If you look deep inside yourself, you may notice, to your dismay, the presence of a singularly unattractive creature. You’ll need to look carefully, because he doesn’t move quickly (or sometimes at all). He camouflages under bed covers. He prefers the mumble over the clear word. His eyelids droop half open; his mouth holds back a dribble of drool. His name is sluggard.

We may prefer to keep the sluggard at a distance, to view this lazy creature only through binoculars or zoo glass. But somehow, he finds a native habitat in every soul, even the most hardworking. When the alarm buzzes, he paws the snooze. When a work project calls for relentless focus, he quietly opens a new browser tab. When some unwelcome duty faces us, one we’ve already put off too long, he nevertheless counsels, “Tomorrow.”

We may hesitate to study the sluggard, preferring to spare ourselves such an unseemly sight. But sometimes, our lazy self dies only when we take a long and careful look at him. “I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,” the wise man tells us. “Then I saw and considered it; I looked and received instruction” (Proverbs 24:30, 32).

As we listen to the sluggard’s mutterings and consider the outcome of his laziness, we learn, by contrast, about a life of labor under the fear of the Lord. So, what instruction might the wise receive as they consider their inner sluggard?

1. ‘A little’ adds up.

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest . . . (Proverbs 24:33)

The candy wrappers strewn around the sluggard’s bed, nearly ankle high now, all have one thing in common: in the moment, they were each “a little.” A little snack, a little break, a little reward, a little treat. He squandered his parents’ allowance in much the same way. Just one more in-app purchase. Just a little more takeout.

The wise hear and receive instruction. “A little,” it turns out, is anything but — at least when joined to a thousand other littles. Many little raindrops make a lake. Many little chops fell a tree. And therefore, how we handle little — little temptations, little decisions, little opportunities for self-denial — matters a lot.

Solomon points us to one of God’s littlest creatures as evidence. “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6). Yes, ants are tiny, this one carrying a speck of dirt, that one a bit of leaf, a third a crumb of bread. An ant cannot accomplish much quickly, but over time, by little and little, an anthill rises from the dirt; a network of underground tunnels takes shape; a colony is warm and fed.

Too often, in fleeing from my inner sluggard, I have tripped from trying to run too fast. Reckoning with how destructive the sluggard’s littles can be, I have thought, “Much! I must do much!” I will finish ten projects this week — no, twenty! I will work out Monday through Friday without exception! I will lead thirty-minute family devotions every night!

Sometimes, indeed, the path from the sluggard’s home rises steep and takes a running start. But most of the time, we are wiser to walk, exchanging little follies for little wisdoms, developing modest, ant-like resolutions and then building upon them. Along the way, we refuse this little compromise for that little obedience; we shun this little laziness for that little labor. We lay each little difficulty before our Father in heaven. And little by little, we receive from him the strength to work more diligently.

2. Neglect grows weeds.

I passed by the field of a sluggard . . . and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns. (Proverbs 24:30–31)

As he rolls over on his bed, or goes for thirds at lunch, the sluggard hardly imagines he is doing any harm. What damage can a little more snoozing do? What’s the problem with a few more mouthfuls? But while he sleeps and snacks and sings a little tune, thorns quietly take over his yard. The sluggard didn’t plant the thorns himself, of course — but by not working, he might as well have. If we do not furrow and plow, and sow good seed, by default we prepare the ground for other purposes. Neglect grows weeds.

Imagine, then, that along comes one of those little moments: Keep working on homework, or watch last night’s highlights? Read the Bible and pray, or enjoy nine more minutes of pillowed bliss? Focus hard for the next hour and finish the project, or check email (again)? We may think such little indulgences are merely neutral, harmless parentheses in the midst of our labors.

“The home of the lazy man and the destroyer end up looking the same. The only difference is speed.”

But whenever we allow the sluggard to grasp our hand, we not only pause from good work, but we produce weeds. Perhaps, for the moment, the weeds appear only in our own soul, as we tutor ourselves in the school of sloth. Or perhaps the weeds grow up for all to see — in half-done work and broken commitments, silly excuses and abandoned responsibilities. Either way, as another proverb puts it, “Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys” (Proverbs 18:9). The home of the lazy man and the destroyer end up looking the same. The only difference is speed.

The sluggard, then, often looks innocent. Surely we could think of more harmful creatures than this smiling sloth, drooped upon his branch. But the wise see through him. “If I don’t disciple my children today, I simply welcome the world to do so.” “If I don’t initiate this hard conversation, I jeopardize this relationship.” “If I don’t finish this work while I have the chance, I will lay the burden on another’s shoulders.”

We are not doing nothing when we play the sluggard. We are growing weeds, toppling walls, chipping foundations, and cultivating thorns, even if ever so slowly.

3. Our desires often deceive us.

The desire of the sluggard kills him. (Proverbs 21:25)

The sluggard’s desires feel like his closest friends, his wisest aids. Their counsels sound so pleasing: “No, don’t mow the lawn now. Looks like rain anyway.” “No, don’t speak of Jesus today, not in this conversation. The time will come (maybe).” “Let your wife change the baby’s diaper. You’re recuperating.” Such wonderful suggestions. Such seductive assassins.

Wisdom puts the matter bluntly: “The desire of the sluggard kills him” (Proverbs 21:25). Kills offers a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but only a bit. In that culture and time, survival depended on labor, on calloused hands and plowed fields and harvested crops and long days. The world was once a harsher place for sluggards.

Laziness is not so lethal today, at least not in many places. But the wise know that even if “the desire of the sluggard” does not take his life, it takes almost everything else. It takes the joy of a good day’s sweat. It takes the peace of relationships carefully kept. It takes the reward of talents well stewarded. The sluggard may enjoy an easier existence — for a few days, or a few minutes. But then every part of life becomes more painful.

So, when sluggardly desires approach, in all their seeming loveliness, the wise anchor their desires somewhere sturdier than the short-term pleasures of sleep, food, or entertainment. They listen instead to the Lord Jesus; they consider the counsels of his Spirit and his promises of strength. Then, with a hearty, “Get behind me, sluggard!” they get up and do their work.

4. Hard work flows from the heart.

The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly. (Proverbs 26:16)

Till now, our weapons against the sluggard have been fashioned mainly from common sense —and understandably so, given that the sluggard is “a man lacking sense” (Proverbs 24:30). But now we come to the heart of the matter, which is the matter of the heart.

When Proverbs tells us that the sluggard is “[wise] in his own eyes,” it places godly labor within the realm of wisdom, a realm where God reigns as Lord. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Proverbs 9:10). Why does the sluggard sleep in and arrive late? Why is he dominated by distraction and procrastination? Ultimately, because he does not have the wisdom that flows from the fear of the Lord.

“Laziness reveals a lack of allegiance; sluggishness shows not just a body but a heart asleep.”

God does not occupy a significant place in the sluggard’s frame of reference — not nearly so significant a place as the cupboard and the couch. The wise, by contrast, remember that “a man’s ways are before the eyes of the Lord” (Proverbs 5:21), and they love to have it so. God fills their outlook as blue fills a cloudless sky; he is their beginning and their end, the alpha of their mornings and the omega of their evenings, the one in whom they live and move and labor. He is the God who, in Christ, sanctified our labors in human flesh and now fills us with his hardworking Spirit.

So, when the wise feel themselves drifting toward the sluggard, they know that hard work is far more than a matter of common sense and self-control. Laziness reveals a lack of allegiance; sluggishness shows not just a body but a heart asleep. And therefore, they take up the dagger that cuts a deeper wound in the sluggard’s heart: “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).

In Christ, whatever we do holds spiritual significance, from secret prayer to rising at our alarm, from fellowship to doubling down on our work. We live and labor before the eyes of our good Lord Jesus. His kingdom calls us. His Spirit fills us. His promises empower us. And his strength compels us to daily lay the sluggard to rest.

Because today is the 21st anniversary of 9/11, I would like to speak to you about the purposes of God in the pain of the world. We will turn to the Scriptures in a few minutes, but first, let’s put the world’s pain before us in some felt measure.

The first plane that hit the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, Flight 11, immediately killed the 92 people on board that flight. Flight 175, which hit the second tower a few minutes later, killed the 65 people on board. In the towers themselves, it appears now that 2,595 people perished when the towers fell, including those who worked there, visited there, and those who entered to save them.

Within an hour after the first attack, Flight 77 carried 59 people (plus five hijackers) into the side of the Pentagon. Inside the Pentagon, 125 people died, in addition to those 59. A couple of weeks ago, Noël and I drove over to the Pentagon Memorial. It is laid out with 184 benches, one for each of those who lost their lives — from the youngest, who was three years old, to the oldest, who was 71.

Flight 93, with 45 people aboard, turned around over Pennsylvania and was headed — where? The White House? Congress? Todd Beamer and others wrestled control from the hijackers, it seems, and the plane crashed with no survivors near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The total fatalities in these terrorist events were 2,986. But the numbers sound too calculating, too sterile, compared to the personal and national trauma of those days. More than three thousand children lost a parent that day. Around sixteen hundred people lost spouses.

And, of course, the calamities go on.

World of Sorrow

A million Americans have died of COVID-19 complications since March of 2020. As I speak, one-third of Pakistan is under water — thirty million people displaced, one thousand dead, ten billion dollars in damages. Sections of Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan all face famine-related starvation, affecting millions.

We could keep describing the unending calamities of the world as if they were extraordinary, but behind my message today lies the fact that 9/11 happens every thirty minutes, and it continues to happen every thirty minutes every day, every year, every decade, every century, without any letup.

Conservatively, six thousand people die every hour in the world, though it’s probably closer to seven thousand. That’s sixty-one million people a year. Of those, five million are under five years old. Cancer kills seven million people every year in the world, six hundred thousand of those in America. Cancer’s death toll is right behind heart disease, which kills seven hundred thousand a year in our country.

Breathe in, breathe out — and four people have died. That’s twelve thousand during this service. And hundreds of them are not “drifting off to sleep” in peace but writhing in pain. Calamities are not exceptional; they’re the more visible breaking of the surface of the ocean of sorrow. The question that I hope to answer from the Bible is, Why do we have a world like the one we have, which is so permeated by pain?

Is the Pain on Purpose?

The word why is ambiguous in English. It doesn’t distinguish between “why” — from what cause — and “why” — for what purpose. German has warum and wozu, but we don’t.

So what I mean with my question is this: Mainly I want to know what the Bible teaches about the purpose for such a world of pain. Causes are important, but they leave you hanging. What we want to know is not mainly, “How did we get here?” But mainly, “Is there a point?” A design? A purpose? A meaning?

Which, of course, you’d never ask if you didn’t believe in God — indeed, in a certain kind of God.

In 1995, I was fifteen years into my pastorate at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. We passed through the biggest crisis I’d ever faced in the ministry. Two staff were let go. Two hundred and thirty people left the church. We didn’t recover for over three years. To move forward we formed a group of twenty-three people, including three or four staff members, who met for a year and a half to pray and study: What happened? Is there a future? What will it be? What will it look like? Who are we?

During that time, they sent me away to a little monastery over in St. Paul’s, saying, “Go away, pray, listen to God, and bring us a vision statement for the church. We know you’re not God, and you’re not infallible, but you’re our leader. Go hear from God as best you can, and that will give us something to interact with.”

What I believe the Lord gave me was a vision statement for what was left of my own life, and I hoped it would become the vision statement of the church. It did: We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples, through Jesus Christ.

When we embraced that, we did not mean that we exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things except terrorist attacks, all things except pandemics, all things except famines, child mortality, cancer, heart disease, babies born with profound disabilities. We didn’t mean that. We meant all things — no exceptions. I come to you with that banner, flying over my life to this day. And because he is supreme, I want to know, from him, in his word: What’s going on? What’s the point of such a world with so much misery?

Answers in Complexity

Christians are complex people, people with complex emotional lives. Conforming to the whole counsel of God in Scripture makes people complex. It teaches that the world is a horrible place and a beautiful place — which, if we open our eyes, we would see. Fall is a beautiful season. If you walk outside right now, you would smile in the cool fall air amid natural glory. And in Pakistan, someone is weeping beside a tent in mud. This is a horrible world and a beautiful place.

It is naive to think that there are good times and bad times sequentially. No, there are good times always, and there are bad times always. They happen simultaneously, all the time. If you walk through the world with a heart ready to weep with those who weep, ready to rejoice with those who rejoice, you will be a complex and wonderful person.

So as we focus on our original question — Why is there a world like this, a conveyor belt of corpses? — we are aware that there is real beauty in this world. Real goodness. But if we could know — if God would show us — why there is so much evil and misery, then we would be able more fully to know him and thank him and trust him and love him and join him in his purposes for the world.

So our question is, Why a world of so much pain? In turning to the Scriptures, I want to start by giving two answers that the Bible says are wrong and then four answers that I think the Bible says are right. We are biting off just about the biggest problem in the world, so I don’t claim to weave every loose end together into a fabric of perfect understanding. What I hope to do is offer you true answers (even if they may raise other questions), answers that are really there in God’s word. Answers you can live by.

Wrong Answer #1: “God is not in control.”

Here’s my first wrong answer: “We live in a world of pain and misery because God is not in control.” The reason this world exists, with its calamities and conflicts and suffering and death, is because God is not in control. God has surrendered control to mindless natural forces, or demonic powers, or ultimate human self-determination, or some combination of them all.

In other words, God is looking down, and the world that he made is reeling out of his control, and there’s nothing he can do about it. (At least, not in the short run.) But that’s not a true answer. Millions of people opt for that answer. Biblically, it won’t hold.

All Atoms Obey Him

In Matthew 10:29 Jesus says, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” That’s a first-century way of looking at the most random and insignificant event in the world and claiming God governs it. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of those sparrows in the darkest forest of Papua New Guinea falls dead from the tree branch without God deciding that it happen.

Or consider Matthew 8:27, when the disciples confess with profound truthfulness: “Even winds and sea obey him.” Every time you hear of a hurricane, or a monsoon, or a tornado, or a tsunami the day after Christmas in 2004, when two hundred and forty thousand people die in one night (including whole churches), you have a choice. Either the winds and the waves obey him, or they don’t. If the wind and the waves of the sea do not obey Jesus in 2022, then Capitol Hill Baptist Church should shut its doors and stop playing religious games.

God saw that tsunami moving across the Indian Ocean, and he could have said, “Stop,” and right there, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, it would have stopped — just like Jesus did it on the Sea of Galilee. It is not a biblical answer to why two hundred and forty thousand people died that night, to say: “God can’t stop tsunamis.” He can. He does if he wills. And he didn’t. Why?

Or consider Proverbs 16:33: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” Here’s my paraphrase: “In Las Vegas, all the dice are thrown, but the numbers on the top are always decided by God.” It is not a biblical answer to the question why people win or lose in the folly of gambling, to say: “It’s random.” It’s not random. It’s God. As R. C. Sproul used to say, “There are no maverick molecules.”

He Decrees by Design

Or consider Lamentations 3:37, which refers to the sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, with all its horrors: “Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it?” In other words, the Bible teaches that God governs the world with all-embracing, all-pervading, meticulous providence. Nothing lies outside the rule of God. He is not whimsical or reckless or aimless. Whatever he permits or causes, he permits and causes by design — according to plan. As he says in Isaiah 46:9–10:

I am God, and there is no other;     I am God, and there is none like me,declaring the end from the beginning     and from ancient times things not yet done,saying, “My counsel shall stand,     and I will accomplish all my purpose.”

“God governs the world with meticulous providence. He is not whimsical or reckless or aimless.”

He does all he does to establish his purposes. When you are an infinitely wise, all-knowing God and an infinitely powerful God, to use the word permit is to say “permit by plan” or “permit by design,” because you know everything that leads up to what you permit and flows from what you permit.

And at any time, if you see something coming from what you permit that you regret, you can stop it or change it. The permission of an all-knowing, all-wise, all-governing God is always a permission that is owing to a purpose. So the answer that says, “God is not in control,” is a false answer. It is not what the Bible teaches.

Wrong Answer #2: “God is evil.”

The second false answer to the question of why there is a world with such pain, is: “God is evil.” There is a malevolent deity over the universe. That is not true. The Bible teaches, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Psalm 92 tells me as an old man what I should say to a young Capitol Hill Baptist congregation:

The righteous flourish like the palm tree     and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.They are planted in the house of the Lord;     they flourish in the courts of our God.They still bear fruit in old age;     they are ever full of sap and green,to declare that the Lord is upright;     he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him. (Psalm 92:12–15)

That’s God’s response and my response to this suggestion that God’s injustice explains the world. No: “The Lord is upright; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.” He never has the slightest dark inclination in his mind whatsoever. “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,” to paraphrase the hymn. The answer to why the world is the way it is, is not because God is evil.

So we turn now to four answers from the Bible, true answers. The answers go together, building into a biblical vision of why God does what he does, so I ask you to consider them as a whole. They’re weighty. Some of you may have never heard anything like this before in your life. Others have. So listen carefully, be like the Bereans in Acts 17:11, and test all things by Scripture, holding fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

True Answer #1: “God planned redemption.”

First, the reason this kind of world exists is because God planned a history of redemption before the world existed — a history of redemption. And then according to that plan, he permitted (by plan) that sin enter the world through our first parents Adam and Eve. The permission of sin was according to plan, and that plan was so that there could be a history of merciful redemption from sin.

Here is 2 Timothy 1:9: “[God] saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” God gave us grace “in Christ Jesus.” In other words, this is blood-bought grace — undeserved, ill-deserved, planned before the foundation of the world, through the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

In order to have a world in which that comes true, God planned to permit sin. So God ordained that there be sin. It is not sin to will that sin be. That’s a heavy statement. It is not sin for God to will that sin happen.

Here we are in the twenty-first century receiving, by faith, grace through Jesus Christ and his work on the cross because in eternity past — not just billions of years ago, but even before time existed, even before there was a universe — God gave grace to us in Christ. He willed that we have it in Christ. That’s the first reason why this world exists as it exists. God intended for lost sinners to taste the glory of his blood-bought grace in Christ.

True Answer #2: “God subjected creation to futility.”

Second, the reason this world of pain and misery exists is because God subjected the natural world to futility in hope. God put the natural world under a curse, so that the physical horrors of that curse would become a vivid picture — a parable, a drama — of the horrors of moral evil, or sin. In other words, natural evil — physical suffering — exists in the world as a signpost, a parable of the horrors of moral evil. Physical suffering exists to show how outrageous sin against God is.

It is worth asking, Why does God make physical suffering the consequence of moral evil? The essence of sin is not physical; it’s not the movement of muscles or the touching of flesh. The essence of sin is when Adam and Eve said to God in their hearts, “I don’t trust you anymore to provide the best life for us. I think I know the best life. I reject your kind of limiting love. I reject your wisdom. I reject you, and I vote for me. I will decide right and wrong.” That was the beginning, crude essence of sin, and it was not physical.

Rather, it was a moral blow to the face of God, and as such it merited thousands of years of horrible, physical misery in the world. Romans 8:18–21 says, “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope . . . ” So it wasn’t Adam or Satan who subjected the world to futility “in hope.” God is the one who designed hope in the sufferings of the world.

Then the passage continues by saying that God “subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” That’s what’s coming, and we say, “Hasten the day, O God.”

When Adam and Eve sinned morally, the world was touched physically. (See Genesis 3.) Why would that be? One reason is this: Sin by its very nature blinds us to the seriousness of sin. Sin does not see the infinite outrage of slapping infinite holiness in the face. Sin can’t feel that outrage. What can sin feel? It can feel hunger, cancer, lacerations, broken bones, disability, death. People don’t lie awake at night wrestling with the outrage of their indifference to God. But they do lie awake at night when their bodies are touched with pain — which is the siren, the trumpet, of the outrage of the evil of sin.

And don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that every pain in a person corresponds to a specific sin in that person. That’s not true. Remember how they asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus said, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:2–3). Physical suffering is a global trumpet blast of the outrage of sin against God.

Some of those who suffer most are the most godly people you know. Last Monday night at the Sing! Conference in Nashville, Joni Erickson Tada — who has been a paraplegic for fifty-five years and lives with almost unremitting pain — said, “I’m not going to cash in my IRA and retire and move to Florida to play pickleball. And you better not either! I’m going to squeeze every ounce out of this body for kingdom work.” Her suffering is not a punishment for her sin. Her sins are forgiven because of Jesus. Her suffering, and yours, is a God-appointed reminder of the seriousness of the moral outrage of sin.

True Answer #3: “Christ is more precious than anything we lose.”

Third, the reason this world of calamity and misery exists is so that today’s followers of Jesus would be able to experience and display the profound, God-honoring reality that Christ is more precious than everything we can lose in this world.

A world of suffering and loss exists so that you and I — by not murmuring or complaining or getting angry at God, but rather resting in him and trusting in him and treasuring him — can show the world that God is more precious than anything we could lose: “Your steadfast love is better than life” (Psalm 63:3). Or as Paul says it in Philippians 3:8, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”

The point of all loss in the lives of Christians is to show by our response that Christ is more precious than what is lost. You have two options every time you experience pain and loss: you can hate God, or you can hate sin. All pain and loss came into the world through sin, all intended to portray the horrors of sin, and few things glorify God more amazingly than when his people endure suffering and loss on the path of love without losing their joy in him.

My wife and I were married in December 1968. Already we were seeing the world through the eyes of God’s infinite worth and greatness and beauty in the midst of a world of carnage, as 58,000 of our contemporaries died in Vietnam. We chose for our wedding text Habakkuk 3:17–18:

Though the fig tree should not blossom,     nor fruit be on the vines,the produce of the olive fail,     and the fields yield no food,the flock be cut off from the fold     and there be no herd in the stalls,yet I will rejoice in the Lord;     I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

“Living through loss without grumbling sings out the greatness and beauty and worth of God.”

It has served us well. In the face of famine (of every kind), God is better. God is enough. Not that we have lived up to this standard as we ought. But oh, what a vision to keep before your eyes: “When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.” Living through loss without grumbling sings out the greatness and beauty and worth of God. That is another reason why loss and misery exist.

True Answer #4: “Christ was appointed to suffer and die.”

Finally, this world of pain and misery exists so that the greatest act of love in the history of the world could happen — that is, so that Christ could suffer and die. This is a reason for suffering and death that the world knows nothing about, that this world exists — with its pain, with its sorrow, with its death — to make it possible for Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to suffer and die. If a world like this didn’t exist, Jesus would have no place to suffer and die. If there were no suffering, Jesus couldn’t suffer. If there were no death, Jesus couldn’t die.

To put it another way, the reason there’s terror is so that Christ could be terrorized. The reason there is trouble is so that Christ could be troubled in Gethsemane. The reason there is pain is so that Christ could feel pain. The reason there is death is so that Christ could die.

“This world exists with its pain, sorrow, and death to make it possible for Jesus Christ to suffer and die.”

According to Revelation 13:8, there was a book before the creation of the world with the names of the redeemed, and that book was called “the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.” In the mind of God Christ was slain before the foundation of the world. This was the plan: the slaughter of the incarnate Son of God.

And what did it reveal? Romans 5:8: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God showed his love through the suffering and death of his Son. Do you believe that the love of God for you could have been shown more fully another way? God has not wasted the sufferings of this world. He planned it to fall on his Son.

Listen to this prayer in Acts 4:27–28: “Truly in this city [Jerusalem] there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan predestined to take place.” Herod, who mocked him; Pilate, who saved his political skin and sentenced him; the Gentile soldiers, who drove the nails; the Jewish mob, who shouted, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Those four sinful acts, this text says, God had predestined to take place.

Christ did not die by accident. This is not just a fluke of history, just a turning of Roman affairs, just mob violence. This had been planned since before the foundation of the world. This is central to the reason for all existence. The Son of God bore the suffering of the world in order to lift sin from all who would trust him and bring them into everlasting joy — exquisite joy in the new heavens and a new earth, glorifying God for his power and wisdom and grace and love. That’s the reason this kind of world exists.

Embrace the Suffering Savior

I’m inviting you to believe this, to be made strong in this. You know that tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, by the flick of God’s finger, half the buildings in this city could go down, and a hundred thousand people would be dead. And God would have done nobody any wrong.

Do you have a vision of God and sin and suffering and redemption that will be able to handle that calamity when it comes? That’s my question. But of course, that might be easier to handle than if one of your children died or if you had a child with a profound disability.

I am inviting you to embrace Jesus Christ as the one from whom, through whom, and to whom all things exist (1 Corinthians 8:6). He came to share this suffering. He came to bear this pain. He came to taste every test and every temptation that we have known. He came to take it to the cross and die in our place, so that by faith in him, we could have all our sins forgiven, have eternal life, and have an everlasting destiny on a new heavens and a new earth, where that curse will finally be lifted.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. (Revelation 21:4)

Andrew Walls (1928–2021) has been called the “most important person you don’t know.”1 He was a Scottish scholar with an Oxford pedigree who devoted much of his life to serving the African church and challenging the academic community to turn its attention to the remarkable growth of Christianity in the non-Western world.

The numbers are staggering. In the year 1900, some 82 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 1970, the number of Christians in the Global South had grown to more than 40 percent, reaching nearly 70 percent in 2020!2 Walls could feel the changes taking place around him while he was teaching church history in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, and he remained active in teaching World Christianity right up until his death at the age of 93.3

How could historians make sense of the explosive growth of Christianity in the Global South?

Missions Is Not the Bomb

One of the many trends Walls noticed was that the church was growing in the main through indigenous witness and local revivals. This was instructive for teaching church history and understanding Christian missions. He insisted that scholars needed to place a greater focus on the African, Asian, and Latin American church in situ rather than simply relegating their entire story to a summary chapter on the history of missions.4 He pleaded with scholars to start teaching “church history” and stop teaching “clan history.”5

At the same time, Walls stressed that “it is difficult to imagine that the change [the rapid growth of Christianity in the Global South] could have occurred without the missionary movement.”6 And then he captured the importance of Christian missions in one sentence: “Missions were not the bomb, but they were the detonator, and as a result Africa and Asia and Latin America have become important theaters of Christian activity, the representative Christianity of the twenty-first century.”7 Missions had triggered the explosive growth of Christianity in the Global South.

Indispensable Detonator

Christian missions as the “detonator” for the explosive growth of Christianity is an insightful metaphor. On the one hand, it tames our pride, reminding missionaries (especially those from the West) that they are part, not the whole, of the work that God is doing in the global church. The Lord of the harvest has poured out his Spirit on all flesh and is using people all over the world to spread the gospel. The work of Western missionaries is only part of the story.

On the other hand, the “detonator” imagery infuses the entire church with a sense of urgency: someone must ignite the Spirit-primed explosion that will set the world aflame with the love of God. As John Piper has taught us, we aim in missions “to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory.”8 Missions is essential for this task.

God has been working in powerful ways through the missionary efforts of his people for two thousand years. When the Spirit of God came blowing in, setting tongues on fire in Jerusalem in the early first century, he translated the message into the languages of the earth. The miracle at Pentecost made clear that the good news was for all people “from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). The Acts narrative shows that “word of God increased and multiplied” through missionaries and martyrs who could not remain quiet about the things they had “seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

In the world of late antiquity, the Christian faith spread along Roman roads to the West, and silk routes to the East. To borrow from the mission historian Stephen Neill, these early witnesses to the gospel were possessed with a “burning conviction” that “a great event had burst upon them in creative power.”9 During the medieval period, contrary to popular imagination, the flame continued to spread through missionaries who followed Paul’s counsel to remain single so that they could offer their lives “with undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35). Missionary monks gave up homes and families to carry the gospel to the “ends of the earth.” 10 During the Age of Discovery, following the European Reformations, Catholic and Protestant missionaries boarded ships, leaving kith and kin, bound for Africa, Asia, and the New World, inflamed by the love of Christ for the salvation of the world.

The evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created an unprecedented wave of missionary fervor, and helped usher in the new era of world Christianity in our own day.

Igniting Transformation in the Dark

By the year 1900, there were some 62,000 cross-cultural missionaries, increasing to 240,000 by 1970, and some 420,000 by century’s end! 11 Most were young, more than half were women, and many left prestigious schools like the University of Cambridge to lay down their lives for the gospel.12

“Missions is the means God has chosen for igniting transformation in the dark corners of the world.”

Academic presses are now churning out research showing direct causation between missionary fervor and the new era of world Christianity. As it turns out, Barbara Kingsolver’s missionary caricature of a failed Southern Baptist missionary in the Congo is misleading. To quote Philip Jenkins, “The runaway success of Christian missions to Africa and Asia are all the more striking in view of the extraordinarily poor image that such activities possess in Western popular thought.”13 Missionaries set off an explosion that has changed the course of human history.14

The rapid growth of Christianity is cause for celebration, but not complacency. About 40 percent of the world’s population, or approximately 3.5 billion souls, remain culturally cut off from the gospel. The vast majority of these unreached people groups do not know a Christian, do not have access to the Scriptures in their own language, and do not live in proximity to a local church. Missions is the means God has chosen for igniting transformation in the dark corners of the world.15

Can Local Pastors Change the World?

I know from personal experience that one of the great perils of pastoral life is that we become so preoccupied with important matters in our local churches that we can fail to see the urgent needs in the world. It is instructive that the word parochialism, meaning “narrow-minded,” is derived from the Anglo-French word parish. Pastors can become so involved in their local parish that they become parochial parsons. It is easy to do. It can happen to any of us. If you are a pastor or a Christian leader, bringing change to the world may need to begin with you.

“We become so preoccupied our local churches that we can fail to see the urgent needs in the world.”

How might pastors help fan the flame of missions today? Take up and read in order to learn about the work God is doing in the world and the work that remains unfinished. These developments are not happening in a corner. Go and see the church at work in the world — and go to learn. Like Peter in Acts 10, eat and drink with your brothers and sisters and let God change you by your encounter with people in other lands. Encourage people you know to go on short-term trips, and use the help of experienced guides. Don’t just send your people to go paint the orphanage.16 Challenge your people to give to ignite change through giving to worthy causes, such as sending a missionary, translating the gospel into a local language, planting an indigenous church, or equipping underserved pastors, evangelists, and missionaries who have ready access to unreached people groups. Finally, send missionaries out, laying hands on no person quickly (1 Timothy 5:22). Combine zeal with knowledge (Proverbs 19:2).

Don’t waste your influence. Don’t let your people waste their lives. Fan the flame that is in you, and help start a blazing fire somewhere in the world.