Urgency for Christians
I’ll never forget the day I passed my final language evaluation in the Yembiyembi language—four hours of grueling verbal and comprehension tests in the village with a crowd of thirty or so following us to see if I would pass. They knew that if I passed, I would start translating “the book of God’s talk” into their language soon after, and once deep enough into that, we would begin the teaching of God’s talk.
There is an urgency to the message all Christians carry, especially those who go to the unreached peoples of the earth, but three reasons for urgency stand out.
1. Hell is real.
Jesus spoke more about hell than anyone else in Scripture. He calls it a place of eternal torment (Luke 16:23) and unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43), where the worm does not die (Mark 9:48), where people will gnash their teeth in anguish and regret (Matt. 13:42), and from which there is no return, even to warn loved ones (Luke 16:19–31).
The Puritan minister Daniel Burgess said, “My father in all his letters to me used to write, ‘O, child, better never born than not new-born.’”
But when we speak of urgency, especially as it relates to missions, we must differentiate it from hastiness. Hastiness speaks as if the gospel were a race and Christians are constantly falling behind in the race. We are told that the secular world is taking over previous strongholds of Christianity at a breakneck pace, that Christianity is falling behind in the birthrates of China, India, and Africa, and that we must go faster in seeing translations completed, churches planted, and baptisms counted.
However, the Lord of the harvest seems to operate on a different timetable. He has promised that He will build His church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it (Matt. 16:18).
Hell is real, so we should speak, think, and live with a sense of urgency. But undergirding that must be an abiding confidence that our God knows all these things and is pleased to see His kingdom flourish at the time and pace of His providential choosing.
2. God’s glory calls for urgency.
In January 2008, we began walking the Yembiyembi people through the biblical narrative, beginning in Genesis. For four months, we taught them about sin, the character of God, the promises of God, and finally the Savior who came into the world and died in the stead of His people. We did interview after interview in the following weeks of those who professed faith, and then we gathered them together to worship and teach through more of “God’s talk.” This process of translating, teaching, and eventually naming elders and deacons went on for eight more years till the church was ready for us to leave.
Those early days were something incredible to behold. One night, one of the young believers and I were sitting out “storying” about God when he paused, looked up, and said in the tone of Psalm 19 (we hadn’t translated it yet): “Stars I see you, mouth and ears you do not have, but you speak loudly of Great Creator God. You tell me of His greatness, you tell me His grip is strong (His power), you speak as clearly as one who has a mouth.” Glory was no longer going to the ancestor spirits but to the triune God of heaven and earth.
Our lifestyle communicates more about the message we carry than most want to believe.
Jesus saw the glory of His God as the primary motivation for His coming to earth. Everything exists for God’s glory (Rom. 11:36). Our salvation is “to the praise of his glorious grace” (Eph. 1:6). God does everything He does for His own glory, and the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
Iain Murray said it this way:
The foremost role of church is always to teach and preach the Word. . . . Another way of stating this would be to say that the ultimate end of all things is the glory of God, and that glory is not given to him other than by men and women being brought to comprehend the truth.1
Our God’s glory demands urgency. Men and women the world over do not know of Him who holds the stars in His hands, who sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, who is the Alpha and the Omega. It is incumbent on us as Christians to make this glory known to all who are made in His image.
3. Indifference communicates just as powerfully as urgency.
Our lifestyle communicates more about the message we carry than most want to believe. Do we invite non-believers over for dinner, do we know what sports teams they root for, what books or TV shows they like, what animates their thinking? Are we students of them? In short, does our conduct have an intentionality about it?
In the missions world, the consultant or coaching team would press new missionaries to learn the language as fast as possible, encouraging them to study a minimum of fifty to sixty hours a week. Yes, it was the means that the language group would hear the gospel, but how they went about this task communicated more about the message they carried to those watching. People can sense urgency, and they can also sense indifference.
In one of my favorite books, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks marks out what an “urgent” Christian looks like:
His directness, his urgency, his yearning, his fervor, his fullness of Bible, his wistfulness, his intensity, his emotion. . . . His desire to be “useful” to souls, to achieve the holy success of serving Christ, to win a sparkling crown to lay at his feet, breathes and burns from first to last.2
Do our lives communicate yearning, fervor, and intensity? In short, are we an urgent people?
For the sake of our neighbors and for the sake of the nations, may God grant what we cannot muster in and of ourselves. May heaven and hell be as real to us as this world; may the glory of our God burn within us compelling us to action till our days are over or the King returns.
