After six humid summers in Burma (now Myanmar), where temperatures topped 100 degrees, Adoniram Judson (1788–1850) hadn’t seen a single convert. Malaria, dysentery, and other diseases threatened the weary American and eventually took the lives of several members of his beloved family. Excruciating trials on top of terrible disappointments punctuated his 38 years of gospel labor.

What kept Judson going as he ran into hard circumstances and hard hearts? Judson explained to his dear friend Luther Rice, “An almighty and faithful God will perform his promises.” Judson rooted his hope in God’s ability and commitment to save sinners.

While the global landscape has changed dramatically since Judson’s day, the human heart has not. Today’s mission field requires men and women who, like Judson, stake everything on the fact that God alone can and will perform his saving promises.

Missionaries as Midwives

Only God can enliven dead hearts. The biblical doctrine of regeneration teaches that, in connection with hearing the gospel proclaimed (Romans 10:14), the Holy Spirit brings a sinner’s spiritually dead soul to life (Ephesians 2:1, 8–9). His quickening alone enables a sinner to repent and believe. In other words, regeneration by the Holy Spirit leads to saving faith. The Holy Spirit’s work does not merely make faith possible; it makes faith certain. No one whom the Holy Spirit regenerates fails to come to faith in Christ (Romans 8:30), and no one comes to faith in Christ apart from the Spirit first remaking his rebel heart.

Grasping this doctrine gives a missionary the privilege of proclaiming the gospel that brings new birth. It also relieves him of the burden of believing it’s up to him to produce conversions. A faithful missionary is like a midwife who supports the mother as she ushers her child into the world. While the missionary’s job is not to resurrect the dead, he does play a God-ordained role in a sinner’s rebirth. God graciously uses means to accomplish his salvation plan; therefore, missionaries help the helpless on their path to new and everlasting life by declaring the gospel.

On the mission field, knowing this difference between what a missionary does and doesn’t accomplish among the lost is essential — and the implications may be eternal.

Guarding the Gospel

Just as a missionary headed to a foreign land vaccinates against potential diseases, adopting a midwife mentality inoculates the missionary from both distorting the gospel message and deploying dangerous means toward noble ends. Missionaries long to see unreached people turn “from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10), but good intentions can go awry if left unguarded by sound doctrine.

It was the apostle Paul’s conviction that God alone can shine gospel light into dark hearts that kept him from surrendering to discouragement, tampering with God’s word, or doing ministry in “underhanded ways” (2 Corinthians 4:1–6). Because Paul understood that only God authors life, he committed himself to declaring the truth openly — no matter the cost (2 Corinthians 4:2). Paul didn’t distort the gospel message or use methods that dilute its truth because he was confident in God’s ability to revive dead hearts through his own word.

Today’s missionaries face threats of both gospel dilution and gospel distortion because an anemic doctrine of regeneration threatens gospel clarity. Some missionaries insist on rapid, contrived methods for converting people and for measuring that growth. Others baptize “converts” from Muslim backgrounds who do not confess or understand Jesus to be the Son of God. Syncretism fundamentally refuses to rely on the power of God for conversion. Rather than accept their role as midwives who have a front-row seat to God’s resurrection power, too many missionaries try to take over his position.

“The work of converting souls is God’s from beginning to end.”

A biblical view of regeneration also defends missionaries against pride. It frees us to labor in the humility that Jonah found only in the belly of the great fish, where he finally accepted that “salvation belongs to the Lord” (Jonah 2:9) — not to us. Though our enemy would have us think otherwise, we are God’s servants by grace, not by necessity. Midwives may be helpful, but they are not primary. Missionaries may walk alongside the person God saves, but missionaries don’t produce anyone’s salvation. The work of converting souls is God’s from beginning to end.
Embracing this truth destroys pride.

Empowering Faithfulness

A biblical perspective on regeneration does more than protect. It empowers missionaries to walk in faithfulness for the long haul. The midwife doesn’t run when the labor becomes difficult. When the birth pains intensify, her presence is most strategic and needed.

Rightly understanding regeneration equips missionaries with the discipline to be prayerfully patient — to persevere when persecution, or monotony, intensifies. What kept the great missionaries of history — like Amy Carmichael, David Livingstone, and William Carey — laboring in the hardest fields with patience? They knew that one person plants and another waters, but God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6). His growing power encourages missionaries to play their part over months and years, trusting God will supply the advance in his time. Missionaries are not in charge of when God delivers on his promises any more than a midwife decides when a child will be born. Both balance expectation and patience as they wait.

Pragmatism is a great temptation on the field. A missionary’s dreams of converting the unreached can quickly melt into disappointments. God often makes his choice laborers more aware of setbacks than successes. In those times, missionaries must lean on what was true for Paul and Judson, because it’s still true for us. Despite his suffering, Paul knew that no disappointment, discouragement, or dark heart has ever prevented God’s power to shine forth “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). The supernatural reality that God authors life in deserts of death redirects our focus from the seen to the unseen.

Raising Expectations

In God’s kindness, a missionary’s hope isn’t denied; it’s just sometimes deferred. What we can’t see today will become clear in eternity. God’s sovereign work means that he alone determines the depth and breadth of a missionary’s ministry. Who knows if God has called you to till very hard soil today so that he might produce enduring, unimaginable fruit after many tomorrows? The biblical view of regeneration showers the missionary with the confidence to labor expectantly, knowing we serve a God who will vindicate himself and his servants by melting hearts of stone. We will see that vindication fully in the next life.

“Our responsibility is simply to proclaim the life that God alone can give.”

If the New Testament shows us that the normal Christian life is costly, how much more costly might the mission field prove? And yet, the same New Testament reveals that missionaries can persevere for the long haul — even when we sacrifice the comforts of our homes only to meet disappointments and dead hearts. For missionaries, God’s power to give life means that whether Jonah is caught in the belly of a fish or Paul is clinging to a plank in the sea (Acts 27:43–44), no circumstance or human heart lies beyond his sovereign directing.

If you feel alone on the mission field, or if the hard soil seems to mock your efforts, lean into your role as a spiritual midwife: as a missionary who comes alongside the work God is doing, knowing that he has been doing that work since long before you arrived on the scene. We can’t manufacture conversions, and we shouldn’t try — because the outcome is not on our shoulders. Our responsibility is simply to proclaim the life that God alone can give.

Audio Transcript

We got our first question about so-called ‘gender pronoun hospitality’ exactly five years ago, in December of 2019, and many others since. Most recently is this urgent question from an anonymous elder: “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast and for taking my question. I serve as an elder at my church. We are blessed with a college nearby where we have an active ministry presence. There we team up with a large parachurch ministry helping churches serve college campuses.

“During a recent training session, this ministry asked us to consider using ‘gender pronoun hospitality’ on our local campus, a suggestion that has now come before the elders of the church to see if we will allow our members, and those we support locally who work on the campus, to do so. The argument is that there are times when, for the sake of evangelism, one may decide to call a person by their chosen gender if such an act removes a possible barrier in sharing the gospel. The ask for our church is for a person to have the freedom, in the moment, to do this, limited to evangelism contexts, limited to conversations with those who are not believers. If someone claims to be a follower of Christ, such ‘pronoun hospitality’ would not apply. But Article 7 in the Nashville Statement seems to me to show no wiggle room here. Pastor John, what do you think of this so-called ‘gender pronoun hospitality’?”

I see five issues that need to be addressed in this question. I’ll take them from what I think is the least to the most important first.

1. Alternative Address

When you’re dealing directly with a person who says he is a woman or she is a man, the pronoun that you use is you, not he or she. “Hello. How are you?” So, it may be possible to engage a person directly without touching the issue of pronouns. Now, of course, that doesn’t work when dealing with proper names. Is Andy now Angie? You may not even know that Angie was once Andy. So, stepping into the conversation, you may not have any choice unless you simply avoid the name, which is possible.

2. Misleading Slogan

Even in a slogan, I think connecting the beautiful biblical word “hospitality” with the unbiblical concept of “gender pronoun” is unhelpful and misleading. Now, I know it’s just a catchphrase, but catchphrases reveal things. We ought to be hospitable, but we ought not to be affirming of pronouns that designate a destructive choice and a false view of reality. It is possible to be hospitable and honest.

3. Compromised Word

The very use of the word gender is a compromise with sinful views of reality. I think we should be using the word sex everywhere. We are distinguishing male and female, and I think the word gender should be reserved for the reality-distorting designation that it is.

“A woman does not become a man nor a man a woman by changing names or performing surgeries or taking hormones.”

Gender (as a designation for persons, not grammar) was pushed into our vocabulary by radical feminists fifty years ago, in the seventies, who believed that the givenness of sexual distinctions forever condemned women to kinds of existence they may or may not want. Therefore, to create the freedom to define their existence, “gender” was used as an alternative to “sex” because gender can be chosen and sex can’t be. Sex is bondage; gender is freedom — so it was thought. I think using the word “gender” where the right word is “sex” is like using the word “marriage” for a relationship between two men or two women. It’s not marriage. It is so-called “marriage.”

In our present context, maleness and femaleness are sexes, not genders.

4. Forthright Evangelism

How much of the gospel’s implications and purifying power should be shared up front in evangelism? Peter stated the gospel like this in 1 Peter 2:24: “[Christ] bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” So, Peter attaches the substitutionary death of Jesus with the sin-conquering effect of that death in one sentence. When the rich young ruler asked how to inherit eternal life, Jesus said, “Sell what you possess and give to the poor . . . and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). He led with an effect or a fruit of the gospel.

Now, we don’t always do that, but we might sometimes. It would go like this, perhaps: “I know you intend to change your sex, but you are my friend, and I think there’s a better way. Jesus has a better way forward for you. He’s full of grace. He’s full of forgiveness. May I share that with you?” That’s legitimate evangelism from the get-go, and it might be a good way.

5. Serious Issue

Finally, this is the most important issue, I think. How serious is the issue when a man claims to be a woman or a woman claims to be a man? How serious is that? Now, you can judge what I think the answer is from these ten points. They go by very fast, and you can pause and think about them.

1. It defies God. The Nashville Statement is right to say, “Self-conception as male or female should be defined by God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption as revealed in Scripture.” But calling a man a woman or a woman a man defies that holy purpose of God. It defies God.

2. It involves living a lie. A woman does not become a man nor a man a woman by wanting it to be so or by changing names or performing surgeries or taking hormones. It is a life built on a lie.

3. Being a man or a woman is not like being left-handed or right-handed. It goes far deeper and touches the depths of our created nature.

4. It regularly leads to destructive and irreversible surgeries and treatments.

5. When that happens, it destroys the God-designed potential of procreation and will bring — I say will bring, not might bring — sooner or later profound and sometimes suicidal regret.

6. It expresses the deeply anti-God commitment to human autonomy over against the will of God. “I will decide the essence of my being, not God.”

7. It contributes to the cultural disorder of sexuality that tends to undermine God’s pattern from male and female and, thus, confuses and destabilizes our young people and increases the prevalence of sexual dysphoria and treats it as a legitimate guide to future happiness, which it isn’t.

8. It overlooks alternative ways forward that take seriously a person’s sexual confusion or rebellion and yet lead people out of dissatisfaction into new hope and embrace of their God-given sexuality through Christ.

9. It is the prelude to future perversions in which a person marries an animal and chooses to no longer be he or she, but now demands the pronoun it. Just go to Wikipedia and look up “human-animal marriage” if you think I’m overstating things. This is not far-fetched. It is consistent with a worldview that says, “I, not God, define my essence.” We don’t want to encourage that progress, which has already gone tragically too far.

10. Therefore, the greatest possible care should be taken before one gives any impression of approving or even being mildly disagreeable toward so-called transgenderism.

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