Looking Outward, Speaking Truth

Our Fall Focus on Missions has us asking, “How big is your world?”  We do this to make sure we’re seeing the immense, diverse, made-in-God’s-image global community of souls the way God sees it.  Always remember John 3:16:  “For God so loved the world…”

In our frantic and distracted times, it’s tempting to zoom in on our own personal, private concerns—to look inward and live for our­selves.  But Jesus is always calling us to look upward and outward:  Lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest (John 4:35).

Goshen has always been a mission-minded church—dating back to our founding in 1827 (our GBC predecessors helped plant three new churches in the 1830s), and continuing today with our annual budget of $174,800 to fund missionaries the world over and our active involve­ment in outreach ministries here in our community.

But we need reminding—we always need to be encouraged to keep on looking outward to God’s world and keep on shining the light of the gospel in this dark world.  Thus our annual missions emphasis.

And yet, we need to go a step further:  even as we reaffirm our long-standing missions commitment, we also need to clarify afresh just what it is we actually have to say to this world.  What is our message?

The Apostle Paul models faithful missionary witness.  He reminds the elders from the church of Ephesus that he “did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable” (Acts 20:20).  And just what was profitable?  He goes on:  “I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (20:27)—i.e., God’s Word, all of it.

His aim when establishing a church was to teach the whole truth of Scripture.  Not half the truth.  And not some slanted, edited, spin-version to make the Bible palatable to listeners.  We can be tempted to soft-pedal sin, or avoid it altogether, so we don’t “put people off.”  Or we may be tempted to speak only of God’s love and skirt around his holiness, justice, and wrath (again, to pacify our listeners).  But, as Paul says, that would be “shrinking” from speaking the whole truth.  Here’s the bottom line:  we fail to love our neighbors if we withhold from them the serious, sobering, beautiful gospel truth of Christ!