#The Tragedy of an Unwilling Missionary

[thedalatribune]

© Paolo Dala

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Now, the reason he, [Jonah], is running:

"Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish; for I knew that Thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repentest of the evil." (Jonah 4:2)

...[Jonah] knew God was gracious, and he knew that even though the message against Nineveh was judgment, even Nineveh repented, God would forgive Nineveh, and he couldn’t stand the thought of heathen people being forgiven. He couldn’t stand the thought of any Gentile nation that was an oppressor and aggressor against Israel being forgiven. I mean that is prejudice that runs very, very deep.

The real issue here was not so much the fear, although we can understand that that may have been there - the fear of going into the city of an enemy. The real issue here was he ran away because he knew that if they repented God would forgive them, and he couldn’t stand the thought. He had come instead – now listen to this – he had come to the point in his life like so many of his contemporaries, that instead of loving the lost, he hated them. He despised them. Sad, tragic attitude.

...He felt the Ninevites deserved judgment. He felt that they deserved condemnation, not salvation, and he was afraid of the mercy of God, and he was afraid of the grace of God. And he felt the Gentiles would corrupt Israel’s privileges. And especially, as a prophet of God, did he know that if the Ninevites repent, they’re going to be in a better position than the Israelites who are apostate.

And he could see the scene,

“If I go and preach and they repent, they’ll step into the place of blessing and Israel, that is filled with sin, will be out of the place of blessing, and God will turn to the Gentiles, and my people will be lost to His blessing.”

You see his dilemma? I mean it’s nationalism to the hilt. He feared the end of Israel’s special election.

But here we’re concerned with his disobedience. Now, he knew that God was omnipresent. He knew that God was everywhere, and you can’t get on a boat and run away from God. You remember what it says in Psalm 139:

“Whither shall I go from Thy presence, from Thy Spirit? Whither shall I flee?”

"Where am I going to go that You’re not going to find me..." No place, but at least he was getting out of Israel, and at least he would get himself so far from Nineveh that God would have to get somebody to go if He wanted somebody to go. He would be physically unavailable even though he knew God would know.

He’s not saying:

“I’m running from the presence of the Lord in the sense that I don’t believe in omnipresence.”

“I’m running from availability. I want to get out away from this, and God will have to use somebody else.”

And I suppose all of us have struggled with that to one extent or another. How many Christians have felt that God has called them to a task, God has called them to a preparation, God has called them to be a certain person, in a certain ministry, in a certain place – maybe a missionary, maybe a pastor, maybe a teacher, maybe someone who works in a Sunday school class?

All of us He has called to reach the people around us for Christ; and we have, instead of accepting that calling, run from it, hiding from the call of God. We know that God can see us and know that, but we run the other way. If we can just get involved in our work, busy in our activities, tied down, then we can’t go. I’m sure there are people – and I have known some - who when they sense the call of God, got themselves so entrenched in where they were in order that they might not be able to be extricated to fulfill the call they knew God gave. But that’s like trying to flee from light. The only thing you’re going to end up in is darkness. That’s like trading wealth for poverty. That’s like trading wisdom for ignorance, or joy for sorrow, or peace for chaos, or usefulness for uselessness. That’s like trading fruit for leaves, reward for punishment.

John MacArthur The Tragedy of an Unwilling Missionary

[rj-anderson]

This is the song Timothy sings while he’s crawling through the tunnel in my third fairy book Arrow, because as a missionary kid he would absolutely know it. (My otherwise excellent audiobook reader, on the other hand, not so much. She seems to have made up a tune on the fly.)

But the thing you really need to know about this hymn is the backstory. It wasn’t written by some comfortable pew-sitting churchgoer who thought it would be nice to sing about how faith in God made life smooth and easy. Exactly the opposite, in fact, because Horatio Spafford went through a LOT.

First came the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed Spafford’s two-year-old son and ruined him financially. Then just two years later in 1873, there was a serious economic downturn that made Spafford’s life even harder. In the midst of all this, he planned to travel to Europe with his family on the steamship Ville du Havre, but was delayed at the last minute to deal with some urgent business. So he sent his wife and daughters ahead, and promised he’d join them as soon as he could.

The ship never made it to Europe. While crossing the Atlantic it collided with another seagoing vessel, the Loch Earn, and sank. Spafford’s four daughters drowned, and only his wife survived to send him a telegram which read SAVED ALONE.

Spafford rushed onto the next available steamship to join his grieving wife. And it was as the vessel passed by the very spot where the Ville du Havre had sunk and all his remaining children had died, with the tragedy only days old and his heart still shattered, that he wrote these words:

When peace like a river attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll,

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well with my soul.

And in case anyone thinks he was just in denial over the deaths of all his children, Spafford called the tune “Ville du Havre”. He didn’t write this hymn because he was unwilling to face all the terrible things that had happened in his life. Instead, he chose to trust God in spite of them.

[christianlivingtoday-blog]

Warning: A Warning from History

Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I CALLED HIM ALONE, and blessed him, and increased him.

Isaiah 51:2

The call of God is a lonely call. It is lonely because you are called alone. All through the Bible, you will not find God calling groups of people. You do not even find God calling couples to work for Him.

None of the patriarchs whom God used had one wife. God did not use any of them as specially anointed couples in the Bible. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon and Saul all had a number of wives and different groups of children. It appears that one woman was not able to cater for the needs of these men.

The call of Moses, the call of Samuel, the call of David, the call of Solomon, Abraham and Isaac, were all individual events. No one was called as a married couple.

On the other hand, we as Christians present couples as though they were called together by God. It is as though they were raised up and anointed together from the womb to serve God as a team.

We also present committees and councils to God for His blessing. But God never called a committee or a council! God never called a couple! When couples have worked together nicely, each of them had an individual call. Committees and councils are set up because human beings do not trust each other enough to give a lot of power to any one person.

Why is all this important? It is important because many people do not realise that God is working with a manthat He has chosen. Whether you join to help the man or not does not really matter. It is the person whom God has called that really matters. With or without an associate, a wife, a friend, a helper or a co-minister, the call of God will go on. Once God has purposed a thing, nothing can disannul it.

This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth: and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations.

For the Lord of hosts hath purposed, and WHO SHALL DISANNUL IT? and his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?

Isaiah 14:26-27

A Warning from an Evangelist

According to one evangelist, there was a man who was assisting him by praying for the sick during his crusades. The evangelist would preach and this man would pray for the sick. One day, this man decided to leave the team. This was a big blow to the evangelist, who would now have to learn how to pray for the sick himself. Apparently, when this man was leaving, he told someone, “The evangelist is finished!” Perhaps he thought that his departure would deal the deathblow to the evangelist’s ministry.

I want you to remember the Scripture in Isaiah 51 about Abraham; “I called him alone.”God does not call groups! God did not call an evangelistic team. God called the evangelist! After this man left the ministry, the evangelist’s ministry flourished and became a worldwide ministry.

A Warning from a Healer

I know another great healer whose wife left him unceremoniously. He woke up one morning and found a message that she was leaving him. In one of their heated arguments, she said to him, “I will finish you. I will destroy you.” She really thought that her departure would be the end of this healer’s ministry. To her surprise, the healer’s ministry continued successfully after her departure.

A Warning from a Great Pastor

I know another great pastor who had a huge church and a thriving international ministry. He had great conflicts with his wife. At a point, divorce became inevitable. Her husband described to me how he begged her not to leave him. She also said to him, “I will finish you!”

She was so convinced that her departure would finish off the great pastor’s ministry that she asked to be paid her divorce settlement before the announcement of their divorce was made public. She felt that the announcement would cause the ministry to crash and there would be no money to settle her. However, after she was paid and the divorce announced, this great pastor continued to flourish and his ministry became even bigger. This rebellious wife was unable to “finish off” her husband’s ministry.

A Warning from the Two Goliaths

I remember another pastor who had two mighty assistants nicknamed “the two Goliaths.” These two Goliaths and their senior pastor seemed to be a mighty spiritual triad whom God was using in their nation. Unfortunately after many years, cracks began to appear in the triad and there was a great strife that caused them to split up and go their separate ways.

As the years went by, the two Goliaths fizzled out into nothingness. However the original pastor, who was the leader, went forward and became very great. The two Goliaths mistakenly thought they could destroy their leader’s ministry.

Remember the prophecy of Isaiah! “I called you alone.”God does not call people in groups of three, groups of five, groups of seven or groups of nine. He calls people alone! Your presence or absence from someone who is called, does not change what God will do. It is a great deception to think that someone’s ministry depends on your presence or absence.

I have a whole lot of people around me in the ministry. Some of them do what I say and some do not. Some obey me and some do not. But God called me alone. Their presence, their obedience or their absence, will not change anything.

A Warning from William Carey

William Carey, known as the father of modern missions, was a missionary to India. He is the person who inspired the worldwide church to begin sending missionaries to the ends of the world. He translated the Bible into Bengali and twenty-nine other languages, printed the Bibles and supplied them to hundreds of thousands of Asians.

He was married to three different women during his ministry in India. His first wife was called Dolly. She was six years older than him and uneducated. William Carey married her whilst he was a teenager and a new Christian. Dolly knew very little of the Lord herself.

His first marriage to Dolly was very difficult because he was married to an unwilling, rebellious, accusative and mentally unstable woman. She was very difficult to be with on the mission field. Initially, she did not even want to go along with her husband to the mission field, nor allow their children to accompany their father. She only went along after much pleading. Their marriage was also further affected by her bouts of depression and later, mental illness, following the loss of three of their children to disease.

In her mentally unstable state, she would accuse her husband of having affairs with women, including their closest friends and the mission’s servants. After twelve years of suffering from delusional paranoia, Dolly died. They were married for twenty-six years.

Six months after she died, William Carey married Charlotte, a Danish countess who lived next door to the mission. They were both forty-six years old. She was a petite, well-educated woman, fluent in seven languages and a supporter of the missionary work. In her teen years she had been severely burned in a fire that had injured her legs.

Though she had to spend much of her day resting, she was an enormous encouragement to her husband. She helped him with his challenging translation work and their growing ministry. Their thirteen years of marriage were happy ones. William Carey was happiest with this second wife; and when he was dying, he requested to be buried by his second wife who had made him the happiest. He clearly did not want to lie by his first wife, even as a dead body.

William Carey married Grace, his third wife, after a period of mourning. She was a forty-five year old widow who loved the Lord and served faithfully beside Carey in the ministry. Grace lovingly cared for Carey during their eleven years together.

As you can see the presence or absence of any of these women did not in any way prevent William Carey from fulfilling his calling. He was not called as part of a group. He was called alone!

In fact, his first wife did not even want to go on the mission with him. Each woman that was attached to him was privileged to be part of the great mission that was accomplished. But it was he, William Carey, who was called and set apart for modern missions. God called William Carey alone.

A Warning from Adoniram Judson

Adoniram Judson was a great missionary to Burma. He had a great burden to go to Burma and labour for the people of Burma (present day Myanmar). He became “the father of American missions”, being the first American citizen to become a foreign missionary. Judson’s vision was to translate the Bible directly from the Hebrew and Greek into the Burmese language. He worked on the translation for twenty-eight years, and with such precision that his translation is still used in Myanmar today. He was also married three times and had three wonderful women at his side for three different seasons of his life.

In his years in Burma, Adoniram Judson saw thousands of lives transformed in Christ. He also faced years of persecution, imprisonment and family tragedy.

Adoniram’s first wife was Ann. She felt willing to spend her days in heathen lands with her husband and give up all her comforts to go where God saw fit to send her. They first went to India, but Adoniram was set on going to Burma.

They arrived in Burma to find a country with Buddhism as the only allowed religion. Adoniram worked for hours each day to become an expert in the language. Ann, on the other hand, exercised her gift of hospitality in Burma and through that became more fluent in understanding and speaking the Burmese of the common citizen.

Six years after arriving in Rangoon, Judson conducted his first public Christian service. Following a threat of war between Britain and the Burmese emperor, Adoniram was thrown into prison for seventeen months. Prisoners were not given food and many starved to death. A prisoner could only get food from friends who visited and prisoners underwent special torture sessions in the prison. Ann went to see every important person she could to help secure the release of Adoniram.

After his release from prison, Ann became sick. Whilst Adoniram was away in another city doing some important translation work, Ann collapsed and died. Not too long after he got back home, their little daughter also died after a bout of dysentery.

Adoniram continued his work of translating the Burmese Bible and in 1834, at the age of forty-six, he finished translating the whole Bible. This was twenty-one years after he and Ann had arrived in Burma as missionaries.

Eight years after Ann died, it was time for Adoniram to get his second wife. Adoniram married Sarah who was a young widow of another missionary and had continued in the field after her husband died. Adoniram and Sarah began a vibrant ministry life together.

Sarah suffered from dysentery and the doctors insisted that the only way to recover was a sea voyage to America; away from the terrible heat and the parasites in the tropics. Sarah died during the journey and was buried on the island of St Helena.

It was time for the third wife. Whilst looking for a biographer to write Sarah’s life story, Adoniram was introduced to Emily who had a great deal of writing talent. She was twenty-seven years old, half Adoniram’s age and had harboured a desire to become a foreign missionary. Adoniram proposed marriage to Emily within a month and they were married the following June.

They went back to Burma and Adoniram worked to complete a Burmese-English dictionary for new missionaries entering Burma. There were, by this time, thirty-six thriving Baptist churches.

Adoniram later caught a severe cold accompanied by a high fever. Dysentery followed and Adoniram had to spend most of his time in bed. As he grew worse, doctors recommended another sea voyage. Emily booked him on a French ship, which was sailing to the Isle of France. She could not go with him because she was advanced in her second pregnancy. Before setting sail he confided in his wife that, “I am not tired of my work. Neither am I tired of this world. Yet when Christ calls me home, I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from his school. Death will never take me by surprise; I feel so strong in Christ!”

Adoniram died during the journey and was buried at sea, three weeks before Emily delivered their child. It took three months for her to receive word of Adoniram’s passing. Four years later, she also passed away.

The presence or absence of each of these three wives did not in any way destroy Adoniram Judson’s mission to Burma. As you can see, Adoniram Judson was not called with any particular woman.

He was called alone and three women were privileged to be attached to him for three different seasons of his life! Always remember the prophecy of Isaiah.

A warning from John Wesley

After the early church movement, one of the greatest ever movements to rise was Methodism, founded by John Wesley. John Wesley struggled with his violent, fighting, challenging and accusing wife from the day he entered into marriage with her.

Because she was loud and open about her confrontation and unhappiness with John Wesley, the story of his marriage is known by many. All the titanic struggles of John Wesley’s life and ministry had to do with his dreadful marriage. Perhaps John Wesley would have achieved much more for the Lord if he had not been married to this difficult woman.

A warning from marriages all around

History shows that many pastors have had serious marital problems. We know about these problems when the final announcement comes that they are to be divorced.

When the final announcement comes, we find out that they have been living with intractable problems for many years. Some of the divorcing pastors have been at the brink of divorce many times but managed to swing back just in time.

Often, no one is aware of what is going on, because they constantly present the picture of a blissful marriage. They often leave ordinary Christians wishing that their marriages were as good as the man of God’s seemingly perfect marriage.

Thank God for blissful marriages. There are indeed many pastors who have blissful marriages. But do not be deceived that all is rosy. Today, when people encounter a few challenges, they think of divorce. Apostle Paul did not present a rosy or easy picture of marriage. He said, “But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned. Nevertheless such shall have troublein the flesh: but I spare you��� (1 Corinthians 7:28).

I recently heard the testimony of a daughter of a very, very great man of God. I shall not mention his name here, but you know of him very well. This daughter was experiencing great difficulties in her marriage.

She told her husband, “My parents never had such problems. There is something terribly wrong with our marriage.”

As her marital problems multiplied, she went to her parents and confided in them. For the first time, her parents revealed that they had had the same marital problems that she was having.

They told her, “We never argued in front of you children. We never let you know when we were having challenges.”

The daughter was amazed. “But we never saw any kind of problem in your marriage.” But her parents insisted, “We had all those problems. You just didn’t know because we did not want you to know.”

People have problems that they are not sharing. Do not curse yourself because you do not have a perfect situation. Just assume that things are hidden from you. Your marriage is probably better than that of others.

Conclusion

The fact that you are married to someone does not mean God called you with the person. My wife was not with me when God called me. God called me when I was an unmarried student. I was called to the ministry and started working for the Lord long before I got married. I founded my church before I got married. It is possible that I was even called before I was born.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Jeremiah 1:5

Getting married did not change my calling into a “joint calling”. The nice family picture that perfect couples present, gives the impression that they have a joint call. This is a delusion that only comes along with many great dangers.

It deceives the assistants, the wives and associates that they are more important than they actually are. It causes them to challenge the one who is called. It feeds a deception that they can destroy or finish off the man of God.

Most rebellious top associates and wives launch out based on this delusion. If you understand the message of this chapter, you will never think you can destroy someone whom God has called. Your presence or your absence cannot change God’s plan.

by Dag Heward-Mills