The Attitude of the Missionary: A Self Esteem Issue

The Fields are White For the Harvest Part II:
"The Attitude of the Missionary: A Self-Esteem Issue"
John 3:22-36

At this point you may be asking yourself, “Why is Rick focusing so much on missions and preaching to us about the attitude of the missionary?” Shouldn’t he be preaching this to missionaries?

This is a legitimate question; my response to this is threefold:
1. There may be someone here whom God has set aside to be a career missionary:
My hope is that in preaching on the topic of missions God will use it to speak to anyone whom he may be calling to missions. So if you sense the Holy Spirit is pricking your conscience, please come and talk to me.

2. The Bible is a Missionary book (a field manual for missionaries):
It’s all about going- God inspired the writing of the Bible so that the message could be carried to the nations. The Covenant that He made with Israel was so that the nations would be blessed through them.

Sometimes God sent men and women to proclaim His message; sometimes He sent Angels; He even sent a donkey as well as a few Kings. Jesus was a missionary. He left the riches of heaven to preach the good news to the world. The Holy Spirit is a missionary too!

All of the disciples became missionaries. I am convinced that Thomas went as far as India and established a church there. There is also evidence that Paul or one of his disciples may have gone to England.
Due to persecution, the church that the disciples established in Jerusalem also became missionaries- they went everywhere that the Jews had been dispersed 500 years earlier by the Babylonians and the Assyrians (Egypt, Parthia, Syria, Persia, Europe and Greece).

Even the 3000 who believed and were baptized on the day of Pentecost became missionaries because most of them returned to their homelands to establish churches.

John the Baptist was a missionary to his people and the Samaritan women was to hers. They were home missionaries.

3. Missions is not optional- We are all called to it, whether it’s home missions or foreign missions- each one of us is a missionary!
The Great Commission is not a suggestion- Jesus told the church to go… or, “Well going, make disciples of all peoples.” Not everyone leaves home in order to go and make disciples; but we are all a component of this missionary machine.

With that said (and hopefully agreed), let’s look at what our first text in this series has to say about our attitudes as missionaries, specifically in the context of home missions. Read John 3:22-36

I. Growing
It would be a major oversight to preach this passage without any consideration of the profound theological assertion that is introduced here: the biblical doctrine of sanctification.
Controversy is nothing new in the church. It is funny how John used the controversy about baptism as an occasion to address the more important issue of growing in Christ-likeness: “he must increase and I must decrease.”

Maybe holding petty disagreements about rituals up against the weightier matters of salvation is a good method of ending “doubtful disputations” among Christians.

In saying that Christ must increase, the Baptist was evidently talking about more then just his ministry- he was talking about Christian growth. He linked the enlargement of Christ and the diminishing of self with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit given without measure at salvation in v. 34.

We are so filled with the Holy Spirit when we are born again, it’s as though He is pressed down and overflowing from within us… like when you try to cram all your clothes into luggage when you go on a long trip and it just seems to be a little too much or the bag is a little too small and no matter how much you press it in, it overflows so that you can’t zip it up- that’s a picture how God gives us His Holy Spirit.

So to teach, as some well-meaning Christians do, that there is a “Second Blessing” in which an increased dose of the Holy Spirit is given contradicts John. We have richly received the Spirit of God in its completeness. (Nor does John connect the reception of the H.S. with Baptism.)

As Jesus increases in us through the immeasurable increasing influence of the Holy Spirit, we who are of the earth, become less earthly, less fleshly, less sinful; we become more heavenly, more spiritual, more Christ-like. This is called sanctification.

II. Going
I have preached voluminously about this subject in the past and I will also preach voluminously about it in the future.

But we cannot overlook the practical nature of this text; the theology does not set itself in opposition to the practical, but lends itself to it. The two topics are not mutually exclusive, but complimentary. Sanctification and mission go hand in hand because growing in Christ-likeness and Going in Christ-likeness are inseparable.

In other words, the work of the mission is God’s means of Grace to sanctify us just as the preaching of the gospel is God’s means of Grace to bring us to faith. The more we participate in missions, the more we increase in Christ-likeness. Conversely, the less we participate in Christ-like going, the less we increase in Christ-like growth.

There is a great assurance in this fact, because, if you truly desire to become like Christ and store treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust nor thief can destroy nor take it away, then all you have to do is to take hold of your divine vocation of being a missionary-

or you will retard your Christian growth!!

Our text today portrays the apparently more coveted missions enterprise: home missions. But when we consider the looming fate of John the Baptist, and his pending prison ministry, we may come to prefer the foreign mission field. Notice the allusion in verse 24 to the fate of John, “For John had not yet been thrown in prison.” (This aside comment on the part of the gospel writer places these events before Mark 1:14.)

Likewise, some speculate that there is a looming persecution here in North America and it may be that in the not too distant future, Chinese and Indian Christians will be receiving Persecution alert emails about Christian leaders in Canada and the United States.

So we have the context: between his temptation in the desert and his public ministry in Galliee, Jesus spent some time in the Judean countryside at where there was apparently lots of water for baptism, because many people were apparently being baptized by Jesus’ disciples.

Then erupts a controversy that reveals the covetousness and the pettiness of John’s disciples: Jesus’ ministry is growing more then theirs.

As a pastor I can understand their frustration. It’s not easy being measured by the ministry of others- especially multi-talented high achieving radio preachers who have teams of researchers and writers working for them. But the only thing worse would be to try to outdo Jesus’ ministry? This is a self-esteem issue.



Appropriate Self Esteem:
Humans must live with the tension between three loves: love of self; love of God and love of others. Jesus assumes self love when he tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves. He commands us to love others and he upholds love for God with our whole heart, strength and mind as fulfilling of the Law.

I think that the problem with sin is that it causes us to elevate love of self over the other loves. And the secular therapeutic world holds up self love as the ideal calling it high-self esteem. I have even heard pastors and church leaders twist Jesus command to love others the way we love ourselves as a command to love ourselves more.

The problem is that we get caught up in self. Our Christian life becomes self absorbed; we talk about what we got out of worship rather then what we put into… pagans go to their altars with more altruistic motives then most Evangelicals. Who ever got bored in the presence of God?

Christians who are so busy loving themselves and striving for high self esteem are not Christians who are emptying themselves, esteeming others more highly then themselves and sharing in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering by sacrificially living for the advancement of the gospel because you can’t do both! And in focusing on self, we deprive ourselves of the greatest and best blessing that God has in store for us- i.e. things that accompany the enjoyment of God.

Then there are those Christians who have graduated from self love and have learned to love others more then selves. But their love of others has become a social gospel. They are so focused on the mission that they never have time for the one who commissioned it. They fight for justice and strive to end war and famine (all worthy causes), but they miss the Kingdom of God and instead try to establish a man-made imitation of it which will eventually produce the Kingdom of antichrist.

Recently we received a letter from Petra’s school and I don’t remember much of what it was about, but I noticed a topic whose title jumped off the page. I never expected to see something so true in public school literature- the title was about “Appropriate self-esteem.”

Wow, the secular world has finally figured out that true self-esteem is not measured by quantity but by appropriateness. Unfortunately, I doubt that the public school system has come to the conclusion that appropriate self-esteem is measured by the place that Christ holds in one’s life, but that letter proved that they may be closer to that truth then many Christians.

So how does the Missionary gain appropriate self esteem?
1. The true self esteem of the missionary has to do with the ever increasing nature of his love for Christ and the ever decreasing love for self. That love for Christ propels us to fulfill his command to be missionaries for the gospel.



Christ, not self, not the church, not the denomination… Christ must have the supremacy in our missions whether it is home missions of prison missions or foreign missions or short term missions or long term mission. He is the bridegroom, we are the friend.

If Christ is not supreme and increasing in His supremacy over the missionary then he has inappropriate self esteem And his or her joy can never be full because he is too full of himself/ she is too full of herself. “He who is above is above all.” That is appropriate self esteem.

2. When we put Christ first instead of self our testimony will be about him and not ourselves and that will give it power. All our conversation, all our glorying, all our worship, all our witnessing will be about him and not ourselves- “What we have seen and heard, that we testify” and whoever receives our testimony certifies that God is true “For he whom God has sent speaks the words of God.”

When our testimony is about ourselves, it is of the earth but when it is about Christ it is about things above- things that bring salvation. That’s where our boldness to preach the gospel comes from and when it’s about Christ, it is a life giving message. “He who believes in the son has everlasting life.”





In his book, “The Great Omission,” Robertson McQuilken describes an experience he had while delivering a lecture to a group of Urbana students.
“How come?” The voice rang out from the auditorium. McQuilken had just explained that over half the world’s population has never heard the gospel and they cannot hear because they don’t have a witnessing church among them. Not only that, but pitifully few missionaries had even bothered to attempt to reach them.

“How come?” said the voice. “How come with so many unevangelized people are so few missionaries trying to reach them?”

“That’s a very good question,” McQuilkin replied, “In fact I know someone else who asks that question every day.”

“Who’s that?” The voice asked. McQuilken gestured toward heaven. He confessed later that the question has haunted him ever since.

Maybe the reason is the attitude of Christians. It’s a self esteem issue.