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Missionary
Missionary Protection
Pray for:
1. Protection from Satan’s attacks on their faith and calling, tempting them to quit and go home.
2. God protect their marriages and families. Protect them from doing so much work that they neglect their families.
3. Protect them from getting so busy doing things for God that they forget to sit and listen to Him.
4. They could forget to find unhurried time for Bible meditation and prayer.
5. Protect them from losing their spirit of worship, love and devotion to you, Lord.
6. Protect them from divisiveness, criticism and crankiness with each other.
7. Protect their unity in Christ, their love for each other, their commitment to each other.
8. Protect their willingness to serve one another, and to esteem their sisters and brothers better than themselves.
9. Protect them from conflicts with local believers and national church leaders.
10. Protect them from squabbling over budgets and properties.
11. Protect them from misinterpreting each other’s motives.
12. Protection from even hinting that the way we do it in America is best.
13. Protection from using their control of money to get their own way.
14. Unity in Christ among missionaries and believers is so important because unbelievers watch them. So they can see and grasp the good news that God loves them so much that He sent Jesus to this world.
15. Protection from defection for their souls, not their bodies.
16. Our primary concern should be for our missionaries perseverance in faith.
Jesus did ask God to protect his disciples, but not the kind of protection we usually think of. He warned them of what might happen. He simply asked His Father to protect the disciples “so that they be one as we are one.”
1. They needed protection from fighting, jealousy and clamoring for position.
2. If the evil one cannot destroy their faith, he will disrupt their work by sowing dissension in their ranks.
3. If he can get our missionaries or us to believe gossip and suspect each other’s motives, Satan does not have to resort to terrorism.
4. If he can maneuver them into head-on collisions with the national believers, he doesn’t need car crashes to wipe them out.
Lord, teach us to pray for our missionaries more effectively, daily.
Protection From What? by Jim Reapsome
The Job Is Too Small
But, for me personally, being anything but a missionary would be second best. Perhaps a story I recall hearing years ago explains it best. It seems the old Standard Oil Company offered an enormous sum of money to a missionary in China to work for them, to help with the development of Standard Oil in China. The missionary turned them down. So they doubled the salary offer. He turned them down again. They said, “What do you want? We can’t give more money than that.: He said, “The money doesn’t have anything to do with it. The job is too small.”
SIM/NOW, p. 3
Facing Loneliness
In his book Facing Loneliness, J. Oswald Sanders writes, “The round of pleasure or the amassing of wealth are but vain attempts to escape from the persistent ache...The millionaire is usually a lonely man and the comedian is often more unhappy than his audience.”
Sanders goes on the emphasize that being successful often fails to produce satisfaction. Then he refers to Henry Martyn, a distinguished scholar, as an example of what he is talking about. Martyn, a Cambridge University student, was honored at only20 years of age for his achievements in mathematics. In fact, he was given the highest recognition possible in that field. And yet he felt an emptiness inside. He said that instead of finding fulfillment in his achievements, he had “only grasped a shadow.”
After evaluating his life’s goals, Martyn sailed to India as a missionary at the age of 24. When he arrived, he prayed, “Lord, let me burn out for You.” In the next 7 years that preceded his death, he translated the New Testament into three difficult Eastern languages. These notable achievements were certainly not passing “shadows.”
Our Daily Bread, January 21, 1994
Resource
- The Missionary as a Theologian, J. R. Blue, in Walvoord: A Tribute, Donald Campbell, ed., Moody, 1982, p. 315.
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