1:8)
Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking into the sky?
CHEEKY ANGELS (ACTS 1:11)
What a fitting end to your career Dr. Jones. You’re about to become a permanent part of this archaeological find. Who knows? Maybe in a thousand years, you might actually be worth something.
BELLAQ TO INDIANA JONES WHEN IT SEEMED IT WAS ALL OVER
When I was a kid, I had a Sesame Street book called The Monster at the End of This Book, featuring the furry, blue monster Grover, begging you not to turn the pages. He warned of a monster at the end of the book. As each page turned, the tension mounted until the end, when Grover realized he was the monster. Well, there’s no monster at the end of this book, but I can assure you there is danger when you’re done reading it. It’s the danger of doing nothing, and just reading another book. Reading a book about evangelism doesn’t make you a temple-raiding gospel adventurer any more than retweeting a Greenpeace tweet makes you a Rainbow Warrior. But if you’re hungry enough, bored enough, or fed up enough, that holy discontent that can be created from reading will serve as a catalyst. But it’s going to cost you. All valuable things do.
Know why most people don’t write a book? It’s hard.
Climb Kilimanjaro? It’s hard.
Live the mission of Jesus? It’s hard.
Chesterton said, “Christianity isn’t tried and found wanting. It’s been found difficult and not tried.”1
Remember, at the beginning of Acts, the Apostles wanted something easy. But in the end, they greased their elbows and got down to business. Jesus found a guy working hard. True, he was working hard killing Christians, but he had the necessary work ethic. He had been used to doing hard things. Studying hard, obeying hard, being a Pharisee, hard. Killing hard. But then he found Jesus and did something harder for him. And it wrecked him. Paul felt the weight lift off his shoulders, and it turned him from being a weighed down power lifter into a light-footed marathon sprinter.
Jesus always does the heavy lifting. In our salvation, he did it all, but on mission he says, I’ll share the yoke with you. My burden is light. I’ll do all the heavy lifting.
TALK IS CHEAP
Words may be powerful, but talk is cheap.
Words cost nothing and unfortunately you usually get what you pay for. I was at a church recently where an individual spoke to me about how he’d been studying discipleship for a decade and really felt burdened to teach the church about discipleship. I asked him if he’d discipled anybody during the last ten years. I don’t have to tell you the answer. The inherent pitfall of a movement where the leaders are paid to talk is that talking becomes the end, not the means to one. When talking becomes the end, then the end is at hand. Words can spark a revolution, but they’re not the active flame. Every revolution that ever wrought change in a country, marriage, or heart was fueled by the fires of action; not the mere spark of a thought. If the pen is mightier than the sword it’s only because words drive men to action. Words are only as powerful as they are lived out. Even God’s Word itself effects no change if we become hearers only.
Perhaps the scariest thing about talking is that it all too easily becomes a substitute for doing. There is a scientific reason for this. The part of your brain that controls the sensation of pleasure and reward is known as the medial prefrontal cortex. It releases a chemical called dopamine that increases a satisfied feeling when you accomplish something.2 That means it’s possible to get satisfaction after talking about something that you have no real intention of doing. This is because although you’ve not done the activity, you’ve imagined it by talking about it and dopamine was released, causing the feeling of satisfaction. But it’s not the same. There are others who can only experience the endorphin rush from taking action and accept no substitutes for it.
The risk of action-less talk is compounded in the age of social media. We enjoy posting a clever word, turn of phrase, or pithy quote, zipping through cyberspace. Knowing that your tweet thundered like a truth bomb, causing somebody out there to reply “boom” makes us feel warm and gooey inside. Digital posts can have a “boom” factor, but if they don’t lead to action, they’re only as effective as a water balloon. In your momentary explosion, somebody got splashed, but nothing got damaged in the process. Like Keats’ famous epitaph, our words are writ in water, and are quickly covered back over and drowned forever in an endless sea of more words. Don’t worry. No animals were actually harmed during this process. In fact, nothing really happened at all. When I tweet something clever, people may say, “Boom.” When I actually live out the words of my social media posts, heaven says, “Boom.” And that’s a thunder worth hearing. On the banks of the Jordan at Jesus’s baptism, God’s voice thundered, “This is my Son, whom I love” (Matt. 3:17). Boom. Jesus wasn’t all talk. He could say, “I always do what pleases him” (John 8:29, emphasis mine).
DON’T EXPECT PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND
When Paul visited the disciples, he communicated the five-year plan for reaching the pagan gentile world on a whiteboard. Because Peter hadn’t yet had his vision about eating deep fried alligator wrapped with bacon, the other apostles exchanged bemused glances, and raised their eyebrows as if Paul was using a non-erase marker on their whiteboard. Because they didn’t get it, I can imagine them shifting uncomfortably, and moving on to the next agenda item. Have you ever laid out the vision of the ages, and everybody in the room looks at you like you just farted and stunk up the room?
This is what happened to William Carey, the Father of the modern missions movement, when he shared the necessity to reach the Orient with the gospel. At a church meeting he shared “whether the command given to the apostles to teach all nations was not binding on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent.”3 The minister convening the meeting shouted him down, “Young man, sit down! You are an enthusiast. When God pleases to converse with the heathen He’ll do it without consulting you or me.”4 Undeterred, Carey preached at the local association meeting on May 30, 1792 about the necessity to go to the ends of the earth with the gospel. After finishing business matters, the meeting was about to adjourn when Carey turned to his minister friend Andrew Fuller in distress. “Turning to Fuller he asked tragically, ‘Is there nothing again going to be done, sir?’ The heartbreak in Carey’s voice, the fire which pierced through the words, stabbed Fuller awake.”5 He asked for the meeting to reopen and by the end of it, they’d made an action plan to make a plan. It was a start, and thus the start of the modern missions movement, simply because one person wasn’t content to just keep talking about the action that should be taken.
Years of hiding behind theological platitudes were enough to make Paul ask how people would believe unless somebody was sent (Rom. 10:14–15). That’s a man of action trying to get people of words to get moving. It is a choice that starts by making a decision.
Paul had been ignored* by the apostles and everyone else, and for eleven long years, he worked his calloused hands making tents in Tarsus, wondering if he’d gotten it wrong, if everybody else was crazy, or just him. Finally, Peter had his vision of the unclean animals. About that same time, reports returned to Jerusalem about some crazy Jesus parties up in Antioch. That thar was Gentile country, and those apache savages weren’t supposed to be Jesus followers! So they sent Barnabas up to investigate. Barnabas decided to head over to Tarsus and ask for Paul’s help. Once he recruited Paul, Paul got started and never stopped. He was like a bull out of the gate; a tireless, indefatigable gospel animal. God pulled him back for long enough to make him like a slingshot, and once God let him go, Paul was propelled outward with a force that didn’t stop until they removed his head from his body. That’ll stop pretty much anybody, but that’s what it took to stop Paul once he got going.
WHY YOU WOULDN’T LIKE PAUL
Paul did boast a lot. You probably wouldn’t have liked him. Most people didn’t like Wesley for the same reason either. Hardly anyone in church history matched his efforts as a gospel preacher, and he regarded his fellow contemporary ministers as helpful to the lost as “ropes of sand.” One man said that by the time Wesley’s detractors had gotten out of bed, he’d already ridden horseback one hundred miles and preached to two crowds. The truth is, Paul also did more than anybody, and he let us know. Consider what Paul said to the Corinthians. Whatever they were boasting about, Paul was saying he had more reason to, even though he sarcastically said, “we were too weak for that!” (2 Cor. 11:21). In 2 Corinthians 11:23, Paul asked “Are they servants of Christ? (I am out of my mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder.” We catch him boasting again in Romans 15:17–18, “Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God. I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done” (italics mine). Boom. Paul could say, “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power” (1 Cor. 4:20). Not just words.
Boom.
He told the Galatians that they had no more right to give him guff because his back, unlike theirs, was scarred to the extent it resembled a walnut shell, and Paul proudly bore his scars like badges of honor. In nearly every epistle, Paul wrote a variation of “imitate me,” using his lifestyle as a guide. We make the mistake of reducing Paul’s life to a representation of a minister, forgetting that according to his own urging to be imitated, Paul saw himself as a model of how every believer should live.
Did Paul brag? Sure he did, but he’d earned his bragging rights. He wasn’t so much elevating boasting, as much as making fun of it. Paul simply showed what it looked like when somebody actually did the stuff they talked about, in contrast with his opponents who talked much and did little. Paul was really mocking the boasting of his opponents by calling them do-nothing leaders. They boasted when they had nothing to boast about. The Corinthians were lapping up the brain drippings of these “talkers” as Paul calls them. They didn’t do anything. Paul’s boasting was a way of showing that actions speak louder than words. Paul’s mic drop came when he told them pointedly, that they were his credentials or letters of commendation. You’re saved because I did something. Let that sink in a bit.
Paul had done things worth bragging about, which always irritates those who don’t do much. Like Morpheus said, “I’m trying to free your mind, but I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it. Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize just as I did that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”6
DO SOMETHING . . . ANYTHING
You’ve probably heard the saying, “To fail to plan is to plan to fail.” That’s clever. Here’s one that doesn’t sound as clever but is probably more truthful, “To fail to act is to act out failure.” People who like words will probably not internalize it, but for those who take action, it doesn’t need to be put into words. They live it.
At my last inner-city church plant, Refuge Long Beach, Christmas loomed ever nearer. With our most recent neighborhood move, we knew we couldn’t just repeat our Christmas Party outreach in the school with a gift drive, pictures with Santa, and a raging cookie party (yeah, it’s a thing). None of us seemed to have the white hot bat phone to heaven either. The commissioner wasn’t lighting the bat signal in the sky telling us where we were needed. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know what our strategy should look like. Our leadership team knew just one thing. We had to keep moving forward on mission.
Our new plan sucked. We scraped together a plan to do a toy drive with the Starbucks across the street. We started making plans to meet with the principal of Wilson High School, notorious for its depiction in the Hillary Swank film, Freedom Writers, to enlist youth volunteers. We all knew it probably wasn’t going to work, but as each day came closer, people weren’t thinking about the fact that it was going to fail. When the chips are down and imminent failure is looming, you start getting serious. We were acting out of the conviction that to do nothing would be irresponsible. Heartless. Possibly even sinful.
Suddenly, we got a call putting us in touch with a local women and children’s shelter, and recognizing it as divine providence decided our toy drive would serve the local shelter, and Starbucks jumped in with both feet. The relationship with the local manager of the Starbucks on the corner received a boon as we were now serving the community in local causes rather than just trying to suck people into our machine. Yeah, people see through that. Believe me.
The lesson? At some point, you have to take action. It felt as if God were taking action in response to ours. Perhaps God doesn’t move often until we do. Here’s the cool part. Pastors don’t typically go to women’s shelters. They’re busy doing their churchy church things. Yet ministry like this can have an exponential impact on a city.
It was taking action that made the difference.
That’s why Peter said to prepare your minds for action (1 Pet. 1:13). This is why I’ve been asking you to act every week. To do something. Anything. A major shift happens when we make that choice. A. W. Tozer, at the end of preaching, once said, “Don’t come down here to the altar and cry about it—go home and live it!”7
LASTING IMPACT
By the time you read this, I may not be training church planting trainers anymore. More than likely, I’ll be working some secular job again, living out what I’ve written, just like I have since 1998. Then again, maybe I’m in a lock up phase so I could get writing. Every time I get held back from being around lost people, I start to get a little twitch. I get funky, but not in a Lenny Kravitz kind of way. It’s more like a gym sock in your locker kind of way.
Like Gandhi never said, but is nonetheless true, you will need to become the change you want to see in the world to truly impact it. There is simply no other way. What Gandhi actually said was, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. . . . We need not wait to see what others do.”8 Make no mistake, this has not been a book about making a huge splash and becoming famous. It’s not about making an impact measured by Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or YouTube views. It’s a book about reaching the unreached, and that starts with God reaching us. For the world around the church to change, the church must change first, for judgment begins with the house of God. If this book did nothing but change you, it would be the first step to making world changers.
Perhaps a major change in this social-media fueled age would be to choose between being popular or being effective. The two don’t often don’t go together. They didn’t for Jesus anyway. Or Paul. Or any of the apostles. Even A. W. Tozer once remarked to Lloyd-Jones that he’d preached himself out of nearly every conference he’d been invited to because he’d desired to be a mouthpiece for God rather than build his own reputation. You can hide behind the enemy lines and put on a great United Service Organizations show for the troops, or you can penetrate No Man’s Land, behind enemy lines where there is little recognition, but maximum impact.
I leave you with one penetrating question to help get you going in the right direction. If God appeared to you as he did to Solomon, and offered to give you something, what would you ask for? What if he asked you to make a choice between having a medium impact here, where people knew your name, and admired you, asked you to speak, interviewed you, and wrote articles about what you were doing, versus having a ministry that blessed millions in a country where you lived in obscurity, worked in the underground church, and nobody ever knew your name. Which would you choose?
How you answer that question will largely determine the course of your life, and possibly the degree of reward in the afterlife. As the Grail Knight said at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “Choose wisely, for while the true grail will bring you life, the false grail will take it from you.” Fame, being liked, and having people applaud you is a life-sucking-false grail. Jesus said that recognition here was often the full reward, whereas the Father rewards that which is done in secret (Matt. 6:2–4). I’m convinced that the ordinary everyday ministry of believers who work with their hands, keep their day jobs, and serve Jesus simply to hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” are the force that will change the world, and have the most impact in the world around them.
In the words of Evel Knievel, “I decided to fly through the air and live in the sunshine and enjoy life as much as I could.” That might sound strange coming from a man who suffered more fractures than you have bones in your body, but I think he was on to something. Enjoying life isn’t about a peaceful existence with no alarms and no surprises. It’s in the ups and downs on mission with the Holy Spirit, like the wind at your back and the rev of power in the engine. It’s in leaving earth momentarily, in the grips of the Holy Spirit as he revs you, watching the ground beneath you dropping, and rising back up to you again, feeling alive because you survived the jump. Freefalling into the hands of God is something that only a few brave souls know how to do. You see, it’s not the jumping, it’s the falling. Gravity can be a harsh mistress. But the ups and downs balance out with the risk and reward. The crashes and flashes of God’s glory. The soaring and the falling. The things you can control, and the things that are left to his control. In that balance comes the exhilaration of making an eternal impact and being a part of the legend of Jesus Christ’s mission on earth.
John Wesley and some of his followers, such as Asbury, may have been the closest thing we’ve had to the apostle Paul in the history of the church, and the Evel Knievel of church history. Until you’ve had people peeing on you from a tree while you’re trying to preach the gospel, you’ve not really lived. It wasn’t just that his life was impressive, but that he, like Paul, inspired an entire generation to burn up, and blaze out like comets for Jesus, radiating his glory across the black backdrop of the night. Here’s to you leaving behind the life as you knew it, and blazing your own path before him.
“Commencing countdown.
Engines on.
Check ignition and may God’s love be with you.”9
Daredevils John and Charles Wesley penned the Methodist covenant prayer for his circuit riders* to be declared together once each year. It would serve any well who were brave enough to pray it. And many, many did, leading to the Great Awakening.
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine.
So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.
Remember those cheeky angels after Jesus said his final words to the apostles and ascended into heaven? “Why do you stand looking into heaven?” (Acts 1:11). I’d pose the same question to you now. We’ve got work to do. Don the fedora. Grab the whip and get cracking. Adventure beckons.
Discussion Questions
(For Dr. Jones, the Princeton Professor in you)
1. What in this book has stood out to you the most?
2. What has been the greatest change you’ve experienced since starting this book?
3. How has God started to take you on a journey to reach the unreached?
4. What advice would you give to someone just starting this journey?
Adventurous Actions
(For Indiana, the Temple Raider in you)
1. Buy another copy of this book, and give it to a friend. (Haha . . . a joke. But erm . . . really, buy another copy.)
2. Write your own covenant and put it somewhere you will see it every day.
3. Ask the Holy Spirit to fill you daily, step out in faith regularly, and be prepared for surprises!
4. Do something. Anything.
*Approximately nine years had passed from Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem, recounted in Galatians 2 and his first missionary journey.
*Had they lived in the age of Evel, they would have totally had motorcycles, white pantsuits with stars and stripes, a cape, and a helmet with a big star on it. Okay . . . That’s too far. Maybe not the cape.