Missions...

is a passion that God has deeply wedged into our hearts for years and, I'm learning, never goes away. And I definitely didn't want it to (though it would make some things easier), but I guess we've kinda "put it on the back burner" for the last couple of years as God has been healing and restoring us, building up our marriage and guiding us through the huge transition of becoming parents. I feel like we have come a LONG way from where we were 2 years ago, and the Lord has been slowly, gently but steadily bringing the nations back to the front of our hearts. I have no idea what this will mean for our future, whether we will go or send (or go some and send some), but doing one or the other is clear....Praise God!

So, last Sunday morning Josh and I were in bed recovering from an ugly stomach bug, and decided to listen to several of Piper's sermons on the subject. If you haven't heard him preach on this you are missing a huge part of his heart...start with "Doing Missions When Dying is Gain"...you won't be the same!

Anyway, though he says SO MUCH there was one statement in particular that really challenged us. This is from his sermon called, "Missions: The Battle Cry of Christian Hedonism."

"When Jesus commissioned his church to disciple the peoples, he did not have in mind merely political boundaries. He had in mind the distant, distinct groups including tribes and tongues and peoples. And today there are over 16,000 such groups undiscipled. If every Christian in the world won all his neighbors to Christ, half the world would be unevangelized; because two billion people make up culturally distant people groups who do not have an indigenous witness. They are the "hidden peoples," the "frontier missions" of our day. The only way they can be reached is by cross-cultural missionaries."