Aggressive Christianity
by Rev. A.B. Simpson
Having hope, when your faith is increased, that
we shall be enlarged by you according to our rule abundantly,
to preach the Gospel in the regions beyond you, and not to
boast in another man's line of things made ready to our hand
(II Cor. x. 15,16).
Were I asked to state the distinctive principles of the
work of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, of which the
Convention is a crystallized expression, there are two things
that I would say: First, it stands for an absolute faith in
supernatural things and a supernatural God. It represents
a Christianity which is out-and-out for God, and it gathers
to it those and only those who believe something, and believe
it with all their heart and soul and strength. In a word,
it represents intense spiritual earnestness.
And secondly, along with this as the outgo and overflow
of this deeper life of faith and consecration, it represents
intense aggressiveness in its work for God, an overflow and
an outgo that is ever reaching on to the regions beyond and
seeking to pass on to others the blessing we have ourselves
received.
The Alliance movement therefore represents spiritual earnestness
on the one hand and aggressive activity on the other. These
are the two thoughts expressed in our text, somewhat obscurely,
perhaps, at first sight, but plainly enough when we look more
carefully at the structure and language of the passage.
The apostle first speaks of their faith and his own enlargement
through fellowship with them, and then of the outcome of all
this, leading him forward to new aggressive work in regions
where others have never gone, and neglected fields which other
have not reached. Let us glance briefly at these two distinctive
features of Christian work, and, we trust we may say, without,
egotism, of this work.
I. A deeper and a larger faith. "Having hope
that when your faith is increased we shall be enlarged by
you." The apostle was longing for a deeper and larger
faith both on their part and his own. This must ever be the
spring of earnest and aggressive work. We cannot give others
more than we ourselves have received. The water can rise no
higher than the spring. All missionary enterprise must have
its source in a deeper spiritual life. Therefore, God has
been deepening the life of His people during these waiting
days. Therefore, God has been developing a more earnest consecration
and a more intense devotedness to Christ in the hearts of
His people during these years. It is this that stimulates
your generous gifts and your noble sacrifices. It is because
you believe in God and in His Word without reserve and have
not been afraid to put all the weight of your need and your
eternal future upon it and have found in it a satisfying joy;
it is because of this that everything else is cheap in comparison
and everything else has ceased to hurt. God has given us a
Christ that is real, a Comforter that fills the heart, a love
that lifts us above ourselves, "a joy that abounds even
through deep poverty unto the riches of your liberality,"
a whole Gospel for the whole man, spirit, soul and body, and
it is only the logical sequence that it should also be for
the whole world.
II. The result of this is unselfish and aggressive work.
No soul can receive this deep, divine and overflowing life
and henceforth live unto himself. No church can be baptized
into this supernatural life and this Christ spirit and ever
again be selfish, contracted or earthbound. It makes the world
our parish and irresistibly flows out like water to the deepest
place of need.
This we trust, we may say without immodesty or extravagance
at least, is the aim of the Alliance movement. The greatest
blessing of our work next to the precious Gospel the Holy
Spirit has revealed and the living Christ who is its centre
and substance, is the privilege of giving it to the world.
It has lifted our work to a higher plane than even the deepest
spiritual teaching could ever have given it. It has given
opportunity for the development of the highest qualities both
of faith, love, sacrifice and service, and it is not too much
to say that it has brought us far greater blessings than we
have been able to confer upon others. Building far better
than we knew God led us from the beginning to lay a foundation
broad enough to reach the whole circumstance of the world
in the scope of our purpose and our blessing. The missionary
idea had given not only expansion but height and depth to
the whole spirit of the movement. It is a law of the commercial
world that the balance of trade must be maintained and that
the exports and imports of a country must have a due proportion.
If we did nothing but receive goods of other lands we would
soon become a bankrupt people. It is the export of our produce
and manufactures that brings to us the treasures of the world
and enriches our merchants and our people. It is the same
in the natural world. The body of water that only receives
the inflow of its tributaries and has no outlet from which
to discharge its overflow necessarily becomes a stagnant swamp
or Dead Sea.
And so the life that terminates upon itself is an anomaly
foreign to the very nature of things and contrary to the law
of its own existence. The Christian that is bound by his own
horizon, the church that lives simply for itself, is bound
to die a spiritual death and sink into stagnancy and corruption.
We never can thank God enough for giving us not only a whole
Gospel to believe, but a whole world to give it to.
Let us look a little farther at this great ideal of aggressive
Christianity and see how it is essential to the whole system
of divine religion:
1. First it is the spirit of the Master. It brought Him
to Bethlehem and Calvary, and it governed all his earthly
ministry. How touching the picture of one of the first days
in His earthly work! The previous Sabbath had been spent in
the wonders of His grace and power, and when the next day
dawned the multitudes thronged around Him, and Peter came
eagerly saying, "All men seek for Thee." Peter was
delighted with the success of his Master's ministry. He was
proud to be around Him and know that He was the centre of
every thought and heart. But he could not find his Lord at
first, and when he did discover Him He was away in a place
of retirement whither He had gone a great while before it
was day to wait upon His Father in earnest prayer, and when
he found Him the Master was not at all delighted or elated
by the crowds, but turning His back upon His sudden popularity
He set His face to new fields and answered, "I must go
into the next towns that I may preach there also, for therefore
came I forth. And He preached in their synagogues throughout
all Galilee." Again and again with weary feet and unwearied
love the blessed Master traveled over the nine hundred cities
of Galilee until all its teeming millions had heard the Gospel
from His lips.
How beautiful that little verse in the fourth chapter of
John, "He must needs go through Samaria." It was
not because the road to Galilee led through Samaria, but it
was because a poor, weary soul was there at Jacob's Well,
and all her countrymen in the city of Sychar, outcasts from
"the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants
of promise," for whose souls there was no one else to
care. How graphic the irony with which His very enemies described
His love of souls when they cried in reproach "This man
lieth in wait for sinners and eateth with them." And
when He had traversed all His own land of Israel He reached
beyond to Syrophoenicia to the poor, sinful race of Jezebel,
to the country of Peraea, and the very malefactor that hung
beside Him in His dying agony. His love was always reaching
out to regions beyond, and if the spirit of the Master is
in us we shall be reaching too.
2. This was the spirit of the Great Commission. For when
He went away He left His will in the form of His last commands.
And what were these? They may be summed up in three special
commissions. First, a commission to the nations as nations
in the closing verses of the Gospel of Matthew: "Go ye
therefore and disciple all nations." He sent them out
as ambassadors from the King of kings to the kings of this
world. He thus repudiated at once the idea of the Gospel being
intended for any single nation or race. Certainly not the
race of Israel, and just as certainly not the Anglo-Saxon
race. The commission was world-wide, and it shall never be
fulfilled until every race, tribe and tongue of the human
family shall have received the Gospel in such form that its
people can understand the message of salvation. It would not
suffice if all the sinners in the United States were saved
if there was yet a single tribe that had not heard of Christ--the
commission would not be fulfilled. We cannot emphasize too
much this national phase of the great commission, and until
it is obeyed we do not see how we can consistently expect
the Master's coming.
Next, there is the individual commission, "Go ye into
all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature."
This sends us man by man to the individuals of the race, and
bids us give every human being a chance for his life.
Then, finally, there is the last utterance of the commission
in its most aggressive form given by the Lord from the slope
of Olivet just before His ascension: "Ye shall receive
power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall
be witness unto Me"--and now notice the expansive character
of the command--"in Jerusalem--and in all Judea--and
in Samaria--and unto the uttermost parts of the earth!"
So the ever-widening circle extends until it takes in the
whole circumference of the world. Short of this, Christian
enterprise dare not pause or it will miss the promise of the
Holy Ghost and the approval of the Master.
3. This was the spirit of the early Church. They were slow
to catch the Master's thought, but gradually they understood
it and fulfilled it. And so it was not long until the Gospel
had spread to Samaria, and then Philip was pressed out by
the Holy Ghost to meet on yonder desert the heathen prince
of darkest Africa and send him back to his own continent a
pioneer of the glorious Gospel, and perhaps one of the founders
of those mighty churches we afterward find in northern Africa.
Then Peter is taken up on the housetop and prepared by a heavenly
vision for the wider ministry that awaits him next day in
the house of Cornelius the Roman centurion.
Next, the church at Antioch is formed with its larger brotherhood
and its freer atmosphere of spiritual fellowship and world-wide
evangelism. And then Saul is raised up and prepared for his
peculiar ministry as the apostle of the Gentiles, and in due
time sent forth on his world-wide evangel until he too is
able to say, "So that from Jerusalem and round about
unto Illyricum I have fully preached the Gospel of Christ.
Yea, so have I striven to preach the Gospel not where Christ
was named lest I should build on another man's foundation,
but, as it is written, to whom He was not spoken of, they
shall see, and they that have not heard shall understand."
The one ambition of his life was to "preach the Gospel
in the regions beyond."
And in the passage already quoted in the fifteenth chapter
of Romans there is a fine sarcasm in one of his sentences
where he tells them that much as he desired to visit them
at Rome and enjoy their spiritual fellowship, yet he had not
even thought of coming to them until he could say, "I
have no more place in these parts." There was really
nothing left to do among the heathen and so he was free to
go to Rome, but even in going there it was but incidental
to a more distant journey into Spain, and it was partly for
the purpose of their helping him in this missionary journey.
And so he says, "But now having no more place in these
parts, and having a great desire these many years to come
unto you, whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will
come to you, for I trust to see you in my journey or to be
brought on my way hitherward by you if first I be somewhat
filled with your company."
4. This is the true spirit of Christian love. It is the
native instinct of the heavenborn soul. The supreme law of
the universe is love and the essence of love is to think of
others and especially of the most needy and helpless ones.
"There's another man," was the stammering cry of
the shipwrecked sailor as they roused him into consciousness
and bore him from the raft on which he was floating. His first
thought was of the comrade that he had left dying behind him,
and so while "there's another man" in any corner
of this dark world who is sinking in the night under his awful
load of guilt and with a desperate sense of helplessness,
let no man dare to call himself the disciple of Jesus who
does not care or presume to answer back to the challenge,
"Am I my brother's keeper?"
5. Aggressive Christianity is the world's greatest need.
Shall I try to make you understand the awful condition of
the majority of our fellow beings in heathen lands? Can you
take in the idea of a thousand millions without the Gospel?
Suppose we were to bring them into this Tabernacle a thousand
at a time, three times a day, every day in the week, and every
week in the year, and thus have three thousand souls every
day hear the story of salvation, how long do you suppose it
would take the whole congregation of the Christless world
to pass before us and have one sermon preached to them about
the love of Jesus? It would take just one thousand years,
and in the thousand years there would be thirty generations
more just like them left to perish. How many of them have
died since this Convention began? A population as vast as
Brooklyn, as Philadelphia--a million souls perished without
Christ! How many of them will pass away before we meet again
at Nyack a year from now? Let me give you the picture of graves.
Let us bury them side by side all across the continent and
allow one yard for each grave. The row of graves would reach
from New York to San Francisco and back again twice over.
And all of these have perished without Jesus! Oh, as they
pass into His presence in their darkness and sorrow and learn
for the first time that He died to save them, what must they
think of us, and what must He think of us, if we never feel
their need and never make a sacrifice to save them? We gave
a hundred thousand soldiers to emancipate this little island
of Cuba from oppression. If we should give a hundred thousand
missionaries it would mean one missionary for every ten thousand
of the human race, and with that army of workers the entire
world could be evangelized in ten years.
What about the means that such a movement would require?
It would take just fifty millions of dollars, one-quarter
of the amount the United States spent in a single year on
the Cuban war, and a mere trifle for the Christian world to
give for the evangelization of the heathen.
We are told by intelligent authorities that the actual increase
in wealth of the Christian people of the United States as
represented by the amount that they add to their Savings Bank
deposits is five hundred millions of dollars. Now they could
give all this without lessening their wealth by merely contributing
the annual surplus. But if they gave but a tenth of this it
would be fifty millions of dollars annually from the United
States alone, and it would be sufficient to support an army
of one hundred thousand missionaries, or one to every ten
thousand of the human race. When we look at such figures how
can our hearts help being filled with deepest shame and wonder
at the selfishness of Christians and the long-suffering of
God!
Time will not permit me to tell you of the neglected fields
of this lost world. I might speak of the three thousand languages
and dialects of earth, of which more than two thousand still
remain without a translation of the Scriptures or a Gospel
messenger to tell them of Christ. I might speak of the interior
provinces of China, with perhaps one missionary to half a
million souls; of Mongolia and Tibet, which have just been
touched with the first rays of light; of Turkestan and Anam
without a single missionary; of the Philippine Islands just
opening their gates to the Gospel; of hundreds of tribes in
Central Africa that never heard of Jesus; of five million
Indians in South America that are still in the night of paganism,
and of many of the republics of South America that have but
two or three lone messengers just beginning to cut their way
through the dense darkness. But space and time forbid. God
is calling, the Spirit is pointing, the Macedonian cry is
pleading for the regions beyond. Oh, who will go, and who
will help to send?
The Missionary Institute, for which today we are to contribute
our loving gifts, is a training school for missionaries for
the regions beyond. The men and women whom we train and send
are themselves outside of the ordinary range of the Gospel
ministry, and belong, in a sense, to a region beyond. Like
the brave Rough Riders and Volunteers who helped to win the
cause of Cuban freedom, they are the brave Volunteers and
Irregulars in the army of Christ and of missions, and they
go forth to regions where others have not ventured and fields
where others have not scattered the precious seed. If there
is a hard place, if there is a lonely spot, if there is a
neglected soul, that is the place that is the work for which
these brave hearts are first to volunteer. But what right
have they to sacrifice and serve at such cost while we stand
back in selfish indolence and apathy? No, let both ranks of
the army of the Lord advance alike and keep step together,
the workers at home and the workers abroad in the same glorious
enterprise of sacrifice and service for a crucified Lord and
a lost world.
In conclusion, the spirit of aggressiveness is the spirit
of our age. The great message of God's providence to our people
today is national expansion. The hand of God and the victories
of our brave soldiers have spread our flag over new realms
and new races. Let us not forget that these millions are not
only our fellow citizens but our fellow sinners too. Shall
we be true to the trust that God has so gloriously enlarged?
Shall we give them merely the earthly symbol of freedom, or
shall we give them the glorious liberty of the children of
God and the Magna Charta of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
If the glory of Christ's cross has transfigured
you and me,
As he died to make them, holy, let us live and
make them free
While God is marching on.