A Cross-Shaped Mission

Fifty years ago, young Christians were being helped to know what it was to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and to understand that when you belong to Jesus Christ you no longer had a choice of where you would be, or what you would do, or with whom you would go. But today, sweeping through evangelical culture, is the invasion of the language of leadership. If you scour through your New Testament, you will notice that word is virtually absent. We find it a couple of times in Hebrews 13, but the dominant language of the New Testament for the Christian believer is the language of servant. Think of what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:5, which I think lies at the very heartbeat of his own ministry: “We do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord.” Most would stop there, but Paul adds that we are “bond slaves for Jesus' sake.”

In the beginnings of my Christian life, to not be burdened for world missions was almost regarded as a sign of apostasy in the evangelical church. The big word was discipleship with sacrifice. Today, in many cases this has been replaced by the word leadership.

I was first alerted to this by well-meaning, earnest, devoted, sincere Christian parents who told me they were training their children to be the leaders of the next generation. That statement is contemporaneous with all movements in which young people are trained for leadership. Leadership training institutes are common but there is no institute for service, sacrifice, and bond slavery. 

And so this subject of suffering and missions comes like a dagger to the contemporary heart. We are so interested in being leaders, but less interested in being servants, sacrificial and unconditional in our response to Jesus Christ. We live in a world where everybody needs to have a title. And the same thing has happened in our churches. It's not accidental or coincidental. 

Missions and Suffering

Missions and suffering is a challenging subject, but it should lift us up: as long as we hear Christ, all will be well. As John 12:24–26a says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am there will my servant be also."

This is also a very delicate subject. It's really easy for a preacher to mishandle the relationship between suffering and missions, suffering and evangelism, suffering and fruitfulness, even using illustrations from some of the great figures of the Christian church to beat the backs of fellow believers into a sense of guilt and failure. 

In the hands of the apostles, suffering is not used to beat the backs of their fellow believers, but to lift up their hearts, and to make us long to be better servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. They speak about it in order to point to the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. The author of Hebrews, in that long list of the sufferings of God's people in the Old Testament period, at the end points us away from them to Jesus Christ in order that we may have our eyes fixed upon Him. Fixing our eyes on the suffering of others may induce simply failure and guilt, but fixing our eyes on the Lord Jesus Christ will always have the effect on us of wanting to do more, to serve him better, and to love Him with all our souls. 

As Jesus says in John 12, and applied more generally, one of the ways of God with His people is that He advances His kingdom by means of suffering. Suffering is not the only instrument in the advance of God's kingdom, but it is very striking, when we read through scripture, just how frequently suffering is in fact a key ingredient in the advance of that kingdom.

It's against that fairly solemn background that I want us to think in three different stages about this theme of missions and suffering. Our calling is Timothy's calling. Take your share of suffering as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. 

Suffering as Embedded in the Christ-Pattern of Sacred Scripture

Alfred North Whitehead was the English mathematician and philosopher who said that all western philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." In a similar way, we could say that the whole story of the Old Testament consists of a series of footnotes to Genesis 3:15, punctuated by teaching, by illustrations, by biography, but they all hang together because the seed of the woman is actually also looking forward to, by faith, our Lord Jesus Christ.

From Genesis 3:15 and the first promise of the gospel onwards, regarding deliverance and God’s plan, there is conflict and suffering from beginning to end. First, there is this conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The Lord said to Adam and Eve that the conflict would reach its consummation in the person-to-person conflict between the serpent himself and the seed of the woman. It is really traced through the promise given to Abraham, and given to David, and fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the seed of the woman.

Unless we see this, we have missed the backbone that holds the Bible together.

And even the language that's used is remarkable. The seed of the woman in conquering the serpent would have bloodshed, His heel would be bruised. The whole of the story of the Old Testament scriptures is sprinkled with blood, with sacrifice, and therefore sprinkled with suffering because this is the way of restoration. 

The goal in Genesis 3:15 is what Paul discussed in 1 Corinthians. But on the day described in 1 Corinthians 15, our Lord Jesus Christ will go to the Father, having subdued all things to Himself, having conquered His last enemy and all of our enemies, leading His ransomed host as our new Adam and say “Father, it is now finished.” He says when all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subjected to Him. He put all things in subjection under Him that God may be all in all. 

The thrust of this glorious vision of the future is when all things will be subdued, when the second Adam will have undone what the first Adam did, when the gardening of the cosmos will be completed precisely because that took place through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And because the whole story of the Bible is a story of how that impacted the people of God in every generation, Paul is saying this is the reason why, when Christians die for their faith, other Christians take their place among the baptized. It's because we know we are on the victory side with Jesus Christ. Christ’s victory makes our sufferings all worthwhile. 

It's this that made theological students at the great Princeton Seminary a couple of hundred years ago line up to take the places of their dear fellow students who had gone to serve the Lord Jesus Christ in other parts of the world, who had given their young lives for the sake of the gospel. They knew it was all worth it. This is the story that is embedded in the whole of the scriptures. 

Suffering Illustrated in the Life and Ministry of the Apostle Paul

One pre-Raphaelite in England, William Holman Hunt, painted a very famous picture entitled “The Shadow of Death.” And in that picture, the young man Jesus stretches at the end of a day in the carpenter shop. His mother, Mary, looks at the wall behind Jesus as the setting sun shines straight at Him. On the wall, there is the shadow of the cross. That is really what the Old Testament is: It's the shadow of the cross, as it were, being pressed backwards, imprinting itself onto those who belong by faith to the seed who will die on the cross. If you belong to Him, the shadow will inevitably fall upon you. 

The Christ pattern also falls forward. We see this illustrated in the life of the Apostle Paul. It is the pattern of his life. Remember what Ananias was told when he said, “but Lord, this is the man who's been persecuting us.” The Lord said Paul was a chosen instrument. He was going to take the gospel to the Gentiles, he was going to stand before kings. One can wonder what Ananias felt when the Lord said he would show Paul what great things he must suffer. But whether or not Ananias told Paul, God really did show him what great things he would suffer. 

If you read through Paul's 13 letters, he refers to the role of suffering in every church or individual to whom he writes. Sometimes it's more subtle. He writes to his friend Philemon about a runaway slave, Onesimus. He became Onesimus’s spiritual father in his prison bonds. If all the latter chapters of Acts had never happened, Paul had never gone to Rome and suffered, then Onesimus would never have met him. It was all in the divine economy that Paul's suffering imprisonment would be the means through which Onesimus would be brought to faith in Jesus Christ. 

Paul gives a list of sufferings in 2 Corinthians 11. Given what he's taught them, when he opens his heart to them, they will see the difference between the super apostles and him. The difference is the way in which the cross is etched upon his heart.  But the Corinthians were drifting from the cross in all different kinds of ways. And the whole letter is punctuated with this. 

In chapter one he says, “the sufferings of Jesus Christ have poured over my life and I've received the comfort of Jesus Christ, united to Jesus Christ. I've experienced the reality of his death, the reality of his resurrection in sufferings and in triumphs and in comforts. And my longing is that that anointing oil has flowed down, as it were, over Aaron's beard over his shoulders onto his body as the representative of his people.”

When the spirit of God unites him to Jesus Christ, it is as though the sufferings and the comforts of Jesus Christ flow over from Him into Paul and his ministry flow over from him into the church. And that's why they are believers in the first place. So etched upon his soul is this union with Christ and His death and resurrection and the sufferings that are so intimately related to the fruitfulness of his ministry. And then right at the end, he returns to the subject in a completely different way.

He's talking about coming to them and is distressed about their situation, as found in 2 Corinthians 13. I think perhaps many Christians read these words as though he was saying the same thing he says to the Philippians, “I'm weak in myself, but I can do all things in Christ.” But he's saying that when united to Jesus Christ, then that awful weakness, in which Christ was crucified, begins to flow into his life. That's the shape of his life. He makes that most clear in 2 Corinthians 4 where he draws our eyes to the humanity of the Lord Jesus and what He experienced. Paul uses what grammarians call a chiasm, when you present an idea, and then later state the same idea but inverse. This may be the most intense chiasm in the New Testament. He says, we're always carrying in us the death of Jesus. I personally think that should be translated “dying of Jesus.” He wants to make vivid the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifested. That only makes sense in Christ. How is it that we carry in our bodies the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in us for we who live? We who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake so that the life of Jesus might be manifested in our mortal flesh. 

So death isn't at work in us, but life in you. That's how it is. When you're united to the Lord Jesus Christ, you share in His death and in His resurrection. Therefore, if that was the divine pattern for his fruitfulness, it is the divine pattern for the church's fruitfulness. He says the jar of clay must break in order that the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ might shine. 

Suffering in the Life of the Church

This relationship between missions and suffering is repeated in the life of the Christian church. John Calvin says, in his commentary on 1 Peter, that from the very beginning, God has designed things so that death would be the way to life, and the cross would be the way to victory.

Throughout much of Christian history, churches were shaped like a cross. When the people of God gathered together for the central moment of their week, they were squeezed into the shape of the cross together. This is what it means for us to be conformed to the image of God's son. 

There are a few things we need to remember. First, we must always remember that suffering is a gracious gift from God. Second, we must remember that having faith in Jesus Christ will always mean that this pattern will be embedded in our lives because we are united to Him. Third, we must remember that the nature of this suffering is God's choice because it's God's gift. It's not our choice. We are encouraged to take our share in it as Timothy did at the end of Hebrews 13, where we're told he's released from prison. We also ought to recognize that there is a tremendous diversity of suffering, just as there is a tremendous diversity of gifts, but the same Lord and the same Spirit. 

This is not a matter of comparing ourselves with great sufferers. This is a matter of us being faithful to Jesus Christ and taking our share of suffering. The history of Christian missions indicates to us how different that can be. John Paton endured much suffering, as did Henry Martyn, a brilliant mathematician who went to the far east. Or then you think about somebody like William Chalmers Burns who was instrumental in the most amazing awakenings in Scotland in the first half of the 19th century, who buried himself in labors in China.

We don't have the math to calculate the relationship between someone's suffering, a church's suffering, and fruitfulness. We don't understand what He is doing–sometimes we get glimpses–but one day we will understand.

Brothers and sisters, Christian family, let’s ask ourselves, what are we involved in? To be faithful to Christ is being willing to die to self. We are no longer our own. We see this beautifully in a poem Amy Carmichael wrote, highlighting this conviction of suffering for Christ that she so deeply carried: 

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die, and rent
by ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?

No wound, no scar?
Yet as the Master shall the servant be,
And, pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?