OC: The Key to the Missionary Message

So- it has been over ten years since I first read through Oswald Chambers, "My Utmost for His Highest." This year I resolved to read it again. Like most devotionals of this stripe, you have to pick and choose and read around a few doctrines- especially the mysticism or what I like to call personal revelation that is experiential but not biblical- I digress. Every once in a while he has a real gem and October 15th is one of them. It is especially relevant to missions in neo-pentecostal, post-catholic Brazil. I might add that in the second paragraph he hits the nail on the head in today's politically-sensitive church in North America (at least as I observe some of it from a distance).

Here it is- Oswald Chambers "My Utmost for His Highest" October 15:

"The key to the missionary message is the propitiation of Christ Jesus. Take any phase of Christ's work-the healing phase, the saving and sanctifying phase; there is nothing limitless about those. "The Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world!"-that is limitless. The missionary message is the limitless significance of Jesus Christ as the propitiation for our sins, and a missionary is one who is soaked in that revelation.

The key to the missionary message is the remissionary aspect of Christ's life, not His kindness and His goodness, and His revealing of the Fatherhood of God; the great limitless significance is that He is the propitiation for our sins. The missionary message is not patriotic, it is irrespective of nations and of individuals, it is for the whole world. When the Holy [Spirit] comes in He does not consider my predilections, He brings me into union with the Lord Jesus.

A missionary is one who is wedded to the charter of his Lord and Master, he has not to proclaim his own point of view, but to proclaim the Lamb of God. It is easier to belong to a coterie which tells what Jesus Christ has done for me, easier to become a devotee to Divine healing, or to a special type of sanctification, or the the baptism of the Holy [Spirit]. Paul did not say-"Woe is unto me, if I do not preach what Christ has done for me," but-"Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel." This is the Gospel-"The Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!" "