tony sheng || mobilizing students for missions

Series of articles on homeless in San Francisco. Be prepared to be heartbroken if you read it, its quite intense.

In total contrast with my principles and values, I watched this movie the other night.... I felt dirty. I made it up by making some notes from Piper . I think I redeemed myself. I've posted notes from it down below, its just from the Conclusion page. It's pretty heavy reading though, I definitely have to read it again.

Notes - Let the Nations be Glad!
The ultimate goal of God in all of history is to uphold and display his glory for the enjoyment of the redeemed from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. His goal is the gladness of his people, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

Worship
Therefore, worship is the fuel and the goal of missions. Worship is the goal of missions because in missions we aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory. It is the fuel of missions because we can’t commend what we don’t cherish. We can’t call out, “Let the nations be glad!’’ until we say ,”I rejoice in the Lord.” Missions begins and ends with worship.

Prayer
Prayer puts God in the place of the all-sufficient Benefactor and puts us in the place of needy beneficiaries. Therefore, when the mission of the church moves forward by prayer, the supremacy of God is manifest and the needs of Christian missionaries are met. In prayer, he is glorified and we are satisfied. “Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full” John 16:24. The purpose of prayer is the Father’s fame and the saints’ fullness.

Suffering
The extent of our sacrifice coupled with the depth of our joy displays the worth we put on the reward of God. Loss and suffering, joyfully accepted for the kingdom of God, show the supremacy of God’s glory more clearly in the world than all worship and prayer.

Is Knowing Christ Crucial?
The aim of missions is to ‘bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations (Rom 1:5). God’s will is to be glorified in his Son by making him the center of all missionary proclamation. The supremacy of God in missions is affirmed biblically by affirming the supremacy of his Son as the focus of all saving faith.

People or Peoples?
Rather, God’s will for missions is that every people group be reached with the testimony of Christ and that a people be called out for his name from among all the nations. It may be that this definition of missions will, in fact, result in the greatest possible number of white-hot worshippers for God’s Son. But that remains for God to decide. Our responsibility is to define missions his way and then obey.
The ultimate goal of God in all history is to uphold and display his glory for the enjoyment of the redeemed from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. The beauty of praise that will come to the Lord from the diversity of the nations is greater than the beauty that would come to him if the chorus of the redeemed were culturally uniform or limited. Moreover, there is something about God that is so universally praiseworthy and so profoundly beautiful and so comprehensively worthy and so deeply satisfying that God will find passionate admirers in every diverse people group in the world. His true greatness will be manifest in the breadth of the diversity of those who perceive and cherish his beauty. The more diverse the people groups who forsake their gods to follow the true God, the more visible God’s superiority over all his competitors.
By focusing on all the people groups of the world, God undercuts ethnocentric pride and throws al peoples back upon his free grace rather than on any distinctive of their own. This humility is the flip side of giving God all the glory. Humility means reveling in his grace, not in our goodness. In pressing us on toward all the peoples, God is pressing us further into the humblest and deepest experience of his grace and weaning us more and more from our ingrained pride. In doing this, he is preparing himself a people – from all the peoples – who will be able to worship him with free and white-hot admiration.
Therefore, the church is bound to engage with the Lord of glory in his cause. It is our unspeakable privilege to be caught up with him in the greatest movement in history – the ingathering of the elect from every tribe and language and people and nation until the full number of the Gentiles comes in and all Israel is saved and the Son of Man descends with power and great glory as King of kings and Lord of lords and the earth is full of the knowledge of his glory as the waters cover the sea forever and ever: Then the supremacy of Christ will be manifest to all, and he will deliver the kingdom to God the Father, and God will be all in all.