RICHMOND, Va. (BP)–Isaiah 6:8 is one of my favorite mission challenges. If I do not preach on the text, I usually bring it into the appeal to respond to God’s call and join him on mission.
I always call attention to the fact that God did not single out Isaiah and call him from among others. It was not a personal call. Isaiah responded to a generic call that reflected the heart cry and yearning of God for a people in darkness.
We have succumbed to the myth that God calls only an elite few to missions, and the rest of us are exempt if we have not discerned a specific, direct instruction to go as missionaries. We have assumed that we can remain content and complacent in our comfort zones at home unless we happen to see a burning bush or have a Damascus Road experience.
Isaiah did not wait for God to call him. He came offering himself to God. When he heard God’s heart for those who were lost, he made himself available and invited God to send him. He asked God to let him be the one to go.
Whether we are available to be on mission with God is not contingent on whether God is calling us. Like Isaiah, it is determined by whether we have come into a relationship with God that sees him as high and exalted with every right to lay claim to our lives. It is a relationship of submission to his lordship that results in our sharing his burden for those who are lost.
I have recognized, however, that there is a flaw in my using Isaiah’s experience to appeal for people to reach a lost world overseas. God was calling Isaiah to go to his own people. The Israelites had hardened their hearts and were walking in darkness! God said in response to Isaiah’s commitment, “Go, and tell this people.”
God is calling us to disciple the nations. He has commissioned us to be witnesses to the uttermost ends of the earth. His heart yearns to be exalted among all the peoples of the world. But he also is calling us to be witnesses to our own people who do not know him and to be a light in the darkness that is engulfing our own nation.
As we approach Easter it is a time to be grateful that we have had an opportunity to come into a saving relationship with our resurrected Lord. But it is also a time to join in a massive cooperative effort with the North American Mission Board to renew our commitment to reach our nation for Christ.
As you give generously to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering, you enable more missionaries to be sent into the unchurched and pioneer areas of our country. You support this year’s efforts to impact the Strategic Focus Cities of Philadelphia and Seattle. You help provide media resources to accelerate evangelism and church planting all across America and Canada.
God is at work through the tragic events of Sept. 11, an uncertain financial future and the meaninglessness of our postmodern secularized culture to create an environment where people are looking for hope and security. And we know that Jesus Christ is the only answer.
God is saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Who will go to the unchurched in your neighborhood and compel them to come? Who will go to the oppressed, the abused, the lonely, the self-sufficient and the affluent in our society and tell them of Jesus? Will you say like Isaiah, “Here am I, send me”?
I’ll continue to use God’s call to Isaiah to challenge people to international missions and cross-cultural witness, because the nations and unreached people groups in darkness are the concern of God’s heart, too. We should all take initiative to offer ourselves to be that witness wherever he sends us, just as Isaiah did. But the call that Isaiah heard and to which he responded was a call to his own people. May we respond to that call as well and support the work of the North American Mission Board in bringing America back to God.
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Jerry Rankin is president of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board.
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