14 Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.
15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
17 And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;
18 They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
19 So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.
20 And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.
Introduction
Open your Bibles to the book of Mark 16, beginning with verse 14 and going through the remainder of the chapter. We will look in a little while at this passage of scripture as it has to do with our challenge and our work as the people of God and our great missionary effort.
Some time ago one of our TV viewers, Sue Darwin, sent me a book entitled Washington Humor and in it there was a story that Lyndon Johnson used to like to tell as he tried to explain why he couldn’t get along with the Russians and arms agreement and curtailing military expenditures. He told about this young Texan who in 1861 went away to the Civil War to fight for the rebels. And when he left home he said, rather braggadociously, to his friends, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in just a little while. We can whip those Yankees with broomsticks.” Well, two years later he came back, walking on a crutch, a patch over one eye, and he had lost an arm. His friends said to him, “What in the world happened to you? I thought you said you could whip those Yankees with a broomstick.” He said, “We could, but they wouldn’t fight us with broomsticks.”
There are some things that in order to accomplish you must have the cooperation of other people. And one of the things I like about our Southern Baptist Mission program is that it is a cooperative effort. It is something we do together. And because we do it together it is called the Cooperative Program, and because we do it together we are able to touch the lives of all kinds of people, all around the world. We are able to touch black people and white people, Indians and Hispanics, and the Chinese, the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated. We are able to touch all kinds of people all over the world. I’m grateful for our cooperative effort because it is enables the missionary to stay in the field and do his work. Have you noticed that independent missionaries spend a large part of their time back here in the States trying to raise money for the other part of the time that they are there on the mission field? They write tons and tons of letters trying to muster up support. I am not opposed to independent missionaries. I’m just grateful to be a part of a great missionary effort that enables the missionary to go to the foreign field and to stay there and work and not have to worry about his support. He can spend his time worrying about getting on with the work. That’s why I am glad for what we do as Southern Baptists.
I’m grateful for our program because of its accountability. You know in his past year we have had the accountability of many well-known ministries called into question. We have learned that a lot of money given supposedly to missionary efforts did not go to missionary efforts. In these independent, one-man-show operations, there is no accountability, but in our Southern Baptist program there is total accountability and you can rest assured that whatever you give your money for it goes for that and it is used in a most effective way.
There is a great economy in the way we do our work—3,700 missionaries in more than 100 countries around the world and the average cost for supporting a missionary in the foreign field is $2.66 an hour. That is below the minimum wage. And if you can beat that price anywhere I would like to go about it.
More than that though, our Cooperative Program, our missionary effort, is not the only one in the world, but it is about the best one in the world. We are able to fulfill that command, that commission, that mandate that the Lord Jesus gave to us. He gave it to us in this passage of scripture.
He gave it to us in many other places but I want you to look at what he has to say in Mark 16:14-16: “Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” And then in the next three verses he talks about some signs that would follow them and did follow them in that first century. These signs were given to them as a special indication that they were the missionaries, the emissaries of our Lord, and so they went out and these signs did accompany them in the first century. As it says in verse 20, “They went forth, and preached every where,” just like Jesus said. And then I want you to notice this little statement: “The Lord working with them.” Here is the crucified, buried, and risen Lord working side by side with them in this great missionary task and confirming the word with signs following.
The church of Jesus Christ exists by mission like fire exists by burning. It is only as a fire burns that it continues to exist and once it stops burning it turns into ashes. And the church of Jesus Christ must ever and always be a missionary church. And if we ever get to the place where we are content to sit in a corner and enjoy comfortable pews and listen to sermons and rejoice in good music and do nothing beyond that, then we are dead and we have lost our reason for being. What our Lord said to those early disciples he says to you and me today, that we have a responsibility to carry the Gospel to all men everywhere and that mission involves eternal consequences. Men and women are lost without Christ and apart from the Gospel they cannot and will not be saved. And as we go, we can rest assured that he will go with us and will work with us.
There are three things I want you to note: First of all, there is a great command to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. A great command.
Second, there is a great consequence. He that believeth is baptized and shall be saved. He that believeth not shall be damned. What we are talking about involves the eternal destinies of men. There is a great consequence.
And then last of all, there is a great companionship. The Lord working with them. And in this great command and this great consequence and this great companionship is bound up our mission and our task as the people of God.
You have heard this probably all of your life. My prayer is that today you may hear it with fresh ears, that you might hear it as you have never heard it before so that whatever God wants to do in us and through us individually and as a congregation he would have the opportunity to do it today.
1. We must preach the Gospel.
We begin with a great command. Jesus said you are to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. I just want you to underscore in your mind those two phrases—“all the world” and “every creature”—because they underscore our mission as a worldwide mission that shall never, ever be accomplished fully and completely. We have to stay everlastingly at it until Jesus comes again. We need to understand the world in which we live, the world to which he commands us to go and minister and work because it is a world that is growing rapidly day by day.
There are seven and a half billion people in the world today. In less than a century that number is expected to rise to more than 11 billion. In that vast world dozens of countries are hostile to Christianity, persecuting and killing missionaries, or forbidding them to cross their borders. And more and more countries are being closed every year to the Gospel. They are saying that they do not want American missionaries in their countries. Whatever we are going to do for the cause of Jesus Christ and whatever we are going to do to fulfill this great command of our Lord, we must get on with it because time is rapidly running out and unless we can reach people and train people and find national leaders in those countries they shall be left in darkness without Jesus Christ.
In addition to a world that is expanded so rapidly we are seeing today the emerging of a new militant spirit among other religious groups. You know that heretofore Christians were the only ones who were missionaries. The others grew only by spreading among their own people, by the birth of people in their religions, but today Islam is the third-largest religion in America and it is the fastest-growing religion in America. And there is a militant spirit about them and they have become vastly missionary people with more than 2,000 Islamic mosques in America today. Many of them have studies for the Islamic religion that are intended to train and to prepare their people so that they might become missionaries to win this nation and the rest of the civilized world to the Islamic faith.
In other generations we had no worry about that. Our only concern was to win them to Christ. Now our concern is that they have taken on a militant, aggressive spirit and they are attempting to win our people to Christ. And if their militant spirit is greater than ours, then they will be winning the world instead of Christianity winning the world.
I was surprised when I went to Australia in February to find in my hotel room not only a copy of the Bible placed there by the Gideons, but a copy of the teachings of Buddha that had been placed there by the Buddhist counterpart to the Gideons, for they now have the militant kind of spirit to spread their religion and their faith around the world. They have learned that from us.
I think I shared with you a few months ago that I went home to visit my mother and I drove the main street of Port Arthur, Texas, and I saw what at one time had been a Baptist church. As a boy I had worshipped there. I had preached there. I preached my first revival there and that Proctor St. Baptist Church is today a Buddhist temple, a place where Christ was once preached and today he is unknown. And we are experiencing that kind of change in our world all the time. And it accentuates the fact that our Lord has given to us a mission that we are to go to all nations and we are to preach the Gospel to every creature.
We are living in an increasingly dangerous world. I’m told that there are at least 10 nations that have achieved nuclear bomb capability and that there is a global arsenal of more than 15,000 nuclear warheads. Now, scientists calculate that the world could not survive a nuclear war that involved a thousand nuclear warheads. But there are 15,000 in the world today. That means that we have the capacity to destroy the world 15 times and it is only Jesus Christ, the prince of peace, who could ever bring to this world the kind of peace that would ensure that we could live for generations to come.
When we think about missions, we must think not only in terms of foreign lands and distant places. We must think about winning people to Jesus Christ right here in our own country and our own state and in our own city. Missions begin right here at home.
There was a fascinating section in Reader’s Digest about Mother Teresa, that elderly Catholic nun, who for 40 years had been working among the world’s poorest of the poor. She found herself in Kolkata, India, in 1931, working as a schoolteacher and from her apartment, inside that Catholic school compound, she could look out her window and she could see the ragged and the diseased, the hungry children and the open sewers and the squalor of the city of Kolkata. And in that safe environment of that Catholic school she heard the clear call of God: “Go and work among the poor.” For 40 years she did that work.
People rallied around her. They came to help. So every summer a schoolteacher from Lawrence, Massachusetts, would come to Kolkata to work with her. And when he saw the diseased and the poverty and the want all around him he would cry himself to sleep at night. At the end of his third summer she said to him, “You should stay home and find the poor in your own neighborhood, especially the poor who are hidden and the poor who are unknown.” Dear friend, you do not have to travel to Mexico or Belize or Kolkata or any other place on the face of this earth to find people who are poor, people who are ignorant, people who are diseased, people who are in need of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They are right here in our own country and as we think about missions, we must think of beginning here where we live and then in an ever-widening circle until we have encircled the globe because Jesus said, “You are to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” That means you begin right where you are.
We modern-day Christians have a strange concepts. I was shocked and distressed when sometime ago Jim Bakker appeared on the Ted Koppel show. Listen, if he ever wants to interview you, don’t go. He has the ability to cut your pants off and you don’t even know it. You are standing there exposed before the whole world and don’t even realize it. Jim Bakker was talking about getting his ministry back. And Ted Koppel said to him, “If you want a ministry, why don’t you go among the poor? They are everywhere out there. Nobody is preventing you from going.”
And I think maybe our Lord would say something like that to you and me. If you want a ministry today, go out among the poor. They are everywhere and they are in need of physical help. They are in need of spiritual enlightenment and all of that is bound up in this great land. Go into all the world to preach the Gospel to every creature.
2. We must believe in Jesus Christ.
There is not only a great command, there is a great consequence. Look at verse 16: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not, shall be damned.”
In that same article concerning Mother Teresa it told about a coworker she drew to her great movement, a lady named Ann Blaikie. She was the wife of an English lawyer who was working in Kolkata, and she became attracted to Mother Teresa and the work she was doing among the poor. It was Christmastime and she came to her with the offer, “I would like to furnish toys for a children’s Christmas party.” Mother Teresa said, “What we need is not toys, we need clothes, we need food.” And this lady responded in her wealth to help some.
One day they were to work together and Ann Blaikie had a fever and did not go. Instead she sent a driver in her car with a note explaining her absence that said, “I had a fever and I could not come.” Mother Teresa wrote her a note back: “I have a fever also; it is better to burn in this world than in the world that is to come.”
I want to tell you that missions are not just a matter of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white—they are a matter of heaven and bell. Men and women without Jesus Christ are lost. And everybody is going to one of two places—they are going to heaven or to hell. As the scriptures say, he that believeth and is baptized—and baptism will naturally follow a person’s believing experience—shall be saved and he that believeth not shall be damned. He is saying that in the balance is the salvation of people, the damning of people by sin and its consequences. That’s what we are talking about.
Some years ago the ruins of the Titanic were discovered on the ocean floor, and there were many articles about the recovering of the treasure from that great ship. Among the thousands of lives that were lost, there were all kinds of people: educated, uneducated, and rich and poor of every color. But in the final analysis there were just two kinds of people—lost and saved. That’s what we are talking about. That’s the great consequence of missions.
3. We must work with others.
One other thing: there is not only a great command, and a great consequence, there is a great companionship. Did you mark that in your mind or in your Bible—that they went forth and preached everywhere with the Lord working with them? Isn’t that significant to you? It is to me. For the Gospel message ends up with Christ, who died on the cross and was buried in the tomb, still with his disciples, traveling with them, empowering them, enabling them to do the work that he called them to do. And there is this great companion and this great comfort that comes to us when we think about our worldwide mission task: that as we go, either in the neighborhoods of Tyler, Texas, or on the borders of our great state or around this world, that wherever we go, the Lord will go with us. And it is upon that promise and that hope that we do our mission work.
When John Wesley, the great Methodist preacher who was at one time a missionary himself—and was maybe, in a sense, a missionary all of his life because he was plowing new territory, moving into new areas—came to the end of his life and was about to die his last words were these: “And best of all, God is with us.”
And let me tell you when you talk about missions, you can talk about the growth of the world out there and you can talk about the hunger and the squalor and the need, and you can talk about the nuclear threat—you can talk about all of that but, dear friends, best of all, God is with us. And when we go, he tells us he will be there also.
Arthur Gossip was a pastor in Glasgow working in a slum area. At the end of a long day when he had been out among his parishioners he came to the last visit he had to make on his list. They lived on the top story of a five-story tenement house. He was bone weary by that point. As he looked at that list of visits he had made, as he looked at those five flights of steps that he would have to climb, and as he thought of how tired he was he said, “I will just wait until tomorrow to make that visit. I’ll go home and I’ll come back another day.” And as he contemplated turning around and walking away, he said, “A pair of stooped shoulders seemed to brush by me, saying, “Okay, I will go by myself.” And Arthur Gossip said, “I turned around and we went together.”
Listen, wherever you go, the Lord will be working with you. And if it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t be in it at all. A great challenge, a great consequence, a great companion. And that’s the missionary challenge to our church.
You might remember the stir when little Jessica McClure fell in a well in Midland, Texas. And when that happened people didn’t stand around talking about it. Some of them said, “Friends, it is time to start digging.” And they mustered up all of their resources, they forgot about the cost in terms of money and personal sacrifice, and all efforts were pointed in one direction: how can we save that one little girl? I think maybe the time has come for us to stop talking and start digging. And for some that means digging down deep in your pockets to give so that others may live.
Hear again the word of the Lord: “And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them.”