From our International Director

Posted on 31 March 2010.

Recently in the course of one day three events happened to trigger a prayer in my heart.

Event one: I read from Psalm 78 and was impacted by the first four verses. The Message translates it like this: "Listen, dear friends, to God's truth, bend your ears to what I tell you. I'm chewing on the morsel of a proverb; I'll let you in on the sweet old truths, stories we heard from our fathers, counsel we learned at our mother's knee. We're not keeping this to ourselves, we're passing it along to the next generation - God's fame and fortune, the marvellous things He has done."

The words struck me: "Stories we heard from our fathers... we're not keeping this to ourselves, we're passing it along to the next generation..." The Psalmist clearly emphasises the need for "oral tradition", for handing on what God has done and telling of the men and women of God He has done it through. For the writer in the Old Testament times that would be Moses and Abraham and others like them. But who is that for us?

Event 2: The same day, while preaching in the morning and again in the afternoon, I showed a short video that talked of missionary giants like Hudson Taylor, Livingstone, Carey, and so on. I use the video often because it speaks of the courage and sacrifice of that generation of missionaries, who took the Gospel to lands like China. If they had not done so, what you read above in Day Two concerning the modern house churches would not be happening. At one of the church services after the video the congregation burst out clapping. Were these stories of missionaries new to them, something they had not really encountered before?

Event 3: The same evening over dinner with some Asian pastors we lamented that the church of our generation has few genuine heroes, few who stand out as men and women of faith and integrity. Especially that we do not pass on "stories we heard from our fathers" (Psalm 78). Maybe that is because we never heard such stories, even if we were blessed enough to have Christian dads and mums.

Putting the three experiences that day together, it seems to me that we need to pray that once again the church will grow to recount and respect the lives of men and women who sacrificed much to take the Gospel to the hard places, paying a great price to do so. I long that the church would once more raise up stories of such heroes and heroines as challenges to our faith and obedience. Maybe the fact that we no longer tell about these things is one major reason why so few obey the challenge to cross-cultural mission.

Pray that a new generation of Christians would learn about and be challenged by those who in the past laid down their lives for the Gospel in foreign lands.

Pray too that the hidden stories about those whose courage fuelled the growth in the church in China would be revealed and would inspire us to new faith and obedience.

Pray that God would raise up labourers for the harvest fields of the world. He did after all command us to do that in Matthew 9:38!