The Great Commission Is Never Convenient

So Father, as we come now, we say with the psalmist whom have I in heaven but you and on earth there is nothing I desire besides you. Our flesh and our heart may fail, but you are the strength of our heart and our portion forever. And as you are our portion, I pray that now as this conference closes and we head out, you might do a decisive, putting a point on it, work that gives joy and strength and direction for engagement in world evangelization and truth clarification.

And I ask this in Jesus' name, Amen. So there's no wrong time for world evangelization. There's no wrong time for truth clarification.

If you wait for the optimal time for becoming a missionary or sending a missionary, you won't be one and you won't send one. If you wait for the optimal time for getting theological clarity about what the Bible teaches, you won't get it. Because there is no optimal time.

Because sin and Satan and sickness and sabotage have made it certain there is no optimal time to know the truth and no optimal time to spread the truth. It does not exist. So if you're going to know the truth, if you're going to spread the truth, then you will need to look sin and Satan and sickness and sabotage in the face and say, I'm going through you and you're not going to stop me.

I'm going through you. Because there isn't any other time. There is no optimal time for world evangelization or truth clarification.

Now I want to try to motivate you. God help me motivate you to give your life to world evangelization and truth clarification in the most inhospitable, unsuitable, uncongenial, forbidding times. If you wait for the ideal moment personally, you still have it together, relationally, economically, globally, you won't know what you ought to know and you won't go where you ought to go.

It's not going to happen. There's only one kind of time for knowing and going and it's always inhospitable, unsuitable, uncongenial, and forbidding. So that's the lesson I'm going to draw briefly out of William Tyndale's life.

You should already have drawn it out from everything you've heard so far. He carried out his theological clarification and his Bible translation in what most of us would consider absolutely impossible circumstances. Circumstances that we would just say, if you're in that situation, you're just keeping your head above water.

You're just trying to stay alive on the run. So you know that Tyndale's incredibly 12 productive years from when he left in 1524 to when he was killed 12 years later when he left England, that those years, those productive years were carried out in exile on the run in danger. Now I'm talking about truth clarification with Tyndale and us because the stress has been heavily here on Bible translation as it ought to be and most people know about that, but most people don't know that he was a remarkable theologian and theological reformer.

I have a three-volume work of Tyndale's works at home, 1,200 pages total. Here's what David Daniel wrote. Now I was told that this is not available in the bookstore, but I've not read all the biographies of Tyndale.

This is the best one I have read. I couldn't put it down. It was absolutely riveting this biography by David Daniel.

So that's my highest recommendation for you to get Tyndale under your belt. Here's what he wrote. It is possible to write about Tyndale as a polemicist, a propagandist, a political reformer, a moralist, a theologian, a historian, an enemy of institutions of the church, yet he first presents himself as a working translator of the scriptures.

It cannot be right, he says, it cannot be right to see him as being anything else more important than that. He translated two-thirds of the Bible so well that this translation endured until today, a labor so great that that list of secondary definitions must surely dwindle by comparison. Well, yes, secondary, but oh how significant those writings were in his own day.

If Tyndale had not translated one page of the Bible, they would have killed him. He did not die because he was a Bible translator. He died because of the heretic in opposition to the Roman Catholic Church.

That's what it was. So Anthony Kenny writes that he was just fine when he was joining Erasmus in putting down the godless clergy, no problem, but when he renounced transubstantiation, to continue Kenny's quote, friars, noblemen, bishops all turned against him and the university which had sheltered him gave him a home no longer. He hoped that an approval of Henry VIII would give him a license to do a translation.

That did not happen. Henry VIII hated William Tyndale and he hated him because he wrote a response to Thomas More who had helped Henry write an attack on Lutheranism and Tyndale responded with long theological defenses of Luther's doctrines and therefore Thomas More hated him, Daniel says, with a rabid hatred. You saw some of that last night in the video where you saw the handwriting describing the horrible words that Thomas More used to describe Tyndale.

All that because he was a Lutheran, not because he was a Bible translator. That didn't happen yet. All that was theological clarification.

Almost all of it written in exile on the run. So he left when he was 30 years old and he died when he was 42 and during those 12 years he did his great Bible translation, he did his great theological clarification. The teachings of Luther were what got him killed.

Now I don't mean to play down the Bible translation, of course. You've picked up along the way. I mean, when I studied Tyndale the first time, I think the most shocking thing for me was the incomprehensible, from our standpoint, hatred of the Roman Catholic Church for reading the Bible in English.

I just couldn't believe it that John Bale, born in 1495, wrote, as a boy of 11, I watched the burning of a young man in Norwich for possessing the Lord's Prayer in English. I mean, I read that the first time and said, that just cannot have happened. That can't have happened.

John Fox records seven Lollards burned at Coventry in 1519 for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer in English. These are just incomprehensible realities of those times. So I'm not diminishing the danger and the beauty of his translating work.

He hoped to escape that condemnation by getting official authorization. It didn't happen. He had to escape from London.

He gives us a glimpse of what those years were like. I think, I can't remember who quoted this, but it's only four lines. It needs to be said again.

My pains, my poverty, my exile out of my natural country, the bitter absence from my friends, my hunger, my thirst, my cold, the great danger were with everywhere I was encompassed, and finally innumerable other hard and sharp fightings which I endure. There is no optimal time to translate the Bible. And he did it.

All those sufferings came to a climax, as you know, May 21, 1535, when he was betrayed. And then they took him off to the castle. He spent the next, what, 18 months or so there.

And you might think that in, after that 12 years, almost 12, of hardship and pushing through and pushing through that, okay, I've done enough. And now I'm sitting in prison, and it's cold, and I don't have what I need. And this is not an optimal time for theological clarification and Bible translation.

And several of you have quoted from the letter he wrote to the custodian of the prison. I'm going to read the whole thing, because nothing moved me more than this letter in all of Tyndale. So it's in the midst of his 18 months, he's in prison, he's going to be killed.

And here's what he writes, I beg your lordship. And that the Lord Jesus that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me from the goods of mine, which he has a warmer cap. For I suffer greatly from cold in the head.

And I'm afflicted with perpetual catarrh. And I asked my wife, well, what is that? And she said, it's what you have right now. Which is much increased in the cell, a warmer coat.

Also, for this which I have is very thin, a piece of cloth to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out. My shirts are also worn out.

He has a woolen shirt, if he would be good to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above. He has also warmer night caps.

And I asked to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening. It is indeed wearisome sitting in the dark. But most of all, I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary that he will kindly permit me to have a Hebrew Bible, a Hebrew grammar, Hebrew dictionary.

Oh, my goodness. Anybody studying Greek and Hebrew? Are you complaining? I'm about to die. I'm cold.

I don't have enough light. Please get me a grammar. Non-optimal.

Okay? There is no time. There is no time that is unsuited for Bible translation and truth clarification. He was writing defenses in the cell to protect himself from being charged as a heretic.

And there's a little bit more to it, but that's enough of the letter, I think. So the lesson I'm taking away from Tindale's life is that his accomplishments of theological clarification and Bible translation are astonishing not only because of their faithfulness and their excellence, but because they were carried out in utterly inhospitable, non-optimal circumstances. There wasn't an optimal moment in his life.

And he achieved what he achieved. So I have little sympathy for you. If you complain about circumstances that hinder you from God's mission in your life, don't come whimpering to me.

So let's turn from Tindale now to the Bible and our experience in the 21st century to see how we should benefit from this boost. It's a boost for me anyway. I'm old.

My eyes are bad. My ears are bad. My back is bad.

My memory is bad. And I'm so excited that you would invite me to this conference. Oh my goodness, what a privilege.

And I lose my place. Let's start with some world crises. And I'll tell you in a minute why I'm starting with world crises.

Crises that would perhaps cause some of you to say, this is not a good time for world evangelization. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the killed and the wounded is approaching one million people. What could that become? Israel is now fighting on two fronts.

They just took out Hamas leader day before yesterday. They're about ready to pour themselves out to get the regime out of Iran. What will that become? China, for the first time in decades, several weeks ago launched an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Boko Haram over and over just a few weeks ago killed 26 Christians and a hundred others in church. Over half of Sudan's 46 million people suffer from acute hunger because of the civil war. And there are civil wars in Ethiopia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Haiti, and 10 other nations right now.

Going to go there? A hundred million people in the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes, including 40 million refugees, 40% of whom are under 18 years old. We are a world in motion, most of it unchosen. On the home front in the United States, since 2017, there have been a half a million opioid-related deaths.

The moral degeneracy embraced by our highest leaders and our wannabe highest leaders is simply appalling. Now I focus on the big global things, and that's the tip of the iceberg for two reasons. One, to draw your attention to the fact that if you were to just experience all of those going away tonight, none of those problems exist anymore, your hesitancy to do missions would be just as great, because they're not usually caused by the big obstacles but the little ones.

You are one heartbeat away from death. I've been seeing young people around, and you might think, well that's true for you. Guess what? It's not.

We're all one heartbeat away from death, and guess who decides? James 4.15 decides. If we live, if it is God's will, we will live and do this or that. God decides whether you get another heartbeat, not age.

Good grief. You are that close, and if that's going to get in your way at 78 or 18, you'll never go. The ache in your hip could be bone cancer.

That'd be a good reason not to go. I've got an ache. Pain in your chest could be the making of a heart attack, the phone ringing, it might be the death of your parents or your children, or worse, their divorce.

The note you're about to open might be your 20-year-old daughter who has decided that she's not a Christian anymore, and she finds her community and the LGBTQ friends. Would you go? Or you look in the mirror and say, you're just not fit. Most of the hindrances to devoting ourselves to God's cause in whatever form are not global.

They're very, very local and very, very personal and usually very painful, and they were for Tyndale as well. Non-optimal circumstances. That's one reason why I started with global, just to point out it's not the main issue.

Second, the other reason I focused on the global crises to start is that they describe the world in which the Great Commission is going to be finished. God is not going to make an era toward the end of history when the nations will be hospitable to your coming, to the reception of the gospel. Most of the unreached peoples in the world live in cultures that are hostile to the gospel.

They're not waiting with open arms, come over to Macedonia and help us, but that is the world in which the mission will be finished. So here I want to read a text from scripture. I find this to be sobering and very heartening.

Realistic and so encouraging. So this is Matthew 24, 9 to 14. You will be hated by all nations.

You will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. Then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.

And because lawlessness is multiplied, the love of many will grow cold, but the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all those hating nations, all the nations, and then the end will come. Jesus will come.

This is a non-optimal description of the world, leading to the completion of the Great Commission. Totally non-optimal as far as the world is concerned. Let's just count them.

I'm going to take them one at a time. I think I have six things I see in this text, which you might say, well, in view of that, there's no point in going. Number one, God's emissaries will be hated by all nations.

Just an aside here. I remember hearing, and I'm not sure where this comes from, I think it comes from liberation theology, but the statement, the culture is the report card of the church, that's not true. And I think that mentality puts a negative feel on the church almost everywhere.

Look at the mess! We must be failing. See if that works as we continue on. God's emissaries will be hated by all nations.

That's Jesus' promise. So if you consider hatred towards yourself your failure, what are you going to do with this text? Second, many Christians will fall away. We might say they will deconvert.

And the number of nuns, n-o-n-e-s, no religion declared, of whatever generation, the number of nuns explodes. That's promised. A lot of deconversion promised by Jesus.

Number three, Christians will betray one another and hate one another. Now that's a strategy of Satan. And you know what it does to faithful Christians is to make them begin to feel, because they don't know their Bibles well enough, what the faith is failing.

The faith is failing. Christians are betraying Christians. What good is Christianity? If Christians are betraying other Christians at home, I've got nothing to say to the world.

They're just going to point like, look at your church. Look at your home church. They're betraying each other.

Like, what are you going to do with that? You're going to just say, oh, well, I guess I can't go tell the truth anymore. I can't tell the story about my Jesus anymore because my church is such a mess. Jesus said it's going to be a mess.

Christians are going to betray other Christians. You need to know how the world ends in order to be happy to the end. Enduring to the end through non-optimal circumstances.

Number four, many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. Books, articles, podcasts, TikTok reels, movies giving voice to many false prophets, causing people to think we're not winning. We're not winning.

To which I respond, win what? Win what? What's your vision? What's your image of how it's supposed to go? We're not winning. The Christianization of the world is not in the Bible, except when Jesus comes. Now, do you want to know how the world gets Christianized? I just decided this afternoon I'd read this to you because I think my message is short enough.

So I'm going to read you how the world is going to be Christianized from 2 Thessalonians 1, verses 5. This affliction of yours is evidence of the righteous judgment of God that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God for which you are suffering. Since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus, they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord from the glory of his might when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at by all who have believed in him because our testimony was believed. The world is going to be Christianized because Jesus is going to come and throw all the non-Christians into hell.

That's when it's going to happen, and they will be opposing the church when it happens. And will you be faithful? Will you be finishing the mission in the midst of non-optimal circumstances? Number five, lawlessness is multiplied. The troops in Kenya today, I mean in Haiti today from Kenya are outnumbered 400 to 15,000 by the gangs.

The gang members have 15,000 right now anyway. Last week the Kenyan forces were 400. Haiti is a failed state of tragic years-long lawlessness.

It is so easy, I mean I live in Minneapolis, it is so easy to imagine urban centers all over America experience lawlessness. My 11th Avenue right now is in worse condition than it's ever been. I've lived in the same house for 41 years downtown and lawlessness is easy to imagine.

Should I stop? Let's move. We're not going to move. Next stop, heaven.

Why would you move? Christians move toward need, not comfort, right? I mean that is the way you choose your house, isn't it? Isn't it? You move toward need, not security. Need, not comfort, Christian. Number five, no that was number five.

Number six, the love of many will grow cold. You travel from church to church hoping to find some zeal for missions, cold. Does that surprise you? When Jesus, now that's the sobering part.

I said it was sobering and encouraging. I mean I regard that as very sobering and just a little parenthesis here on exegesis. So any of you post-millennialists in the house? I wrote a whole book on the second coming two years ago, you get it, and I labored long and hard to decide for myself and demonstrate Matthew 24 is about the second coming, not about 70 AD mainly.

I understand how the preterist view works, and I think it's dead wrong. So I am applying this text not naively, okay? I've worked a lot on trying to understand how those verses I quoted relate to second Thessalonians, and there are about 15 reasons why that text and Paul's understanding of the second coming in second Thessalonians cohere and thus show that this is not mainly about 70 AD, though it had outcroppings there, this is mainly about what we're going to experience someday come Lord Jesus. So close that parenthesis about my defensiveness exegetically.

When he had given these six inhospitable circumstances for the completion of the mission, the next word out of his mouth, verse 14, and this gospel of the kingdom. That word kingdom, it means kingdom. This is a gospel of King Jesus, not old poor Jesus wringing his hands, look at the world's coming through.

He promised it, he's not wringing his hands. And this gospel of the kingdom, this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testament to all those nations, yes it will. And they're not done yet.

3,100 languages that got to be reached. That's what he promises here. This testimony to all the nations will happen, and then the end will come.

He does not say the gospel of the kingdom might be proclaimed if things get better. He does not say that there might be a testimony to all the nations. He does not say the proclamation and the testimony might usher in the second coming.

He doesn't say that. Matthew 24 14 is not the great commission. Matthew 24 14 is the great promise.

The great commission tests your obedience. The great promise tests your faith. Go, make disciples, will you obey? I'm going to finish it.

It's going to finish. Go in the strength of this promise. That's why I say it's so encouraging.

There is a great certainty, a great promise, a great absolute. The great commission tests obedience. The great promise tests our faith.

You would believe him that in spite of being hated, in spite of Christians deconverting all around us, maybe in our own family, in spite of betraying one another, in spite of false prophets, in spite of lawlessness being multiplied, in spite of Christian coldness. Now get this. Is your eschatology really that pessimistic? There will be, according to verse 14, white hot Christians who finish the mission.

That's what it says. I mean, I just regard the juxtaposition of verse 14 with 12 to 13 as stunning. There will be white, hot, God-centered, Christ-exalting, mission-oriented churches in your town.

Let yours be one of them. That's the way I prayed in Minneapolis for those 33 years I was a pastor there. I want to torch the glacier, Lord.

It's coming over us. I want to torch the glacier. Do you get that picture? Coldness, coldness, and lawlessness are multiplied.

It's like a glacier, but it doesn't say that your church has to be included, not even your city. Every Friday, I gather for prayer at church for people who love the city and pray for it. Every other Monday, people gather at my house when it's cold.

During the summer, we go to the little mountain down by the Guthrie Theater, and we pray for our city. I pray for awakening. I pray for revival.

I pray for 11th Avenue. What do you do with these Somali 20-somethings who've totally dropped out of their Muslim community, and they're just doing drugs in the bus stop and slumped over in their stupor? How in the world do you preach the gospel to these people? That's my question. That's what we're praying about every Monday, every Friday.

When I describe the horrors that are coming, it doesn't mean you roll over and play dead. You get that, don't you? I mean, the whole point of this message is you keep on in non-optimal circumstances. That's the point of the message.

But if you don't have a realistic sense, you're just going to beat yourself up and say, we're failing, we're failing, we're failing. Maybe not. I mean, you might be doing some things wrong, but that's not the main orientation.

The main orientation is whatever goes wrong, I'm going to be one of those white hot people. I'm going to be one who stays in love with Jesus, and through it all, I'm going to finish this thing, whatever God calls me to be. Now, I think Tyndale is a great help here, and we're almost done.

Truth clarifier, Bible translator, because that biblical truth, and we heard this well in the new birth sermon a while back. I just was so helped by that message, just so utterly crucial that William Tyndale cared about the Bible because he cared about what the Bible taught. He cared about the truth of the gospel.

The gospel of the kingdom sustained him. And you might think, oh my goodness, this poor man, he's on the run all the time, he's beleaguered, he's sick, and he's going to die, and surely his gospel must have become a kind of austere, heavy, duty-burdened thing that got out until he was dead. Not true.

Oh my goodness, I love, this is a high point for me of Tyndale's triumphs. Here's his definition of euangelion gospel, that's his word. Euangelion, that we call the gospel, is a Greek word that signifies good, merry, glad, joyful tidings that make the man's heart glad and make him sing and dance and leap for joy.

That's Tyndale. Go figure. I mean, that's just amazing.

So he's writing that in 1530, that's six years before he died, he was driven to translate the Bible into the vernacular of every language. Yes, every language. I think it went by maybe too fast in that first lecture where he quotes Tyndale like this, Christ wishes his mysteries to be published as widely as possible.

I wish that they might be read and known not merely by the Scotch and Irish, but even by the Turks and Saracens. Turks. I mean, can you imagine Thomas More hearing that? What? Every Turk, every Saracen reading their own Bible? You know what's going to happen to transubstantiation if you do that? You know what's going to happen to the veneration of Mary? You know what's going to happen to justification by transformation? You know what's going to happen to baptismal regeneration? You know what's going to happen to the infallibility of the Pope? Can't have that.

We'll kill them, burn them. He wanted the Bible in every language for the sake of the gospel. Without the Bible, no pure enduring gospel.

The Bible is like a container, all the parts of which are essential for preserving the most precious thing in the world. You can't just strip away hunks of the Bible and expect to have your little canon within a canon that's going to survive in any biblical way. He believed, and this was stressed I think in the regeneration talk that we heard from Professor Master, no creature can loose the bonds, this is Tyndale, no creature can loose the bonds save the blood of Christ only.

When gospel is preached, it openeth our hearts and giveth us grace to believe and puteth the spirit of Christ in us, and we know him as our father most merciful and consent to the law and love it. That's the new birth and it happens through the blood of Christ, which happens through the preaching of the gospel, which happens in a Bible that makes sure it's protected and rightly understood. Tyndale was sustained in a life of theological clarification and Bible translation through unremitting, non-optimal, inhospitable, forbidding circumstances because he was thrilled by the power of the gospel to set people free, free from condemnation, and that they would be made glad in God.

That's got to end on this note. It is a miracle, is it not, to read 2 Corinthians and the way Paul rejoiced through persecutions and tribulations that we will never taste. The list in chapter 6, the list in 4, the list in 11 especially, are breathtaking, and he says this in 2 Corinthians 7, 4. In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy.

You've got to go home with that. If you don't go home with that, I mean, the angels show up at the arrival of Jesus. Behold, I bring you good news of great joy.

Not small. Great joy. I bring you good news of great joy.

And then Jesus, in the middle of his teaching, I speak these things to you so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be full. You come to the end of his ministry in chapter 25 and he welcomes people into the joy of their master. In his presence is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.

If that's not your experience in the non-optimal circumstances, you won't have good news. It won't be good news. It is a miracle.

It takes new birth, which is why I love this conference. I love the focus on truth clarification and Bible translation because if we don't have the miracle of the new birth and the truth that sustains that kind of joy, we won't get it done. So I close where I began.

If you wait for the optimal time to be a missionary, you won't be one. If you wait for the optimal time to get theological clarification about what the Bible teaches, you won't be one. One more little side track here that comes to my mind.

I'm 78. I was in school until I was 28 years old. Good night.

I mean, 12 years from 6 to 18. And when I was done with high school, I'm thinking of you young people especially, when I was done with high school, I thought, good night, I'm glad that's over. And if somebody had said to me, hey, you're going to be in school for 10 more years, I said, you're out of your mind.

You're out of your mind. So I head off to Wheaton College, and I'm in school for four more years. And God lays hold on me for the ministry and the Word.

Okay, I want to learn the Bible. I want to know the Bible. So I go three more years at seminary.

Now I'm 25. And at the end of seminary, I thought, what am I going to do with my life? To preach, or teach, or write, or I don't know what to do. I love the Bible.

I don't know how to use it. I mean, I don't know where I should use it. And one teacher says, well, if you got enough sitzfleisch, which means you can sit 14 hours a day in a chair, then just go off and get a doctorate.

And then all the doors are open to you. Okay, I'll do that. So three more years in Germany.

And I'm done with formal education. And I go teach in a college for six years. And then I become a pastor at age 34.

Now, I'm just saying that 50 years from that, where I am right now, I'm 78, so 50 plus 28 is 78. I look back on that as totally not wasted. I felt so, I mean, I remember in seminary, guys with their armbands and their bare feet, March, because it's the late 60s.

And what are we doing in school? And good old Dr. Bromley, the church history professor, preached a sermon when Jesus began his ministry, he was about 30 years old. So sit down. To all of us 25, 25 year olds, or 22 year olds.

So my point is, when I say there's no optimal time for truth clarification, I mean, do it. Get it. Whatever means it takes to get truth clarification.

I remember talking to a veteran missionary one time that said, what's the most important thing to get ready for the field? And he said, first Bible, second Bible, third Bible. I thought, okay, that's good advice. Okay, close that parenthesis.

Let me see if I can find my place again. There's no optimal time for either. It never feels right.

So, circumstances will always say, not now. Not now. And faith will always say, I'm going through you.

In the name of Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, in the joy of the gospel, for the glory of God, I'm going through you. And you won't stop me. So Father, I pray that whatever direction these men and women here have been feeling, whatever tugging and directing, you would not let non-optimal circumstances be one of the reasons why they don't follow through.

Oh Lord, if you would be pleased, hundreds in this room right now could find themselves 10 years from now in very different circumstances, so happy that they attended this conference and were moved in a new direction. I pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.