36, Day 32 (Written Wednesday January 11 ~ Getting Over The Hump: The Great CO-MISSION-ARY

As you might imagine, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about and studying about mission work in the past few months. One of the things that clicked with me recently was the origin of the word “mission.” It’s actually a contraction of the word “commission” as in “the Great Commission.”

“And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, ‘All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18-20). That is the Great Commission, and it dawned on me tonight that it was given by the very first Christian missionary, Jesus.

What is a missionary? A missionary is someone who, having heard the Great Commission, makes it their mission to seek to fulfill it. In so doing, they leave home and go anywhere they can to preach the Gospel to the lost. Jesus left His home in heaven to come to earth, where the lost were, in order to preach the Gospel so that we might be saved. He said, “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). Jesus was God’s original missionary and He then gave this mission over to His disciples when He returned to heaven.

There are all different kinds of missionaries. There are those who move to far away foreign lands, their are those who frequently visit far away foreign lands, there are those who take the Gospel to places in their own country where it hasn’t been taken before and there are those who work right at home taking the Gospel to those who haven’t heard it. If you are a Christian, you must be a missionary. The only question is, which kind are you going to be?