The Christian Mission Identical with that of Christ
J. Brand. John 17:18-19 As you have sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.… Here are two impressive facts. One is that Jesus is holding converse with the Father about the conversion of the world, and the Christians whom He was to leave in it. The other is that Christ regards the mission of those Christians in the world as practically identical with His own. The two missions are identical. I. IN THEIR PURPOSE AND MOTIVE-POWER. Christ's mission originated in the bosom of God, in view of an infinite calamity which had fallen on man. The race was hastening to a wrecked immortality. There was but one power that could arrest its fatal progress — Love. God was Love. Christ came to establish an empire of love, and to change the moral drift of the perishing race, The apostles caught this sublime thought. "If God so loved us, we ought to love one another." The scope of the Divine mission was universal, and hence, "All the world" became the watchword of the Christian ages. Hence, when Christ gathered a little band of followers, He pushed them out into the great world of want and woe and hate, along the line of His own career — "As Thou hast sent Me, so have I sent them." II. IN THEIR METHODS. 1. He ignored "superior races" and civilizations, and pushed His truth out to the weakest and the lowest. With a "sublime radicalism" He goes after the most needy. 2. He recognized the essential slowness of the cause, and hence, taught and wrought with Divine patience, believing in the immortality of truth, and looking down through a long vista of years for results. 3. He ignored the principle of demand and supply, as utterly defective for the lifting of humanity. That principle aims to merely meet existing desires. Christ ignored desires and acted in view of needs. His method was to come where there was no demand for Him, but where there was an immeasurable need; and for love's sake, man's sake, God's sake, to thrust Himself upon the attention of men, when they wanted something else; thus creating a demand for spiritual life where none existed. Our mission is to proceed on the same principle. The apostles so acted. They went where there was no demand for them. The Macedonian cry which came to Paul was not the cry of the men of Macedonia, but the cry of the Spirit of God for Macedonia. These three principles should characterize our Christian methods. III. IN THEIR REQUIREMENT OF THE SAME QUALIFICATIONS. The most impressive aspect of Christ's mission is its divine heroism — the total abandonment of Himself to the cause of the lost. This, too, must be true of the Christian disciple. To the man who really enters upon the Christian mission, every land is his fatherland, because man identified with Christ is greater than the world on which he works, and his final home is above. IV. IN THEIR SOURCES OF HOPE, THEIR ASSURANCE OF SUCCESS. We are not to carry to the sin-sick world a doubtful remedy. We go to lost men as messengers of hope. The Christian's message is not simply a new law — that men have now; not a new philosophy — that has failed already; not merely a sense of guilt — there is no hope in that. What the world needs is a gospel of Hope. The story of the cross is such a gospel. The supreme theory of the Christian, then, is to grasp the Divine conception of his mission — to get Christ's view of the ideal man. The Greek ideal man was an elegant thinker; the Roman, a great ruler; the modern, a king of commerce. Christ's ideal man is he who, identified with God, heroically commits his consecrated powers to the service of God's suffering poor. (J. Brand.) Parallel Verses KJV: As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. WEB: As you sent me into the world, even so I have sent them into the world.