I came across this stirring quote today while reading and found it profound and convicting. I thought I would post it to stir your soul as well.
The author is K.P. Yohannan, a missionary born in India with a desire to reach Asia for Jesus (he preaches a lot in America as well). His life is marked by sacrifice and often intense persecution for the sake of the Gospel.
Recently I counseled a couple planning to enter missionary service. They claimed they desperately wanted to serve the Lord. They were well qualified, and it was obvious that the Holy Spirit was calling them into the privilege of His service.
But the world had a grip on them. They began to ask what I now recognize as the critical American questions about Christian service. If they went into missions, how would they live? Would they have a home? Would they have a retirement plan? What about the education of their children? What about insurance?
They were measuring the opportunity for service by the amount of inconvenience it would cause them. They didn’t want to face the possibility of difficulties, sorrows, sacrifice and uncertainty in missionary service. The risks were too great, and so, like millions of other North Americans, they have not yet obeyed that call. They probably never will.
What a contrast with the routine sacrifices made by so many Christian workers in the Third World. I think of a team of five young pioneer missionaries whom the Lord called to begin a mission in Rajasthan, a North Indian state. They had no money for train fare, let alone for food or rent. Everyone discouraged them and begged them to stay home. But this was their answer: “If we have no money to go by train, we will walk (1,500 miles). If one of us becomes sick and dies on the way, we will bury him on the roadside, and the rest of us will continue on. If only one of us survives the journey and reaches Rajasthan, and places only one gospel tract on the hot desert sand of that state before he dies, we will have filled our mission, and we will have obeyed our Lord.”
*K.P. Yohannan, The Road to Reality, Creation House, 1988, pgs. 73-74.