I am not sure what you put in your pocket when you go on a trip, but have you ever thought of putting a promise in there? A few years ago, Jack Mitchell, coordinator of GFA’ s medical missions efforts, and I were chatting about his trips. Even in the height of COVID when so many missionaries were locked down or locked out, Dr. Jack continued to lead medical missions teams around the world. As we were talking, he made the offhand comment that when he goes on these trips, he tucks in his pocket God’s promise of His presence. His picturesque way of putting it captured for me what we as believers are to do with God’s words: we are to pocket them, knowing that we can bank on them and experience their reality.
As I read missionary biographies, I get the distinct impression that no biblical promise has encouraged missionaries more than Christ’s promise of His presence as He articulated it to His disciples on an unnamed mountain in Galilee: “and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20b). Let me cite a few examples:
Hudson Taylor’s visits to and ministry in China spanned the course of 51 years, but he arrived in China for the first time in March 1854, single and two months shy of his 22nd birthday. Hindered by stormy weather from disembarking from the ship that had brought him to China, he wrote the following:
“What peculiar feelings arise at the prospect of soon landing in an unknown country, in the midst of strangers—a country now to be my home and sphere of labour. ‘Lo, I am with you alway.’ ‘I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.’ Sweet promises! I have nothing to fear, with Jesus on my side.”1 Without Jesus, Taylor had everything to fear; with Him, nothing!
O new missionary, rely on Christ’s promise of His presence to tame the feeling of fear that will well up within you from time to time!
What kept missionary explorer David Livingstone going during decades of travel in Africa’s formidable interior? Livingstone was awarded an honorary doctorate in absentia from the University of Glascow in 1845, and in 1858 he addressed the student body, answering this very question:
“Would you like me to tell you what supported me through all the years of exile among people whose language I could not understand, and whose attitude towards me was always uncertain and often hostile? It was this: ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world!’ On those words I staked everything, and they never failed!’”2
Two years previously, in his diary, Livingstone refers to this same promise of Christ as the “word of a gentleman of the most strict and sacred honour.”3 Christ’s presence kept Livingstone going all those years!
Livingstone’s death in 1873 was the major impetus behind Mary Slessor giving her life for missions in Africa. Although she could not read until the age of 14, she became an avid Bible reader. The pages of her Bibles are filled with her personal annotations, written in every direction and everywhere on the page. In the Dreisbach Library, housed at the GFA home office, we have a framed copy of the page of her Bible that has on it Matthew 28:20. Next to Christ’s words promising His presence to His disciples, she has written these words:
“Set to my seal that this is true.”
Mary goes down as yet another witness from the annals of missions history that Christ stays with His servants as they labor for Him on the front lines.
Perhaps no missionary survived more direct attempts on his life than John G. Paton. In addition, sickness took away his wife and their newborn infant less than four months after his arrival on the island of Tanna. Though stunned, lonely, and sorrowful, he later wrote:
“But for Jesus, and the fellowship he vouchsafed to me there, I must have gone mad and died beside the lonely grave!”4
On another occasion, Paton was being chased by cannibals. He was forced to hide for his life in a tree while dozens of angry, warring natives hunted for him below. But there in that tree, Paton experienced the presence of Christ to an unusual degree:
“The hours I spent there live all before me as if it were but of yesterday. I heard the frequent discharging of muskets, and the yells of the Savages. Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe as in the arms of Jesus. Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among those chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy His consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then?”5
As disparate as are the details in the examples of above, they all share something in common: each experienced Christ’s presence because each went. In essence, this proves that they pocketed His promise.
They went!
They believed His promise enough and trusted Him enough to go. They were doers, not just hearers of the promise. What will be the evidence that you or I have pocketed Christ’s promise?
If we go!
Do you want to experience the presence of Christ? Pocket His promise and join the wonderful endeavor of making disciples of Jesus in every nation.
1 Hudson Taylor in Early Years: The Growth of a Soul by Dr. & Mrs. Howard Taylor, p. 201.
2 A Bunch of Everlastings by F. W. Boreham, p. 119.
3 The Personal Life of David Livingstone by William Blaikie, p. 181.
4 John G. Paton: Missionary to the New Hebrides (Banner of Truth 1994 reprint edition), p. 80.