By Katie Nalls
NEW ORLEANS -- Preaching from 1 John 3:17, Jerry Rankin, President of the International Mission Board, challenged students at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary to see the responsibility of every believer to reach the nations for Jesus Christ.
Speaking November 27, during a global missions chapel service, Rankin stated that most Southern Baptist are familiar with the Great Commission, but many think it is a special call for an elite few who have had a burning bush type of experience.
“How readily we dismiss any sense of responsibility and fail to find the motivation that would lead us to lay our lives on the alter, making them available to fulfill the Great Commission,” Rankin stated.
The first command that Jesus gave his disciples after “follow me” was “look,” Rankin said. In John 4, Jesus told the disciples to lift their eyes and look at the fields that were white unto harvest.
Rankin explained that believers must see a lost world as God sees it – a world of people groups without Christ.
“I think Jesus realized that until we looked and saw a lost world as God sees it, that we would not find the motivation or the compelling thrust to go into that world, to be his witnesses, or to make disciples,” Rankin said.
According to Rankin, God is at work in the world bringing people to Jesus. He shared several stories from the missionary emeritus celebration that took place at Ridgecrest in September. More than 1,000 missionary emeriti participated in a time of celebrating what the Lord has done and is doing. One missionary who was appointed in 1950 shared that at the time of his appointment, the Foreign Mission Board had around 60 missionaries in 27 different countries whereas there are now over 5,300 missionaries working with more than 1,100 people groups in 184 countries.
Rankin shared some of the ways that God is at work in the world.
“Last year over 100 unreached people groups were engaged with the gospel for the first time hearing of the love of God,” Rankin said, “God is using the turmoil and chaos and warfare and natural disasters and political upheaval to draw people to spiritual answers that only Jesus can provide."
Rankin asked, “Do we not see that God has brought us into the kingdom for such a time as this? Will we not open our eyes and see the opportunity as it has never existed before to take the gospel literally to the very ends of the earth?”
Since 2001, the number of churches planted has escalated from around 4,000 a year until last year there were more than 25,000 new churches started. For the last eight years, IMB missionaries have reported an average of more than 1,000 new believers a day being baptized around the world, with 600,000 new believers baptized last year alone.
In addition to telling believers to look at the world, Jesus commands them to love. “Someone has correctly said that the great commandment and the great commission are inextricably linked. For you see, it is love that makes possible the phenomenon of sacrifice because sacrifice is others centered,” Rankin said.
Rankin concluded, “It is not a matter of who is called to go and who is permitted to stay, but he calls us all to look and to love and then to live out that faith wherever he places us.”
NOBTS President Chuck Kelley also challenged seminary faculty, students and staff to use the global missions service to determine their personal missionary responsibility.
Kelley said, “The truth of the matter is if Christ is the king, then we must acknowledge his authority to send us wherever he wants us to go – into danger or into safety, into the unfamiliar or into the familiar. It could be your struggles to learn Greek and Hebrew are God’s way of preparing you to learn another language to preach Jesus in a different tongue or to be the first person who will speak of Jesus to a lost people group of the world.”