Paris Reidhead preaches about the importance of every Christian being a missionary for Christ, emphasizing the need to renounce the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes that separates clergy and laity, and to understand that God expects every believer to have a worldwide ministry. He highlights the early principles of missions, the dedication of missionaries like Adoniram Judson and David Livingstone, and the need for a revival that returns to these foundational principles to address the challenges of modern missions and the vast number of unreached people. Reidhead urges individuals to be involved with people, not just souls, and to be filled with the Holy Spirit to fulfill their unique ministry for Christ.

World Missions in Review By Paris Reidhead* Will you turn, please, to Matthew, Chapter 25. Our Scripture reading will begin with verse 31, and conclude with the end of the Chapter. WORLD MISSIONS IN REVIEW. When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: 32And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: 33And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. 34Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: 36Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 37Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? 38When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? 39Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? 40And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. 41Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: 42For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: 43I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. 44Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? 45Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. 46And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. You will notice from the text that this is an extremely personal matter, that everyone is going to be involved in this time when our Lord reviews that mission to which He has committed His church. No one will escape. It will not be that a professional company are there standing. It will not be that the present company of 27 thousand American missionaries around the world will be called before the Lord to give an account and we that remained at home will be excluded and allowed to sit idly by, waiting for the results of the examination. You must understand one thing about Biblical Christianity, and that is that God has established a premise that is to be the foundation of all future judgment, and as well as of all Christian testimony and ministry. And that is that everyone in Christ is a member of His body, and thus subject to the rule and the government of the head, and every Christian shall be judged by Him in that day, in accord with what he has done with respect to the will of the Head, not to the will of the church or denomination, but to the will of the Head, the Lord Jesus. Now, understanding this, we find that there is light shown upon the principle in Revelation, the 2nd Chapter. Our Lord is writing to the church at Ephesus. This church which is so commended in the Epistle, now is condemned by the Lord in the testimony given by John. We suppose there to be probably as much as 40 years between the time the little Epistle to the Ephesians was written and the time that John wrote this. There had been a change, just as there can be a change in any church or any life in the passing of years. Now I read with the beginning of the 1st verse of the 2nd Chapter continuing to verse 7 of Revelation: “Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things sayeth He that holdeth the seven stars in His right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks; I know thy works, and thy labor, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou has tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast labored, and hast not fainted. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, which I also hate. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.” Now this church had controversy with the Lord, and He with the church. They had labored. They had been faithful to testimony and truth, but they had lost their first love. But you notice that He commends them in the 6th verse. “But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, which I also hate.” Now you would say, “What does He mean by this?” Well it comes from the word, Laos, from which we get our word, laity. The word that has to do with the people in contrast to the clergy, and apparently even at this early time the last decade of the first century, 90A.D. or thereafter. A principle, a spirit was beginning to creep into the churches that there was a distinction and a delineation between certain of the officers, bishops. We find, for instance, that one of the writers; I believe it was in Barnabas’ epistle (I would have to check on that. It is not clear at the moment.) but one of these early writers of the early ante-Nicene fathers, makes perfectly clear a distinction between the bishop as being someone in charge of an area and then the elders and the pastors. Already this spirit of the separated clergy and laity had begun by this time, and it is here called the deeds of the Nicolaitanes. This distinction in the body between clergy and laity. And our Lord says, You hate it, and I also hate it. Now what does this mean particularly. I think it carries us back to the 25th chapter where He has all before Him, 25th chapter of Matthew, where He has the sheep and the goats, and all are judged in accordance with principles we are going to consider in just a moment. Everyone is going to be judged according to what he has done in respect to the commandments of the Lord, and the will of the Lord. Understanding this, we recognize therefore that the matter of missions is to be a matter of responsibility to every member of the body of Christ, and not just a few that we find necessary to send to distant lands because we cannot go. In the economy of God, in the mind of God, He intended every Christian to be a missionary. Now this is the principle that I wish to establish. Then I would propose to show you how it operated from the very first, how it was destroyed by the rise of the principle and philosophy of the Nicolaitanes, and what it means today in the 20th century after 150 years of modern missions. And then I am suggesting to you that the answer to the 20th century and the dilemma that we face is return to these early principles in respect to missions. Now see what took place then at the very first. Our Lord as He left His church, represented by the apostles with Him on the Mount of Olives, said, “After that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, ye shall receive dunamis (power) and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) Notice this is the very promise of blessing that He made to Abraham. In Galatians, and had we time I could take you there to show that we are actually heirs of the promise made to His Seed, the Lord Jesus, and that thus through the infilling empowering presence of the Holy Spirit every Christian is to inherit the promise made to Abraham and can expect to have a worldwide ministry for Christ. Now this is what He has said. He has stated it. He said it would not be on the basis only of your natural talent and ability, though He respects the different vessels that He has made; nor will it be on the basis of opportunity, for He realizes that a James in prison and shortly beheaded will not have the ministry that a Paul-Peter delivered from prison will have. But that every single member of His body is to have a worldwide ministry for the Lord Jesus. Now this is the premise. This is the basic, Biblical principle that when you are in Christ, in that relationship with Him that is the normal Christian life, committed utterly and absolutely, unchangeably to His sovereignty, and filled with the Holy Spirit, yours is to be a worldwide ministry. This is His statement. “Ye upon whom the Holy Spirit comes shall receive dunamis,” (the very thing that went out of Christ when the woman on the roadside touched the hem of His garment and was healed,) and ye shall be witnesses. He did not say, You may be. He said, You shall be witnesses unto Me both, both. How strange it is that we have felt that this was either as though the Lord were not quite sure of His diction, and He chose both when really meant either. Ye shall be witnesses unto Me either in Jerusalem, or in Judaea, or in Samaria, or unto the uttermost part of the earth. This is the way we read it. This is the way we approach it. This is how we feel about it. It is an either/or matter. If you cannot go out there, well all right. Then you can stay here. Either go or stay. As though we had option in it. Well He left no option, and He in a sense left no choice. He said, “Ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” And, because of this, we find that there is in the earliest pages of this book the record of the rapid and marvelous expansion of the church. It was seen in the fact that when the Apostles abode at Jerusalem, apparently they only had hiding space enough for the few apostles. The rest of them had to run. And we find that this deacon by the name of Phillip could not get a corner in which to hide, and so he ran as fast as he could and did not stop to catch his breath until he got to Samaria. And they said, “What are you here for?” “Well I am here because I am a Christian.” “Well who is a Christian? Well why, what are they chasing you for?” And questions gave way to answers, and answers aroused more questions, and the result was, they said, “Well, if your Jesus is alive and He healed the lame, we have somebody that is lame. Let us see what He can do.” And so the lame in the city were healed. And here is the demon possessed. Let’s see what He can do. And so the demon possessed were delivered. And there was great joy in that city, for many that were lame were healed, and many that were possessed of evil spirits were delivered. And they believed, and they were baptized. Now who was this man? This foreign missionary, that had left his own country and tongue and culture, and had gone out into a neighboring area? Who was he? Was he one of the Apostles? No, not so. Not so. The Apostles were still in Jerusalem. Who was he? Well if you please, he was a layman. But oh, what an atrocious word to use of Philip, a layman. How my heart grieves when I hear the term, I am just a layman. Oh, where did it come from? Well it came from the Nicolaitanes, that is where it came from; it was the thing that the Lord hated, that He said He would not have any part of, and He commended the church at Ephesus even though they were luke warm and were not hot or cold, and they had left their first love, but nevertheless He had this to say for them. He hated the deeds of the Nicolaitanes. This delineation, this distinction that was going to break down the purpose which had been inculcated in the church by the sovereign Head, our Lord Jesus, that every member of the body of Christ should be an effective witness for Christ. Everyone should be a missionary. And so we find a layman has gone into Samaria. He has there a witness and there is great joy. And so then they send for the clergy. And Peter and John come up. Not so. Oh, we recognize apostles and prophets, we recognize that there were elders and deacons, we recognize that the elders served as pastors and overseers. But there was only one level. They were members of the body of Christ. They shared the life of the risen Head, and “He gave some to be Apostles, and prophets, and evangelists, and pastors and teachers.” But why? “He give them for the perfecting of the saints into the work of the ministry,” not the doing of the ministry for the saints. Do you see the heresy of the Nicolaitanes grows. It is not that He gave Evangelists, Pastors, and Teachers to do the work of the saints which is not the case at all. He gave Evangelists and Pastors and Teachers for the perfecting of the saints into the work of the ministry. Well there is all the difference in the world. Apparently it looks the same on the outside. Here are evangelists. Here are pastors. Here are teachers. And the church as we acknowledge evangelists, pastors, and teachers. We accept them. But how do you accept them? Do you accept them as the Lord gave them? Do you accept them that the Lord gave these for the express and the exclusive purpose of the perfecting of you, meeting you and the majority, bringing you into a relationship with Christ where you can do the work of the ministry. Or, do you accept them as having been sent to do the work of the ministry for you. I told you of my friend who was with us when we were up at Monterey, in New England Keswick, as candidates for the mission field. And he was telling us of his experience in going into a little church way out in the fields of North Dakota as a student pastor. And he told how that first day he turned to the man that had met him at the train and brought him, and was his host, and he said, Brother, would you close with prayer? And the man looked at him, shocked. He said, Of course not. That is what we have you here for. We are paying you for that. You pray. And this is the spirit of the Nicolaitanes carried to the absurd and the extreme. But nevertheless it is the essence of the spirit. We are hiring you to do something that we are indifferent about doing, or incapable of doing. Now brethren, we have got to recognize that in the day when we stand before Him, this will not prevail, and you cannot say in that day and hour, Well you know, we had such a splendid evangelist, and excellent pastors, and we had such marvelous preachers, and oh, we felt that all we really had to do was just to attend on their...Well what were they ministering for? What was their goal? What was their end? What was their purpose? It was, if you understood what He gave these for, it was to bring you to maturity, to perfect you into a relationship with Him, so that there could be the fulfillment of His purpose in and through your life. Now this is then the basic principle of the New Testament. Everyone upon whom the Holy Spirit was to come was to receive power, and everyone upon whom He did come was to be a missionary, a witness for the Lord Jesus, and this witness was to be worldwide, both Jerusalem and Judaea, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. We want to understand Satan’s strategy; we will see his attack here. We have already seen it at the beginning of this, about 90a.d. when John wrote, telling the church at Ephesus that He commended them for hating the deeds of the Nicolaitanes. But, this was not enough. It should have been, but it was not. For we discover that progressively from that time there went this delineation between clergy and laity. Men became interested in great polemical discussions refuting the philosophers, the pagan philosophers. And as you read the ante-Nicene fathers, you just are appalled at how much time was wasted in refuting the inventions of hell. I can imagine that if some of the dear, dear men used their great intellect in point by point refutation of the doctrines of hell, that hell is, just filled with delight, because now someone that ought to have been exalting Christ was using his strength to refute their arguments. And hell was capable of inventing by the ream; just as goods pour off the loom so hell could invent new errors and new heresies, and new doctrines. And if the church was going to spend all of its time in picking these to pieces, then they said, Well we have just fixed them up right here, with one fell swoop they have done it. They feel that they have to just refute everything we say and we will get them to spend all their time doing that. And the consequence? Well the consequence was this. By the 4th century, we find a distinct delineation between bishops and pastors. We find that it went on progressively increasing with the development of the celibate clergy, and other factors which made for a permanent division between the people and the preachers and the teachers. I suppose that we have to account for this primarily by the success of the church, humanly viewed success. You know that 313 A.D. Constantine declared Christianity was the State religion. It was the religion of the Empire. Well you can imagine what this meant. But one day, the temples that graced the hilltops were dedicated to Juno, and Jupiter, and the gods of ancient Greece and Rome, and now by the edict of the Emperor they have become necessary to be converted. It was necessary to convert the statuary, so what they do is chisel off Jupiter, and put a robe over him for the time being till the sculptors can finish, and they call this robed figure Peter. And so on with Mary, and all the other Apostles, and all the dignitaries of the church. Now the statuary has been converted, and the temple has been converted. What about the people? Well you know that it was not possible to do it all at once, and so as they would pass the balconies over which the Bishop would be standing they dipped their leaves, their branches into the tubs of water, and then sprayed it out and hoped that a drop would land on some. They had a lot of people to take care of in a very short time. The people then went to the temples that had been converted, and saw the statuary that had been converted, and they said, “Well now we are Christians, what do we do? What are we going to do here?” “Well,” they said, “worship Christ.” “Well we do not know anything about Him. Where is His statue.” So they had to put one there. And so it was necessary to teach them about it, and so they put Him on a Cross and a crucifix so that they could do it. And so they said, Well now how....? We had better get somebody up there. Before when we came we had a priest there, and he told us when to stand and sit and dance and smile, and told us all about it, and so we would like to have someone sort of lead us, give us a program and lead us in it. And so we find then that they had to have someone to teach them, and there was no personal relationship with the risen Lord. There was no sense of oneness with Him, No sense of partaking of His invisible life and under the control of the invisible Head. And thus religion has now become reduced down to formalism. The ancient occult mysteries of Hinduism have been carried over, and converted, and changed. Look what has happened. Doctrines are submerged, in traditions, and buried under the accumulation of the interpretations of the fathers, and Satan who could not destroy the church by a frontal attack has been able to vitiate it and destroy its effectiveness by infiltration. Now you can see of course how successful he has been. It plunged the Western civilization, Christian, so-called Christian civilization into a period known as the dark ages. Well what caused them to be dark ages. Wasn’t it this, that the hated doctrine of the Nicolaitanes had prevailed. No longer did you have the priesthood of the believer; no long did you have the recognition that everyone was entitled to the full relationship with Jesus Christ. No longer were the people told that they could meet and know the Lord in personal encounter with Him. No longer were they told that He would be the life of their life. They now had to have someone who would go into the presence of God, someone that would mediate between them and Christ, someone that would tell them what to do and when to do it, and would give them assurance and consolation, because God was so far removed that there had to be these had to be these professional ones that would come between the individual and God. This is the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes, carried into the extreme form. Well we are very grateful for what was done at the Protestant Reformation. We are heirs of it, but let it be understood this night that the Reformation, as good as it was, was complete only in certain respects. And we are conscious of the fact that tonight we are still laboring under the tremendous magnetism and draw and pull of much that was of the Nicolaitanes, much that was of that day. And, therefore, as we seek to serve the Lord now, we have got to see what has happened in the period call the period of missions. The Roman Catholic Church was extremely anxious to be missionary. You understand that in South America some of the oldest buildings in the Western hemisphere are the magnificent cathedrals that were built by the priests using the Indian labor of those lands that they conquered to the south of us. We recognize that these were zealous men, earnest men that were convinced that the only possible way the people to whom they had come would ever be saved was by submitting to the teachings, and leadership, and doctrines that they would bring. But if we go back to South America now our missionaries tell us that the things have changed very little across the centuries. The ancient (for this hemisphere the ancient) cathedrals stand, but the worship is a gross mixture in many cases of paganism, superstition and of the lack, the utter lack of understanding of the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. But what of Protestantism? lest I should seem to be prejudiced. Is it not equally true that across the centuries there has been a steady adherence to and dependence upon the hated doctrines of the Nicolaitanes. Has not this been the case? I recall down in Jacksonville, Florida, some years ago when I was in a meeting in a little church there, a lady came to — the hostess where I was staying, and attended the services, and she said, “You know last night the preacher mentioned something about Divine Healing, about the Lord for the body, and I am troubled about that so I went to the Pastor this morning.” And she said, “We (and then she gave her denominational name) we do not believe that doctrine. I am not going to go to these meetings with you anymore.” Well she had not gone to the Word to find out what the Word said. She would have been, and the Pastor would have been, the most avid defenders of the utter liberty of the people, and yet when she had a question arise it was not going to the Word of God to find out what God’s Word said. She had to have someone that functioned in her case as the authority who could tell her what she believed, and would thus be the means whereby her mind would be at rest, and she would not need to strain it or to put any pressure on it. She could just find out what she believed by asking him. This is the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes, not of the Bereans who search the Scripture daily to see if these things be so. We find, therefore, that the established church was missionary, but only in the continued extension of the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes. Then we come a little further. We find that when Protestant Missions began it began in its largest thrust through a little people called the Moravians, the descendants of John Huss in that revival movement that antedated Luther’s ministry. And they went out to the field. But there was a great freedom, a great liberty, but still it was an extension of this that they had where they sent 15 hundred missionaries. Probably that group, the Moravians after they came to reside at the estate at Zinzendorf at Herrnhut in Germany represented the most totally people committed for missions of which the church has any record. But there again it was the extension of the same principle. They sent out 15 hundred in 40 years, which was quite marvelous for a small group of people that they were indeed with very meager resources. Many of them-- I have told you of the two young men that heard of an Island out in the West Indies owned by a planted who was an atheist, and absolutely declared that under no conditions would any religious representative ever come to the 2 to 3 thousand slaves that he owned and who worked on his plantation. And my heart was greatly moved when I read of the parting of these two young men. They had written to the man. They had sold themselves to him as life-long slaves, just so that they could be there as Christians where these 3 thousand people, uprooted from Africa, where they might have had an opportunity to hear of Christ, and taken to this place where a man said they must live and die with no one to tell them of the Lord, and so these two young Moravian men sold themselves into lifelong slavery at the going price of a male worker and then used the money that they secured from the sale of their life and freedom and bodies to pay their passage out to the West Indies. The boat was leaving from the harbor there in the North Sea, and as they cast off the lines and the tide began to move it out so that the sails could fill with wind and it could make its way out to the islands, that when they disembarked they would never return, they stood side by side. And then one of the young men put his arm around his fellow, and as the people stood on the key side he raised his hand, and over the slowly widening gap, the last words that they heard were these, “May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering.” And with that the gap widened, and they saw their family no more. This was the passion of their hearts to get the Gospel out. And so we will have to recognize that in World Missions in Review we see a great renaissance of biblical love for Christ among the Moravians. But you know that when Cary stood up in the assembly of his brethren in Britain and said, Brethren, I believe God is burdening me to go to India he was immediately squelched and the Moderator said, Sit down, young man. You are out of order. When God gets ready to save the people of India He will do it without you. But Cary did not believe that. He had come to recognize that a cobbler had responsibilities, and so he implemented the testimony that he had over his little shoe store bench when he said, My business is to serve the Lord. I cobble shoes to pay expenses. And he went to India as, shall I use the word of opprobrium, a layman to go, and was instrumental in the hands of God for the opening of that little sub-continent to the Gospel. Then to our knowledge none before since the time St. Thomas had come and the church had been established in the southern area of India. Now, dear friends, understand that since that time, with the going of Robert Morrison1 to China and Hudson Taylor2 also to China, the movement we know as modern missions has developed. How grateful I am to tell you that tonight there are some 27 thousand Protestant missionaries, and we would like to believe that most of them, to some degree at least, know and love our Lord Jesus Christ and are seeking to exalt and to glorify Him. We also see much that is very commendable, and deeply gratifying to our hearts in the close scrutiny and review of these 150 years of missions. We see men that identified themselves with the people in China in those other years growing their hair in the form of a queue, and wearing Chinese clothes, and sleeping and living in Chinese houses, and completely abandoning all contact with their homeland. How different from us in the 20th century that go and have to take about 5 tons of luggage in order to adjust our selves to these lands to which the Lord has sent us. Those in the early days simply went out, identified themselves with the people, and were prepared to spend the balance of their lives, never expecting to see their loved ones again. And so those early years of missions are filled with the testimony of men, valiant, courageous men that loved the Lord Jesus Christ and pioneered for Him. No one can read the story of Adoniram Judson3 in Burma without breaking down in gratitude that God found such a man that was willing to endure for our Lord Jesus. And so as we look back over these 150 years of reawakened missions, we are deeply grateful for every hero of the Cross. I remember my own impressions as a lad of five in my grandmother’s living room in Minnesota, sitting on the floor, bored with the conversation of my elders, and looking for toys that were not there. I saw a book among other books, a think one, a black one, a somber cover. And I reached over and pulled it, and there to my amazement were the most thrilling and exciting pictures that I had ever seen. And I turned to my mother and said, What is this? And she said, Dear, that is the life story of David Livingstone, and there I saw those pictures. I can see them with my eyes open now as I saw them then. They were burned into my memory so that I will never forget them. The canoe having been tipped over by the hippopotamus’ jaws clamping down upon the unfortunate paddler that had fallen into its maw. And then to see the lion as it was shaking the valiant Livingstone. And then to see him as he was there interceding for slaves that were to be beheaded. And these wood cuts, just the old woodcut engraving, burned themselves into me that afternoon as I sat there. It was ten or fifteen years before I ever saw the book again, but I could turn the pages in my mind and see them with startling detail. Well that afternoon something happened in my heart as I came face to face with the fact that God intended men and women everywhere to hear that God loved them and Christ died for them and that they could be saved. And years later it was my privilege to go into villages that Livingstone had missed where we were told by those that resided there that never before had a missionary ever come. And never will I forget the heart-shaking experience of coming down a path toward evening and having one of the boys go in to ask if we could camp in the area. Then as I came to find him accompanied by a chief whose body was bent and whose face was lined, whose skin hung in folds. Obviously deteriorating and soon to die. And as he hobbled out there to meet me, he looked at me and tears gathered and laid through the ash covered cheeks. And he spoke and it was interpreted for me. Oh, why have you been so long? I have been waiting for you. What do you mean you have been waiting for me? I have only been in the country a little while. What do you mean you have been waiting for me? He said, When I was a little boy (one of his own boys of the village was there)...When I was his size, my father, who was chief, went to the big river where the sun set and there he told me that there was a man whose skin was like the morning, the morning sun, that had told him that God loved him and that someone called Jesus had died for him, and he said he was coming to our village. My father asked him to come. My father died, and he told me to wait. And he said, Hardly a day has gone by but what I have been looking. And he said, Why have you waited so long? Why haven’t you come before? I tell you it is hard to sleep at night when you realize there are 17 hundred tribes around the world that have had no one to tell them of the Savior’s dying love. It is hard to recognize this as being the product of 150 years’ missions. And then to realize that nearly 2 billion of earth’s family do not know, and have not heard, and 1 George Ernest "G. E." Morrison (1862 – 1920), also known as Morrison of Peking or Chinese Morrison. 2 James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) A British Protestant Christian Missionary to China and founder of China Inland Mission. 3 Adoniram Judson, Jr. (1788-1850) First Protestant missionary sent to Burma. that there are 140 thousand people that died today that have never heard once savingly the name of Christ. It is hard. It is hard, I say. But what is the answer for it? This is what I submit to you. If you will examine from 100 years past, for the statistics are so inadequate, beyond that, but quite complete, at least relatively complete for the last 100 years...If you will examine as of 100 years ago the total Protestant mission force, the number of Christians on the Mission Fields, and the world population, and will just carry those figures for ten year’ intervals up to 1950, this is what you discover, that in 1950 there were more unreached and unevangelized than there had been in 1850. We rejoice that there have been churches planted that have not had the Gospel before, but speaking of earth’s family we find that there are far more today that have never heard of Christ of known Him than any other ten year interval in the past. Consequently, if you project out on the basis of the average for the last hundred years, during which time we had the invention and the development of the steam engine, the railroad, that automobile, the truck, the radio, the television, aeroplane, all of these means that we are employing to the utmost of ability and strength, this is what you find on the basis of the average for the past hundred years, or for the highest ten year extent in that hundred years, projected out to 2050. If we do in the next 90 years, for we have already used up 10 of this, as well and no better, or just an arithmetic increase of what we have done in the past hundred years, it is a foregone, established, irrevocable conclusion that in 2000 there will be far more unevangelized than in 1950, and in 2050 a great many more than there are now. You say, Well what is the answer to it? The answer to it is, I am sure, lies right here in the hated doctrine of the Nicolaitanes. It hangs right on this hook, right on this point, God never intended you to be content with being a missionary either in Jerusalem or Judaea, or Samaria, or unto the uttermost part of the earth. This is not what He said. This is a heresy. What He said was, “Ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem and in Judaea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Now we are in great need of a revival. But the revival is a revival that is going to return us again to the elemental, Biblical principles that we have been content to neglect, and forget that in the innovations we have developed and the procedures that we have mastered, and the plans that we are employing, we have forgotten that we can do all that these plans, and innovations and procedures demand and still have a portion of our time to give to earnest reconsideration of elemental Biblical principles. I am not an iconoclast. I do not know that I have a bone of it in my body, but I do not believe that there is any reason at all that we should close our eyes to the fact that a small handful of people, beginning back there at Pentecost, were able in one generation to save their world for Christ, and that multiplied increase, multiplied thousands in a hundred years with every kind of instrumentation possible, things never dreamed of by our fathers, have not been able to keep up with the birthrate, much less to evangelize the great backlog of the unreached. It seems to me that as we continue loyally doing all that is at our hand to do, we must recognize that we have been content to accept the hated doctrine of the Nicolaitanes. And that doctrine states that, if you do this, then you can hire it. It is an extension of the industrial revolution into the church. In the industrial revolution the assumption is that, if you can make enough money pulling a chain when a red light goes on, you can go home happy because you have money. But we are discovering that our people that have come into this sensitized kind of existence stop off at the local pub and drink themselves into oblivion because of the total dissatisfaction they have with having prostituted the abilities and powers God gave them. And they are not satisfied. There is something more to work than simply performing a menial, inconsequential task, even though it gives you enough money to live. There is something in the human spirit that demands opportunity for creativity, for extension, for challenge. And the man is not content just to get his pay check. And thus we find that here in our city with Local 3, we have now pressed it to absurdity that men are prepared to work for just a few hours a week and extensive overtime, and now it is foolish for a person to go to college, because the average school teacher gets across the nation about $106 a week, whereas if you work for Local 3 you will succeed in getting, if you follow the plan that is now presented in operation, $253 a week. And we have thus come to the place where we have found that the only possible reward is but an increase of money. But money does not satisfy. And so we find that in our service, we have said, If we can just do one thing; I’ll give and you go; I’ll teach Sunday School, and you witness; I’ll do and you’ll do, and we have tried to carry this departmentalization of work into the things of the Lord, creating the class of clergy and laity on new levels. It will never work, my dear. It will never work. It will never work. It is not. It has not worked. It cannot work. There is only one possible way in which the challenge of the 20th century can ever be reached and realized, and that is for us to emphasize to every young person and old person, however many years have passed upon their grey heads, or how free their face may be from the lines that care will engrave, we must tell them that God’s intention was that they be filled with the Holy Ghost and have a worldwide ministry for Christ. You say, How can it be a worldwide ministry? He had a plan, and His plan was in operation. First, He said, “You will be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem.” No one lives in an apartment in this economy simply to have shelter. He lives there because he is God’s foothold for evangelism in that apartment. No one works in a shop just so that he can get his living. He is there as God’s witness. He is there as God’s fifth columnist for Heaven. He is there because God put him there. He is there, empowered by the Holy Ghost, illumined by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. He is a missionary for Christ in his Jerusalem; it is not too extensive to go from Jerusalem to Judaea. It is possible for him to have an extended ministry. It is possible for him to move from point A to point B and to find there those whom he can touch in love for Jesus Christ. Then we discover that ever Samaria, the adjoining regions, can be visited. It is not at all unusual for people to drive clear out to California for a week, but why haven’t we come to the place where some of our people are driving down to Mexico in order that they can take a few weeks or days of their vacation to labor alongside of these that are there. The night schools are on almost every hand. There is no reason why Spanish could not be learned by a great many people and vacations could be taken in terms of missionary work. I do not think we have begun to understand what our Heavenly Father would do if we were prepared to accept the fact that we are responsible for our Samaria, and then to the uttermost part of the earth. It is possible for us, by His grace, to be there. You understand that life is made up of time, and time is sold for money, and every time you give a dollar, you are giving not so many cents but you are giving the portion of your life that is required to earn the dollar. Should it be that you get a dollar an hour, when you contribute a dollar to send someone to the mission field you are actually investing an hour of your life. Be it understood by you, therefore, that you cannot give money. All you can give is yourself. You have carried your talent, you skill, your ability into the market place, and there you have merchandised it, and they have returned your time in a fluid form. And when you give to send someone to a distant land that you have never seen, God is enabling you to make friends through the mammon of unrighteousness, and in His own bookkeeping He counts that you have spent the time there that your money represents. And I believe that it was at that time, as it is now, possible for you to have a ministry, both by prayer, but by your own fluid life in the form of money in sending the Gospel into the Balin Valley and into the hidden recesses of the waiting tribes have never heard. Now, if we understand it then, we accept it, it is this, that He expects you to have a ministry to people, not to souls. Be this understood that we in the 20th Century have erred in thinking that God is interested in souls as some excrescence of personality. And we have been prepared to offer human sacrifice on the altar of our ambition through the means of statistics. And we have been able to get nickel Christians, and nickel converts, and get people to raise their hand and do other things without realizing that we must become involved with people. It is a terrific responsibility to be a witness for Him. Our Lord became involved with people. He took their sicknesses. He took their heartache. He took their burden. He took their hunger. We cannot do it by a tract flippantly given, or a word lightly passed. It requires that we are to be witnesses for Christ, that we abandon to Him our blood, bought personalities and let the tenderness of Christ flow through our eyes, the sympathy of Christ is manifest through our patience in listening, that we let it be manifest in our concern for the needs of men. Oh, that we should somehow lose this idea that He is interested in souls that reminds me of Indians, going around clipping off scalps and tying them to their belt, and holding up the scalps and saying, Look what I have. It isn’t scalps the Lord wants. It is people that He wants. He loves people. He died for people. And you are to be witnesses to people. And this is to become involved with them. Oh, not to the place where they drain your life from you like a vampire bat. It presupposes that you are filled with the Spirit. It presupposes that you have His illuminating guidance and direction and power and strength. He did not say, You shall go, as Dr. Simpson said: Our Lord was not afraid that His disciples would not begin to preach. He was afraid they would before they were filled with the Spirit. And after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, ye shall be witnesses unto Me. But I believe that it is God’s purpose that every member of this church and every evangelical church should be a Spirit-filled missionary, not just a member that contributes, or serves, or performs some occupation, but a member of the body of Christ, a member of His body, a part of His body under the immediate, direct control of the Head, and in fellowship with the whole body, and performing the ministry that He has uniquely committed to that individual. There is something you can do that no one else can do. I heard just yesterday of one of the members of this church that works in a hospital as a nurse, whose life and whose ministry in that hospital has been used. One of the directors of the hospital at some point of extreme responsibility, heavy responsibility, in speaking to one of our other people told how this nurse by her godly life and consistent testimony and frequently, happily spoken word for the Lord Jesus was instrumental in bringing him to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is now the Superintendent of one of the city Sunday Schools, active, seeking to serve the Lord and minister for Him. It was not that she was there to make a living. It was not that she was there simply to get enough money so that she could perform by gift some task; she was there as a missionary for Jesus Christ. This is Biblical Christianity. This is that which accounts for Paul’s conquest of that area from Jerusalem to Illyricum or Yugoslavia. Every place he left, he did not leave converts to Christ or even to Paul, but he left, if I may say it, little Pauls. “Be ye followers of me as I am of Christ.” Men that had come to know the end of themselves through their union with Christ in death, men that had come to the place where they had known the infilling, empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. Beloved, I believe we need a revival. I believe that if we are to have that revival there must be a frank, open disavowal of and renunciation of the hated doctrine of the Nicolaitanes. And we must recognize that God holds all of us to be missionaries for Jesus Christ. As Dick Hill has said, “You are either a missionary or a mission field.” If you understand this, there will be quickened in your heart an ever deepening hunger to know Him. But as long as you feel that you are satisfying the Lord by simply occupying space in the pew and performing some service that makes no spiritual demands upon you, you will be amazed how indifferent you are and unconcerned you are about spiritual matters. But the moment that you have realized that God put you along the roadside so that the hungry at midnight could come to you for the bread of life, when you discover that you are there, appointed of Him, then you can see there is nothing on the shelves. You will go to the good man and begin to knock, and there will cry within your heart such a persistent, importunate cry that He will know that you are asking not for yourself but for those to whom He has made you responsible, and He will arise and give all that you have asked. This was His Own analogy. This was His Own illustration. Why? Because He wants-the marvel of Biblical Christianity was that Jesus Christ was given a body by Mary so that by this means He could encounter temptation and meet head-on Satan and all of his power, and then die for you, so that you could give Him your body, and He could by the Holy Spirit live His life in you and through you. And His purpose was that you be a missionary both in Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth. I say to you that the only revival that is sufficiently important to merit your undying prayers and great heartache, and burden and love is a revival that will begin with the renunciation of the hated doctrine of the Nicolaitanes, and will result in your going on to seek the Lord. Now this does not mean at any moment a disavowal of the place of the church and the responsibility of it, and our fellowship as members of the body, but it does mean that the Head has bound us together that we might be sharers of His life, and fellowship one with another and that the purpose of all maturation and all the provisions of His grace were first that we might worship Him in Spirit and in truth, and that out of that worship there might flow the witness and the ministry so that it could be said of us in that day, “Come ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world, for I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me in; naked, and ye clothed Me; I was sick and ye visited Me; I was in prison, and ye came unto Me. Then shall the righteous answer and say, Lord, when saw Thee hungered and fed Thee? or thirsty, and gave Thee drink? When saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in, or naked and clothed Thee; or when saw we Thee sick and in prison and we came unto Thee. And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily, verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto Me.” (Matt. 25:34-40) We are going to stand before Him and give an account. Oh, might it be in that time none of us are ashamed, but hear Him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord.” Missions begins with you. Shall we pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank and praise Thee that Thou hast bid us come, and Thou hast given us rest from our sins, rest from ourselves and the tyranny of our own personalities and natures. Then Thou hast filled us with Thyself. And when Thou hast brought us to that place of sharing His life, His risen life, we hear the very One who said, Come and rest, say, Go and preach. Father, it is not fair for us to say, Come and rest means me, but go and preach means someone else. The One who said it said it to both. Father, we do ask that somehow the Holy Spirit burn into the hearts of the congregation truths of the evening that as we get perspective and see world missions in some little view, into our hearts will come perhaps to some confession, brokenness because of their unconcern and indifference to the lost around them, willingness to close their eyes to the sheep scattered without a shepherd. We can be broken, Lord, when we hear about Africa, Indonesia, but help us to realize that when our Heavenly, our Lord saw His own fellow countrymen in Galilee on that market morning, saw the sheep scattered without a shepherd, He was moved with compassion. Bring us to the place, Father, where we share the fellowship of His suffering. We realize that when He promised the fullness of the Holy Spirit and the upon baptism and the anointing of the Spirit, He said, it was that we might thereby be enabled to be witnesses “both,” “and” to the uttermost part of the world. So breathe upon this people, Lord, and bring us in wholehearted commitment and abandonment to all that Thou hast set before us as Thy will and purpose. Meet us now. With our heads bowed, and eyes closed, this service has a place for you, a response. You know what the Lord has said. The invitation if you are a sinner is to come and throw yourself at the feet of the risen, glorified Savior and receive Him as Lord and Redeemer, and see that His Blood was shed to wash away your sin. If you are a Christian, backslidden, failing in His purpose, enamored with the world, then the invitation is to come and cast yourself before Him in utter abandonment to His will and purpose, If you are that Christian and sought to walk in His light then the invitation is to realize that He has made you a witness, and let Him guide you and direct you and lead you to those to whom you speak and share of the things of Christ. There is a place for you. There is an invitation to you. We are going to stand in just a moment. Then we are going to leave. But I do not want you to feel that you must leave. If God has been speaking to your heart and there is need, and you want to finish some business before you go, I suggest that just while we are in the Benediction... Shall we stand. Now Father, Thou dost see and know and understand this people. We know, Lord, that communism has done in 40 years what the church of Christ has been able to do in 400. We believe that it is because we have missed one cardinal point, so obviously clear, that the wayfaring man though a fool need not err therein. Yet, Lord, we have erred in it, and we have felt that we could have professionals do what Thou hast said only the members of Thy body could do. Now, Lord, we pray that to every Christian’s heart will come a passionate desire, born of Thy Spirit tonight not to be content until we are all that the Lord Jesus wants us to be in relationship to Himself and in relation to His work. So seal to our hearts Thy truth. Bless the young people as they meet, the College and Career Group, grant, Lord, that this shall be a happy time of fellowship together. Now may Thy grace and mercy and peace be and abide with us now and until Jesus comes. Amen. * Reference such as: Delivered at The Gospel Tabernacle Church, New York City on Sunday Evening, February 18, 1962 by Paris W. Reidhead, Pastor. ©PRBTMI 1962