A life-threatening journey, an urgent request, and a harvest no one saw
This story begins with a simple, but potentially life-threatening request that we received:
Person X from country Y wants to be baptized. His motivation is pure: God is asking this of him, and he wants to follow that call.
Mark 16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
He has no church nearby and came to faith by reading a Bible that he was given. You would think the answer is simple, right? “Come on, there are plenty of churches in your country, just find one and go!”
But… there is a rather important “small” detail: believing in God is strictly forbidden in country Y. There are no openly operating churches. There are “underground churches,” but if the authorities discover them, they have a huge problem.
And if those same authorities discover what X has done, it could have serious consequences, such as imprisonment or worse.
X does not know any other Christians in his country, so at the moment, we are the only people with whom he can have these kinds of conversations.
He also wondered whether it was a sin that he had not yet been baptized. So we looked at the following together:
Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.
In other words: you are saved by God’s grace, through your faith in what Jesus Christ has done for you. Period. Baptism is a “work,” and it does not save you. Yes, it is beautiful to be baptized out of obedience to God, because He asks this of us, but baptism itself does not save you. Besides, God knows your heart:
Psalm 139:1-2 O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
He knows that you want to obey Him, and He knows that the authorities are currently making it impossible for you to do so. Our salvation does not depend on whether we are able to do everything God asks of us. That was an important message for X, and that short Bible study gave him an enormous amount of peace.
Lesson 1: Our salvation does not depend on what we are able to do
We may obey God and do the things He asks of us. But our salvation is not based on our performance. Not on our good works, and not on whether or not we have been baptized.
Our salvation is by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ and in what He has done for us.
But the desire remains, and what a “burning” desire it is!
Now, it is “coincidence” that X will soon be allowed to travel to a Western country on a business trip. That is an exception in his culture; not everyone is free to simply leave the country, so he belongs to the lucky few.
We made a plan together: X can be baptized in that other country where he will be staying temporarily.
We quickly contacted a church in that country and called the pastor with the question:
If X walks into your church next Sunday, can you baptize him?
We cannot tell you who he is, we cannot tell you which country he comes from, and no video or audio recordings may be made during the service, nor may any photographs be taken. We hope that he can be there next Sunday if he can briefly ‘escape’ from his travel companions. If that does not work, hopefully it will be the week after.
Can you arrange that?
The person on the phone understood what was going on between the lines, asked no further questions, and simply said: “Yes, no problem at all. We’ll take care of it. Period.” He did ask whether we wanted to receive an update, but given X’s safety and privacy, we said we did not. The fewer people who know anything about it, the better.
That pastor also trusted God and simply did what God put in his path. Something to think about when another Christian asks you for something. Do you trust him that way too?
And there’s something else… X came to faith by reading a Bible that he was given. That Bible reached him through, through, through several people. The person who bought that Bible has no idea that X received it. The first person who distributed that Bible in country Y also has no idea that the Bible eventually ended up with X. The person who ultimately gave that Bible to X does not personally know X either, and has no contact with him anymore. All the people who passed this Bible along did so trusting that it was needed, following Matthew 28:19 and Romans 10:17. They simply never saw the outcome of their actions. They ploughed in God’s field, but never saw the harvest.
All those people who gave that Bible away might be asked: “So, what about the harvest from your work of blessing?” And all those people (in this case) would have had to say: “No idea, we are ploughing, but we haven’t seen any harvest yet.”
We regularly meet missionaries who are asked the same question: “So, what about the harvest?”
Those missionaries sometimes experience that as a question that requires them to give an account to someone else. And if there is no harvest, they are judged, because apparently they are not doing a good enough job? Questions like that really bother many missionaries and put them in a difficult position. Because what are you supposed to answer when you simply have no idea what God is doing through your work?
We have examples of missionaries who then start telling “nice stories” just so they have something to say about the “harvest.” And let me be very clear: the responsibility to remain honest of course lies with the missionary themselves. You must not make up stories or make the results look better than they really are.
But at the same time, the way that question is asked can absolutely encourage this behaviour. If a missionary constantly gets the feeling that they are only doing a good job if they can show impressive results, the temptation to make those results look a little better becomes increasingly strong.
That is healthy neither for the person asking the question nor for the missionary themselves.
But… it happens.
And probably more often than you would like to know.
Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch…
Lesson 2: For the person asking about the harvest
There is a lesson here for the person asking the question: asking about the harvest is a strange question, in my opinion. The missionaries themselves often have no idea what the harvest is. They trust God, do what God asks of them, and that is where it ends for them.
So, dear questioner… Do you also trust God and can you let it go? Or is that question secretly a judgment of the missionary’s work? Or, on a very human level, are you simply secretly curious about exciting stories?
Because how is a missionary supposed to know what God ultimately does with their work?
How many people have ever passed on a Bible without ever knowing where that Bible would ultimately end up?
How many people have ever talked to someone about Jesus without ever knowing what God did with that conversation?
You simply do not know. So perhaps we should be a little more careful with the question: “So, what about the harvest?”
Lesson 3: For the missionary
There is also a lesson for the missionary in this story:
1 Corinthians 3:6-9 I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour. For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.
You, as a missionary, plant, fertilize and water, but you are not the one who makes it grow. That is God.
And that “fertilizing” is intentional. Because let’s be honest: fertilizing can simply be dirty work. You stand there with your hands in manure, and afterwards you smell like it. Not exactly the most glamorous job.
Missionary work is sometimes exactly like that. It is not always beautiful, inspiring or spectacular. Sometimes it is simply hard work, solving problems, standing beside someone, having conversations that seem to go nowhere, starting over again and again and yes… sometimes you are pretty much up to your hands in the “manure.”
But even then, you are not the one who makes it grow. You can therefore be faithful in what you do without ever knowing what the ultimate result will be. Perhaps you will never see “the harvest.” But trust God that He is doing what you cannot do.
This story is an example of several people who planted, fertilized and watered, but knew nothing about the beautiful harvest that was actually there!
The person who bought the Bible did not know.
The people who passed it on did not know.
The person who ultimately gave it to X did not know.
And yet X read that Bible, came to faith and now wants to be baptized.
That is harvest.
Only, none of the people who were involved had any idea that the harvest existed. So keep planting. Keep fertilizing. Keep watering. Keep doing what God asks you to do. And if you never see the harvest?
Praise God for the harvest that you have not seen and perhaps never will see.
And then it became personal…
After that conversation and dealing with the practical side of things, it led me to some very confronting self-reflection.
I, who used to struggle to get out of bed at 9 a.m. on Sunday for church, am ashamed now. Because what does that small effort amount to compared with the courage of X?
This man is risking everything. A dangerous journey from country Y to country Z, simply to follow God. My old behaviour feels like a lame excuse.
Contacts like these are an enormous blessing. They show us fellow Christians who are full of fire, without compromise and with everything they have. And that is a powerful lesson for all of us.
Lesson 4: For ourselves
How is your flame doing? Are you burning with passion, or does that nice warm bed win on Sunday morning? Let X’s courage be a lesson to you.
Not because that makes him “better” than us. And not because God loves him more because he takes greater risks. But his life does show us how easy we sometimes have it.
X cannot simply live out his faith openly.
We can.
X has to think carefully about whom he can trust.
We usually do not have to worry about that.
X is willing to make a dangerous journey to be baptized.
And sometimes we can barely manage to get out of bed on Sunday morning.
That is pretty confronting. So perhaps it is time to wake up again.
Come on, get up and follow God with everything you have.
Lesson 5: Making disciples
Oh… one more thing. You, the reader, are also reading this and learning something about who God is and how He works. And that means you are also part of the harvest.
What? Yes, absolutely! God does not ask a missionary to simply “make new Christians.” He asks:
Matthew 28:19-20 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
Making someone His disciple and teaching them what God has commanded goes far, far, far beyond “simply making new Christians.”
It is about a lifelong journey of learning who God is, what He asks of us and how we may follow Him.
And today… you have also learned something about who God is. You have learned something about His grace, about obedience, about trust and about how He works through people who may never see the harvest themselves.
Your discipleship has therefore grown as well. So you, the reader, are also part of the harvest. Have you, as a reader and perhaps as a missionary, ever stopped to think about that?
Welcome to our “normal” life, sometimes quite an adventure. 🙂
X, take care.
You are our hero today.
Go with God.
