Stay or Leave
5 Minute Read
As a Bible teacher, I recently proposed this hypothetical situation to a class of high schoolers:
If you were a business professional that wrote and/or sold books that advocated for Christian values, how could you respond if the country you did business in began to make the writing and selling of such books illegal? What would Christlike approaches be and what would non-Christlike approaches be?
It was a pleasant surprise to get a variety of responses for both kinds of approaches. Things such as: make a lawsuit out of it, stop selling publicly and just sell privately, just change businesses completely, move to another country and keep selling, or just stay and keep selling and deal with the consequences. The last two particularly caught my attention: move or stay. If you were put into this position, what would you do?
Many of us probably do not face this sort of active restriction against gospel work. However, if you have the humble blessing of being in touch with present-day, global, mission work, you might know people who do. We have brothers and sisters living and serving in countries who face daily opposition to gospel work. We may only know their abbreviated name or pseudonym, or their silhouettes, or the general region where they work, because the danger of their identities being exposed could immediately garner dangerous consequences.
Those pseudonyms and silhouettes face the decision or pressure of whether they should stay and serve despite the dangers and possible repercussions (death threats, deportation, fines, etc.) or if they should leave and go do some other work or work somewhere else. I invite you to consider what you would do.
We should consider it a privilege and a duty to prayerfully think on these dangers regularly to the end that the Lord moves us to (1) encourage the missionaries we know, (2) financially support them if we don’t already, (3) pray for them and with them, and (4) consider visiting them if possible and edifying to the ministry. The gospel going forth to every tongue, tribe, and nation is an inextricable duty the Lord has given to His bride, you need only reread Matthew 28:18-20 or Acts 1:8. We must not think it is only a duty of a select, holy few.
John Paton, a missionary who served islands populated by cannibals east of Australia, constantly faced the threat of death by disease or angry villagers. Yet, when surrounded by natives who were ready to kill him, the Lord’s wisdom and Word granted him strength and faith to believe this:
My heart rose up to the Lord Jesus; I saw Him watching all the scene. My peace came back to me like a wave from God. I realized that I was immortal till my Master’s word with me was done. The assurance came to me, as if a voice out of Heaven had spoken, that not a musket would be fired to wound us, not a club prevail to strike us, not a spear leave the hand in which it was held vibrating to be thrown, not an arrow leave the bow, or a killing stone the fingers, without the permission of Jesus Christ, whose is all power in Heaven and on Earth. He rules all Nature, animate and inanimate, and restrains even the Savage of the South Seas.
As the global body of Christ, let us pray to the end that God be glorified among the neighborhoods we dwell and the remotest villages of the earth through the courageous witness of men and women in the face of danger. He is worthy of such service. Let us seek to either be one of those witnesses or send and support someone else to be such a witness.
