Sermon quotes on missions
Randy Alcorn
“I’ve heard people say, “I want more of a heart for missions.” I always respond, “Jesus tells you exactly how to get it. Put your money in missions – and in your church and the poor – and your heart will follow.”
Thomas Cahill
Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination-making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.
William Carey
Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.
Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert
We are not bringing Christ to poor communities. He has been active in these communities since the creation of the world, sustaining them, Hebrews 1:3 says, by His powerful Word. Hence, a significant part of working in poor communities involves discovering and appreciating what God has been doing there for a LONG time.
J.L. Ewen
As long as there are millions destitute of the Word of God and knowledge of Jesus Christ, it will be impossible for me to devote time and energy to those who have both.
Carl F.H. Henry
The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.
Andy Johnson
Many of us don’t have to board international flights to reach people from other religions and cultures. We just need to open our eyes, look around, and engage the nations in our own cites and towns….80 percent of international students never see the inside of an American home during their stay.
Andy Johnson
It’s estimated that more than a million North Americans participate in short-term mission trips overseas each year, up from an estimated twenty-five thousand in 1980. During this same period, long-term missionaries from North America have only increased slightly, if at all.
Andy Johnson
The heart for God-glorifying missions starts with joy in the gospel. Our churches must first cherish the God who sent his own Son to save sinners like us.
E. Stanley Jones
The Indian is making an amazing discovery, namely that Christianity and Jesus are not the same – that they may have Jesus without the system that has been built up around Him in the West.
Isobel Kuhn
I believe that in each generation God has called enough men and women to evangelize all the yet unreached tribes of the earth. It is not God who does not call. It is man who will not respond!
David Livingstone
People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa….It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege.
David Livingstone
God had only one Son, and He was a missionary.
David Livingstone
Do not think me mad. It is not to make money that I believe a Christian should live. The noblest thing a man can do is, just humbly to receive, and then go amongst others and give.
David Livingstone
If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?
Henry Martyn
The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.
Steve Moore
The Great Commission is too big for anyone to accomplish alone and too important not to try to do together.
John R. Mott
The missionary activities of the church are the circulation of its blood, which would lose its vital power if it never flowed to the extremities.
Paul Pierson
A theology which asserts that only the organized Church should be involved in mission, that theology has a very serious quarrel with history.
The Dynamics of Christian Mission
Winkie Pratney
Every Christian a missionary; every non-Christian a mission-field.
Lamin Sanneh
The original language of Christianity is translation.
Oswald J. Smith
The church that does not evangelize will fossilize.
Robert E. Speer
Prepare for the worst, expect the best, and take what comes.
Charles Spurgeon
I remember one who spoke on the missionary question one day saying, “The great question is not, ‘Will not the heathen be saved if we do not send them the gospel?’ but ‘Are we saved ourselves if we do not send them the gospel?’
John Stott
Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.
John Stott
We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.
John Stott
Why is it that some Christians cross land and sea, continents and cultures, as missionaries? What on earth impels them? It is not in order to commend a civilization, an institution or an ideology, but rather a person, Jesus Christ, whom they believe to be unique.
Lee Strobel
I’ve seen far too many Christians who are more than willing to travel halfway around the world to volunteer for a week in an orphanage, but who cannot bring themselves to take the personal risk of sharing Jesus with the co-worker who sits day after day in the cubicle right next to them.
C.T. Studd
Send us people with initiative. Send only Pauls and Timothys . . . who are full of zeal, holiness and power. All others are hindrances. If you send us ten such men the work will be done. Quantity is nothing; quality is what matters.
John Wesley
I want the whole Christ for my Savior, the whole Bible for my book, the whole Church for my fellowship and the whole world for my mission field.
Richard Wurmbrand
It was strictly forbidden to preach to other prisoners. It was understood that whoever was caught doing this received a severe beating. A number of us decided to pay the price for the privilege of preaching, so we accepted their [the communists’ ] terms. It was a deal; we preached and they beat us. We were happy preaching. They were happy beating us, so everyone was happy.
Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf
I have but one passion: It is He, it is He alone. The world is the field and the field is the world; and henceforth that country shall be my home where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ.
Samuel Zwemer
The history of missions is the history of answered prayer.
Elisabeth Elliot
A missionary friend of mine once said, ‘Things were simple before I went to Africa. I knew what the African’s problem was, and I knew the answer. When I got there and began to know him as a person, things were no longer simple.’
Margaret Craven
Don’t be sorry for yourself because you are going to so remote a parish. Be sorry for the [Alaskan] Indians. You know nothing and they must teach you.
Source Unknown
He who dares to teach must never cease to learn.
G. Thompson Brown
Mission . . . must take the form of servanthood. Only in this way can it escape the charge of arrogance.
Mark A. Noll
Today more Christian workers from Brazil are active in cross-cultural ministry outside their homelands than from Britain or from Canada. More than 10,000 foreign Christian workers are today laboring in Britain, France, Germany and Italy-more than 35,000 in the United States. Obviously, once-fixed notions of “sending country” and “receiving country” have been tossed into the air.
Taken from The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith by Mark A. Noll Copyright (c) 2009 by Mark A. Noll. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Paul DeNeui
As a missionary … it was always comforting to realize that I did not bring God along with my physical and cultural baggage to my new host country.
Christian Communitas in the Missio Dei,” in Ex Auditu: Christianity’s Engagement with Culture, vol. 23 (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 94.
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