Jesus didn’t die for men and women who might be saved. He died for men and women who will be saved. Right now, as you are reading these words, there are men and women — from your neighborhood to the nations — who have been purchased by the blood of Jesus. They may be hostile to the gospel, believe in a false god, or be spiritually seeking, but in the years to come, God will send beautiful feet to herald the good news of the gospel to them. They will be transferred from “the domain of darkness . . . to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13).

God will do this, and he is inviting you and your church to participate in his plan. It’s like a cosmic take-your-kid-to-work day. Right now, at this very moment, there are persons and people groups who have no idea of the majesty of King Jesus but who, by the grace of God, will come to know and love him and spend eternity with us because of our obedience to “go into all the world” (Mark 16:15).

But how can pastors faithfully motivate our congregations to obey the call to go?

God’s Big Story

A thread runs through the Scriptures that you can’t unsee once you see it. To pull that thread in your preaching, teaching, and discipleship grows an awe for God, a love for the lost, and a zeal for the nations.

The thread starts at the beginning. God commands Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28). The whole earth would be his, and we would be his viceroys. We would bring light and order to the world. But then Satan tries to cut the thread and steal the whole world for himself (Genesis 3). As sin enters the cosmos, it fractures everything; the universe is thrown into decay and subjected to futility. But God won’t finally relinquish a square inch of his creation to the enemy, so he sets into motion his plan to fill the earth with his glory. That plan includes all nations and peoples (Genesis 12:3).

God’s plan was always multiethnic, transcultural, and multilingual. He makes that purpose clear in the Abrahamic covenant, and we see it woven through the entirety of Scripture, culminating in the beautiful picture of men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation worshiping before the throne in a remade heaven and earth (Revelation 5:9–10; 21:24–26).

Throughout the Old Testament, we repeatedly see God’s heart for the nations. When Israel went up out of Egypt, “a mixed multitude also went up with them” (Exodus 12:38). Rahab, a Canaanite woman, became part of the people of Israel (Joshua 6:25). Ruth, a Moabitess, became Boaz’s husband, making King David the descendent of a foreign woman (Ruth 4:18–22). Examples abound of non-Israelites joining the people of God. Salvation would come through Israel, but it was never meant to terminate with Israel.

Jesus, God incarnate, reveals this plan more fully. He ministered to non-Israelites like the centurion (Matthew 8:5) and the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:26–30). He explained that he had “other sheep” not of the fold of Israel that he would save (John 10:16). And before he returned to heaven, he sent his disciples to be his “witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

The storyline of God’s salvation is woven together with the nations. The command to go into all the world is God simply continuing his mission to gather his sons and daughters from afar.

Mobilizing Witnesses

So what is it that mobilizes people to join God in his mission? I’ve been the lead pastor of our church now for 21 years. We have sent a lot of people to the nations. I’ve discovered that building a sending church starts with faithfully preaching and teaching God’s story of redemption.

Tell the story.

In our preaching and teaching, we emphasize God’s big story as often as possible. When preaching through a book of the Bible, we try to help people understand its place and role in the Story.

We do the same in our discipleship. We have three core classes at our church: Christian Belief, Christian Story, and Christian Practice. Although Christian Story is the class that emphasizes the whole story, each one has the whole Bible as its framework, which roots hearers in a story bigger than themselves. This emphasis has come up repeatedly as we’ve talked to men and women from our church who have moved toward the nations.

Train toward the nations.

When mobilizing a church toward the nations, nomenclature matters. “Neighborhoods to nations” has become the phrase that helps our church understand what our hope is. Men and women who don’t know how to evangelize (or won’t evangelize) in their own neighborhoods will never consider the costly price of heading to a different place and culture. Those who have experienced the extravagant grace of God in being the conduit through which the gospel flows tend to be those who move toward the greatest need. We have made it a repeated priority to invite men and women to experience that grace through outreach training.

In outreach training, we don’t just train; we go out and do. Men and women learn tools and tactics. Then they head out to popular hangout places to pray with people, invite them to study the Bible, share the gospel, and build relationships. One recent outreach led to 134 people engaged spiritually, 87 who received prayer, 18 who heard the gospel, and one who said yes to Jesus. Each year, the people who engage in this training grow in courage, zeal, and belief that the arm of the Lord is not too short to save. Their zeal in worship, hatred for sin, and belief in the mission of God exponentially grow.

Aim young.

If you don’t know where to begin, I want to encourage you to aim young. This practice has produced some of the most fruit for us over the years. We want to educate, inform, and inspire the next generation and young families toward the opportunities that are ripe among the underreached and unreached. Our Vacation Bible School has almost always had a world focus. Each year, kids hear from missionaries, raise money for global projects, and pray for the work among our 100 Unreached People Group (UPG) cooperative (see more below).

We highlight this emphasis throughout the year in our children and youth programs as well. It is not uncommon for our missionaries to teach, explain, tell stories, and answer questions in our elementary program. As kids move into our middle-school and high-school departments, they can participate in short-term trips that grow in intensity and distance. This past year, a large group of high schoolers went to a closed country with a key partner and put on a sports camp among the predominantly Muslim population. They laughed with, played with, prayed with, and ministered among one of the world’s most unreached peoples. The energy and excitement it created among those students continue to encourage and embolden both them and their families.

We also send whole families on short-term trips. They get to go and see together how God can use their whole family as a means of grace to those who are far from him. Over the past two decades, we have discovered that young families with kids often have far more success meeting people and connecting with other cultures. No matter where you are in the world, everyone speaks the language of kids. I’m not taking away from the stunning global work singles and older saints do. But most of the cultures in the 10/40 window are high hospitality cultures, and kids get you in the door more quickly.

Build together.

About a decade ago, we shifted our mindset from being a church with missionaries to being a sending church. We still utilize key partners, but as a sending church we want to own a clear process that moves people from the neighborhood to the nations. After some significant prayer and consideration, we wanted to focus on the underreached and unreached in the world. Together with ten other churches and organizations, we started the 100 UPG cooperative. We are hoping, praying, resourcing, and believing that over the next couple of decades, God might use us to see one hundred unreached people groups have a gospel presence established.

That goal is way too big for one local church, but by prayerfully joining with other churches, we believe we have a real shot. Each church has established local pathways (neighborhoods) that begin that training at home. From there, they move to one of three hub locations around the world and join a team already at work before moving to the desired final location.

Pray and Preach

None of this happens without prayer. As we teach God’s big story, train in evangelism, aim young, form key partnerships, and dream big, we are praying for specific places, people, and opportunities to get the right people to the right place with the right training.

It doesn’t start overnight, either. If you want to build a sending church that aims to reach the nations, start by consistently preaching on the nations and the unreached. There is no substitute for the preacher who has the nations in his bones. Fan into flame your belief that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1).

Somewhere near the beginning of my Christian life, I started associating sleeplessness with godliness. And for understandable reasons.

The sluggard of Proverbs has long lived as a vivid character in my imagination — that buffoon who flops on his bed “as a door turns on its hinges” (Proverbs 26:14), who answers his mother’s fourth knock with a mumble: “A little sleep, a little slumber . . .” (Proverbs 6:10). Then, positively, I read of psalmists who prayed at midnight and woke before dawn (Psalm 119:62, 147) — and of a Savior who rose “very early” (Mark 1:35) and sometimes passed the night without a wink (Luke 6:12).

Stories from church history also cast a shadow over my bed. I read with wonder how Hudson Taylor sometimes rose at 2:00am to read and pray until 4:00am (Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, 243). George Whitefield, too, was known to begin his day well before dawn, sometimes finishing both his devotions and his first sermon by 6:00am (George Whitefield: God’s Anointed Servant, 196). And didn’t the Puritans get just a few hours of sleep a night? The post-Puritan William Law seemed to capture the spirit of the godliest saints when he spoke of “renouncing sleep” to redeem the time (When I Don’t Desire God, 160).

Under such influences, I tried many times to carve off minutes and sometimes hours from my nightly routine, attempting to find the smallest amount of sleep I could get without losing essential functions. I greeted many midnights and dark mornings. I experimented with elaborate alarm clocks. I traded my pillow for cups of coffee.

And all the while, I did not always take seriously all that God says about sleep. I did not realize that “sometimes,” as D.A. Carson puts it, “the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night’s sleep” (Scandalous, 147).

Sleeping Saints

For all the biblical passages that hallow sleeplessness, perhaps just as many sanctify sleep. In Proverbs, the same father who warns his son about the dangers of “a little sleep” also assures him that wisdom gives good rest (Proverbs 3:24). Alongside the psalmists who praise God at midnight are others who praise him in the morning after a sound night of slumber (Psalm 3:5).

And in the Gospels, one of the more remarkable images of our Savior is of him in a storm-tossed, wave-battered boat, “asleep on the cushion” (Mark 4:37–38). He could stay up all night when needed, but he was not above taking a nap the next day.

“For those prone to productive self-reliance, the bed is a desk in God’s school of humility.”

Perhaps the most striking endorsement of sleep, however, comes from the simple fact that God made us this way. Scripture gives no indication that our need for nightly rest began in Genesis 3. And in fact, before the fruit was taken from the tree, before the weariness of sin weighed down the world, Adam slept (Genesis 2:21). Sleep, it seems, is no fallen necessity, nor merely a fleshly temptation, but a divine gift. Both then and now, God “gives to his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2).

And therefore, though occasions come when we must renounce sleep for the sake of something greater, Scripture gives us a more positive default posture: in Christ, God teaches us to redeem sleep. He brings our beds back to Eden, where we learn to receive sleep as healer, teacher, giver, and servant.

Sleep as Healer

On nights when sleep seems like a great interruption, like an eight-hour paralysis on our plans, we may find help from imagining our beds as a balm for mind, body, and soul. For by God’s design, sleep halts us to heal us.

Until recently, sleep’s God-given powers of healing were a matter more of intuition than of empirical reality. But sleep scientists can now write volumes about the benefits of adequate rest for the brain and the body. Matthew Walker, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, goes so far as to say, “Sleep is the universal health care provider: whatever the physical or mental ailment, sleep has a prescription it can dispense” (Why We Sleep, 108). While we lie unconscious, sleep solidifies our memories and nourishes our creativity; it boosts our energy and staves off sickness.

Which also means that sleep plays a modest but notable role in our spiritual health. As exercise can keep our bodies fit for service, and as nutrition can energize us for good works, so a healthy pattern of sleep can assist our love for God and neighbor — keeping us awake and alert for meditation and prayer, readying us to spend and be spent for others. More than that, good rest also guards us from sins that our sleep-deprived selves might indulge more easily: irritability and impatience, bitterness and lust, cynicism and grumbling.

When the miserable Elijah asked God to take his life, God’s remedy for the prophet’s despondency was first sleep, then food, then more sleep — and then finally words (1 Kings 19:4–6). John Piper, having learned Elijah’s lesson, mentions how he becomes “emotionally less resilient” on little sleep. Therefore, he writes, “For me, adequate sleep is not just a matter of staying healthy. It’s a matter of staying in the ministry — I’m tempted to say it’s a matter of persevering as a Christian” (When I Don’t Desire God, 205).

Nightly, the God who knit these brains and bodies stands beside our beds, ready to retie the day’s loose ends, patch our holes, and wake us up repaired, freshly ready to hear and respond to his words of life.

Sleep as Teacher

As sleep heals, it also teaches. And in a world preoccupied with productivity, sleep teaches lessons we might scarcely learn elsewhere: God, not we, upholds our life (Psalm 121:3–4); his initiative and action, not ours, decisively builds our homes and watches over our cities (Psalm 127:1–2). For those prone to productive self-reliance, the bed is a desk in God’s school of humility.

Like Israel’s weekly Sabbath, nighttime bids us to lay down our to-do lists and cease our striving, reminding us that God can keep our lives running while we lie unproductive. And like Israel’s Sabbath, the lesson is hard learned and easily forgotten. Many of us receive God’s rest reluctantly, even unwillingly, like people searching for manna on the seventh day (Exodus 16:27). Yet the teacher sleep returns again, each night repeating its lesson.

As if to reinforce the point, God tells us stories where he works wonders during our deepest slumber. In Eden, Adam falls asleep a bachelor and wakes to find a bride (Genesis 2:21–23). Later, a similar “deep sleep” falls on Abram, and in the darkness, God makes great and solemn promises, and seals his gracious covenant (Genesis 15:12–21). And then still later, as the disciples’ heavy lids close on their Savior’s anguish, Jesus wrestles and prays and wins the victory in Gethsemane alone (Mark 14:40–42).

To be sure, we ought not presume that God will fix our shoddy work while we sleep. In all likelihood, the weeds the sluggard should have pulled today will still be there tomorrow, a little taller for his negligence. But for those who are tempted to eat “the bread of anxious toil” (Psalm 127:2), these images of God’s tireless care, his sleepless provision, powerfully remind us that he can do far more in our sleeping than we can do in our waking.

Sleep as Giver

Of course, we may acknowledge sleep as healer and teacher yet still find ourselves lying down begrudgingly. Medicine and lessons may be necessary, but necessity rarely makes patients and pupils rejoice. Scripture, however, speaks of sleep not only as needed, but also, for God’s people, as “sweet” (Proverbs 3:24; Jeremiah 31:26).

Like food, sleep falls among those good gifts “to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth” (1 Timothy 4:3); it is one part of the “everything” that God “richly provides” for our enjoyment (1 Timothy 6:17). And therefore, we sleep Christianly when we not only humble ourselves to get the sleep we need, but also when, as Adrian Reynolds puts it, we “wake up after a good night, stretch and cry out, ‘Thank you, Lord, for the good gift of sleep’” (And So to Bed, 38). Sleep is a generous gift from a generous God.

Beyond bodily refreshment, however, God invites us to experience sleep as gift on a far deeper level. We catch a glimpse in Psalm 31:5, a common bedtime prayer in Jesus’s day: “Into your hand I commit my spirit.” At night, God gives us the privilege of giving to him our very selves, including all the cares that feel so vexing and troubling, so discouraging and distracting. There at our bedside he takes them — takes us — and safely keeps us while we sleep. And there is no sweeter place to sleep than in the sovereign hands of God.

“God can do far more in our sleeping than we can do in our waking.”

Jesus, who would pray Psalm 31:5 before his great and final sleep, enjoyed this gift every day during his three decades on earth. How else could he sleep through the storm? How else could he rest while surrounded by so much need, while threatened by so many foes? Only because he nightly handed his spirit into his Father’s care, and received from his Father a peace that surpassed the biggest troubles of today and tomorrow.

Sleep as Servant

Sleep as healer, sleep as teacher, sleep as giver — these three give us abundant reason to actively seek a good night’s rest. In light of them, many of us may need to acknowledge how much sleep we really need and to consider some basic tips for falling asleep and staying asleep, especially in our caffeinated, sedentary, digital world.

But the aim of Christian sleep goes further still. As followers of the Savior who sacrificed his sleep for us, we do not pursue a good night’s rest at all costs. We do not take this healer, teacher, giver and set it up also as master. Rather, we receive sleep with a soul that stands ready, at all times, to forsake sleep when love calls.

Perhaps a friend in need asks for a late-night phone call, or a small-group member needs an early-morning ride to the airport. Perhaps a child cries from down the hall, or a spouse just needs to talk. Perhaps hospitality ran late, or some crucial decision requires a midnight consultation with our Lord. Either way, in the face of such needs, we kindly thank sleep for its services and then dismiss it as the servant God made it to be.

When we leave our beds to walk in love, we do not leave our God. His help is stronger than sleep’s healing, his wisdom deeper than sleep’s teaching, his generosity greater than sleep’s giving. He can sustain us in our sleeplessness and, in his good time, give again to his beloved sleep.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. (John 1:1–2)

Bible readers young and old have wondered why John begins his Gospel referring to Jesus as “the Word” that became flesh (John 1:1, 14). The Greek term for “word,” logos, is common enough in Greek. It appears over three hundred times in the New Testament, with different meanings in different contexts. But when understood in relation to Christ, the word has been furiously debated.

Yet Christ being the Logos is cause for more than debate; it is cause for worship. As Christians, we insist upon certain truths concerning Jesus as the Word to better appreciate the beauty of his person and work.

Divine Identity

John may have used logos in connection with the common Aramaic language he used himself. The Aramaic Targums (loose translations and expansions of the Old Testament scriptures) often refer to the “word [memra] of the Lord.” Hence, “Israel is saved by the Memra of the Lord with an everlasting salvation” (Isaiah 45:17).

Moreover, the standard Hebrew of Hosea 1:7, “I will save them by the Lord their God,” is paraphrased in the Aramaic Targum as, “I will redeem them by the word of the Lord their God.” So the “the Word” is a way of saying the Hebrew name of God (YHWH), such as in Numbers 7:89, where the Palestinian Targums say, “From there [between the cherubim] the Word spoke to him [Moses].” God spoke to Moses, but specifically the Logos spoke to Moses.

“Referring to Christ as ‘the Word’ is a virtual assertion of his divinity.”

Referring to Christ as “the Word,” then, is a virtual assertion of his divinity because of how the Aramaic Targums make use of this title. We rightly take the immediate context of John 1 as evidence for the preexistence of Christ, yet we must also see John’s designation of Christ as “the Word” as evidence for the deity of Christ, since Aramaic-speaking Jews would have understood the terminology as such in their first-century context.

Divine Self-Expression

In addition, logos often designates a word or the act of speaking (Acts 7:22). More specifically, logos can have in view God’s revelation, his divine self-expression (Mark 7:13).

The personification of God’s words to humanity are principally and majestically summed up in Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh (John 1:14). The Word is with God, the Word is God, and the Word became human, revealing (unlike any other) the glory of God (John 1:1–2, 18). All things were created through the uncreated Word (John 1:3) for the Word (Colossians 1:16).

Jesus, as the Word, is the Word of life (John 1:4); he gives light to the world and overcomes the darkness. But shockingly, the Word who has life in himself (John 5:26) experiences death on the cross. Through both his death and his resurrection from the dead, “He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God” (Revelation 19:13). Jesus as the Logos is not just the divine Son but the creating, saving divine Son, who reveals God and his purposes.

Logos and Creation

We are missing out on the glory of this title of Christ if we fail to go back to the beginning — an oversight John is careful to avoid, taking us back to the very beginning in his prologue. The distinction in Genesis 1 between God and his creation is clear. Moreover, the Logos is not only the Creator of all things, but the sustainer of all things as well (Hebrews 1:3). The Bible knows nothing of a God who creates and does not also at the same time powerfully sustain his creation by his providential control over all things.

God’s outward works follow a basic pattern: they are from the Father, through the Logos (Son), in the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 8:6). Genesis 1 also makes clear that God is a speaking God (“And God said . . .”). The psalmist tells us, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6). When God creates, he also reveals, which is why the Son is properly called the Word of God. God does not speak to the creation unless through the Logos.

All truth comes from the Logos, for he is the sacred repository of all truth. The Logos provides the basis for God’s revelation to be communicated to humanity. Quite apart from his role as the Mediator in salvation, he is also the Mediator of all revelation, whether in creation or Scripture. The Logos creates, sustains, and speaks, communicating to all creatures some resemblance of God. He is God’s most powerful self-expression, which is precisely why John personifies the Word in order to highlight God’s ultimate self-disclosure. Apart from the Logos, we could know nothing of God.

Logos and Redemption

The Puritan Stephen Charnock speaks of the Logos as the one who makes continued declarations of God to humanity:

As the beautiful image of reason in the mind, breaking out with the discovery of itself in speech and words, is fittest to express the inward sense, thoughts, conceptions, nature, and posture of the mind, so the essential Word of God clothes himself with flesh, comes out from God to manifest to us the nature and thoughts of God. He which is the word of God is fittest to manifest the nature of God. (Works of Stephen Charnock, 4:132)

“God’s best declaration, his best words to humanity, come (fittingly) through the Logos.”

The Logos has the perfect ability to declare the revelation of God, for his “great end” is to reveal God (Matthew 11:25; John 1:18), whether to angels or men. Indeed, Charnock writes, even for the angels, when they looked upon Christ crucified, stricken by the Father, buried in the tomb, raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven to be enthroned forever as King of kings and Lord of lords, “they learned more of God and his nature, more of the depths of his wisdom, treasures of his grace, and power of his wrath, then they had done by all God’s actions in the world . . . in all those four thousand years wherein they had remained in being.”

In the Logos, all of God’s attributes are manifested and glorified. Natural theology offers sinful man a dim knowledge of God, but because of the Logos, the attributes of God “sparkle” since they have redemption in view. “Christ is the stage,” says Charnock, “wherein all the attributes of God act their parts.” God’s best declaration, his best words to humanity, come (fittingly) through the Logos.

In sum, by calling the Son the Logos, John is offering us a glimpse into not just the nature of Jesus (the divine revealer of God), but also the purpose of Jesus: he is the revealer of redemption, which ultimately comes not only through words but through actions. As the one who conquered death, he is the Logos of God, the only one in whom there is redemption. And this one in whom we have redemption — the Logos — is Yahweh himself.