An Excerpt from The Fuel and the Flame
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Like a speeding car that makes a ninety degree right turn going sixty miles per hour, college students have the innate ability to make quick decisions and instant life direction changes. Jordan grew up camping, hiking, and rock climbing with full intentions of passionately pursuing these loves when he entered the University of Arkansas, but God had a hard right turn in store. Almost from day one, a Campus Crusade staff member plugged him into a small group and their leadership training track. Although he became a Christian at an early age, his walk with the Lord didn’t take off until he attended a CCC Summer Project in Branson, Missouri. After that experience, his new focal point then was to become a Christian physical therapist, that is until he met Pete Kelley, a CCC staffer in Estonia, where Jordan had gone for yet another CCC summer mission project. When Pete challenged Jordan to consider full-time ministry as his vocation, he came back, prayed hard and made another right turn by changing his major to graduate sooner, raise support, and head to Thailand for a year-long mission assignment.
Jordan’s mentor, CCC veteran David English, sent me his e-mails from the field, and they read like a modern day replay of the book of Acts. He describes one adventure of taking the Jesus Film to an eager tribe of natives who had never even seen a movie: “My group was going to the most remote village around and the terrain was so hilly that at times we had to pull the truck (full of equipment) up the hills using a rope!” Once Jordan and the team got set up, a neighboring tribe saw the lights and walked an hour and a half to join them in the showing of the film. There were many that received Christ that night as their eyes were glued to the screen. Jordan was impacted too, sharing, “The Lord really spoke to me that night. My dreams were coming true: being out in the wilderness and showing the Jesus Film to those that have never heard. Just to look at the people’s eyes during the film was amazing. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.”
His main ministry, though, is among the almost one million college students in the bustling, pollution filled city of Bangkok. After overcoming culture shock from the abject poverty, the putrid smell, even the swarms of stray dogs everywhere, he was able to settle down and build relationships with Thai students. Jordan is sharing the gospel on a daily basis, seeing some receive Christ and others rejecting Him because of their Buddhist beliefs. He agonizes over the hardened hearts of many of the male students, and when one guy responded to his gospel message with, “I don’t need Jesus,” Jordan just about broke down and cried. It’s hard to believe that this happy- go-lucky kid from Harrison, Arkansas that had his life all planned out is now, instead, half way across the world pouring his life out for the lost in Thailand. The moldable, pliable, flexible heart of a college student is a beautiful thing in the hands of the Lord. For students, this is the opportune time in their life that we can pray, challenge, recruit, and send them to a world in desperate need of workers.
* This just in: Jordan just signed up for another year in Thailand!
Even though students have led in embracing the task of evangelizing the world, they have done it, many times, without the help of churches and mission agencies. Just as the roots, trunk, and branches serve one another to produce a healthy tree, there could be an incredible synergy created if these three groups could coordinate their efforts, drawing upon the strengths of each, seeking to be church-based, student-focused and agency-linked:
A. Church Based
This is the place that the workers are nourished, fed, and prayed for. These are the rank and file believers who pray, give, and send. Just as the roots of a tree provide the stability and resources for the trunk and branches, “World Christian” churches do the same for student groups and mission agencies. Para church campus ministries must not try to take the place of local churches, but, instead, to work in partnership as a compliment to them.
B. Student Focused
Virtually every major missions movement in history has been instigated and fueled by college aged young people. Then and now they are the primary suppliers of crucial personnel for this over ripened harvest. Xavier, the pioneer missionary, told students centuries ago to “give up their small ambitions and come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ.” The winning, building, and sending of collegians must be a primary focus of churches if the workers are going to get to the field.
C. Agency Linked
We don’t need more mission agencies─we’ve got hundreds of excellent ones ready and able to penetrate every unreached people group with their ministry structure already in place on the foreign fields. But they are waiting for student ministries and local churches to wake up and provide them with the needed workers and resources to turn them loose. The roots or the trunk can’t reach up into they sky to heights unknown; only the branches are designed to do that.
Right now you might be asking, “Gosh, I would like to raise up some Jordan’s too! Just how do you get students to develop a heart for the world?” As we’ve seen, it requires teamwork and, of course, begins, ends, and is covered with deep, consistent intercessory prayer. This role of “world prayer warrior” is only as effective as the specific information that we have to pray back to our heavenly Father. Patrick Johnstone’s book, Operation World, is the best tool I’ve seen that gives, what I call, detailed “prayer fodder” about the demographics, needs, and prayer requests of every country and most all the “people groups” within those countries. Use it in your own devotional time each day to build a heart for the world. Take it with you when you have quiet times or concerts of prayer with your disciples. Train your students to use their Operation World along with their journals and Bibles on a daily basis.
The Sneakiest Verse in the Whole Bible
In Matthew 9:36-38, Jesus gave us an awesome plan for raising up “World Christians.” But beware, it is easily the sneakiest verse in the whole Bible! Here it is:
“When He saw the crowds, He had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, "The harvest is plentiful,l but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into His harvest field."
You look at this verse and realize that the bottleneck is not with the harvest, it’s with the workers! Jesus doesn’t tell us to get out there and start witnessing, nor does He even say to start praying for the lost. The Lord simply commands us to ask Him to raise up Christian laborers to work among the unreached of our world. Let’s say you’ve completed your inductive Bible study of this passage and you are now ready to make an application, doing exactly what it says. You get your trusty Operation World out and flip to today’s entry where it lists the kingdom of Morocco in North Africa. You casually read some of the basic country information like: Total population: 30 million; Urban population: 51%; Arabic speaking: 65%; Berber speaking: 34%; Literacy: 30%; Annual income per person: $1,260.
Reminding you of your old high school geography class and getting a little bored with this information, you happen to glance over at the religion statistics and suddenly you’re stopped dead in your tracks! What? 99.85% of the whole country are Muslims? Less than 500 believers out of 30 million people? And many of those believers aren’t even Moroccan? It must be a misprint! How could any country in the world only have one Christian for every 60,000 people in it? You bear down and look closer at the text, now carefully reading that Sunni Islam is the state religion, that witnessing and church planting are not tolerated, and this country is the tenth worst persecutor of Christians on the planet. How could this be? You never heard about this in church, much less geography class! Out of frustration and burden, your mind races to figure out a way you can right this wrong.
Then you remember Matthew 9:36-38 where Jesus gave you the solution to this dilemma, and so, on bended knee you begin: “Lord, You told me in Matthew 9 to pray to You to raise up laborers to go to the harvest fields. I’m right here just doing what You told me. I ask, Lord, that You search out workers that will go to Morocco and boldly tell those people about Jesus. Oh God, please find men and women who will heed Your call to go. You said that the harvest is plentiful, and I believe it Lord. So, I’m asking You, Father, just like You told me, to send workers to Morocco quickly. Amen.”
WARNING: DON’T PRAY THIS PRAYER!
Let’s say that day after day, week after week you decide (even though at times you don’t feel like it) you’re going to obey the command Jesus gave us in Matthew 9 and continue to plead with God to raise up and send workers to this spiritually desolate country of Morocco. Then early one morning, unexpectantly while on your knees, you get what I call “the divine tap” on the edge of your shoulder. A still small voice speaking to your heart, calls you by name and says, “I have answered your prayers.” Your heart leaps and you cry out, “Thank you, Lord, thank you. I have been so diligent to pray, just like You commanded, for laborers to go to Morocco and now you’ve responded. Praise you, Jesus!” “Yes,” the small voice replies, “I have answered your prayers, and YOU are the answer to your prayers!” “Oh, no, Lord,” you cry out, “I didn’t mean send me. I was praying for You to send someone else! There must be a mixup!”
This little drama would never end up this way because if you really had been toiling in prayer for weeks or months over the country of Morocco, and if the Lord did speak to you about going, your heart would have been prepared and responsive to His call. The reason this is the sneakiest verse in the Bible? Because Jesus knows full well that you will become deeply burdened about whatever you labor in prayer over. This passage serves as the crux of God’s missionary recruitment strategy, and if He can get you and your students to obey the command of Matthew 9:36-38, He knows it is just a matter of time before your heart will be so full, so weighed down, that you are willing to go and do whatever He tells you. That makes these Matthew 9 verses not only the sneakiest, but also the most dangerous in the Bible. WARNING: Do not obey this passage if you do not want to become a laborer in the harvest!
If we will be faithful to intercede for the nations, it will break down strongholds of sin, soften the hearts of leaders, open the doors for missionaries, and pave the way for nationals trying to win their neighbors. Dick Eastman, author of The Hour That Changes the World claims that our prayers are the most powerful and effective weapon we have to bring about real, lasting change in people─and nations. According to Eastman, we don’t want to miss out: “To pray for world evangelization is to serve on a ‘Great Commission Fulfillment Committee’ that meets daily in the courts of heaven.” We can huff and we can puff trying to blow a nation over for Christ, but unless we look to His power (through prayer), and not our own, we will be ministering in vain.