50 Missionary Maxims

1: – "The gospel is good news only if it gets there in time!"

2: – "We talk of the Second Coming, but half the world has never even heard of the first!" -- Oswald J. Smith

3: – "If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him." -- C.T. Studd

4: – "The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed!" -- Hudson Taylor

5: – "I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light." -- John Keith Falconer

6: – "It is as necessary for people to hear the gospel as it was for Jesus to die."

7: – "This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth!" -- Keith Green

8: – "The mark of greatness in a church is not how many it seats but how many it sends!"

9: –"If God calls you to be a missionary, don't stoop to be a king!" -- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

10: – Is it fair that some people should hear the gospel twice before everyone has heard it once?

11: – "In the vast plain to the north I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been." -- Robert Moffat, missionary to Africa (villages like these still exist today!)

12: – "God uses men (and women) who are weak and feeble enough to lean on him." -- Hudson Taylor

13: – "While vast continents still lie shrouded in darkness ... the burden of proof rests on you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by Him to keep you off the foreign field." -- Keith Falconer

14: – "Sympathy is no substitute for action." -- David Livingstone

15: – "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God" -- William Carey

16: – "The supreme task of the church is the evangelization of the world." -- Oswald J Smith

17: – "If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honour, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?" -- David Livingstone

18: – "Believers who have the gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story." -- K.P. Yohannan, founder of Gospel for Asia

19: – "I believe that in each generation God has called enough men and women to evangelize all the yet unreached tribes of the earth. It is not God who does not call. It is man who will not respond!" -- Isobel Kuhn, missionary to China and Thailand

20: – "People who don't believe in missions have not read the New Testament. Right from the beginning Jesus said the field is the world." -- J. Howard Edington

21: – "Let my heart be broken with the things that break God's heart" -- Bob Pierce

22: – "If God's love is for anybody anywhere, then it's for everybody everywhere." -- Edward Lawlor

23: – "If you take missions out of the Bible, you won't have anything left but the covers" -- Nina Gunter

24: – Don't say, No! when God says, Go!

25: – "Our God of Grace often gives us a second chance, but there is no second chance to harvest a ripe crop." -- Kurt von Schleicher

26: – "The reason some folks don't believe in missions is that the brand of religion they have isn't worth propagating." -- unknown

27: – "Christ wants not nibblers of the possible, but grabbers of the impossible." -- C.T. Studd

28: – "If the Great Commission is true, then our plans are not too big; they are too small."

29: – Is Christ’s final command our first concern? (Check out: Matt 28.18-20; Mark 16.15; Luke 24.47; John 20.21, Acts 1.8) 

30: – "Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love" -- Roland Allen

31: – "God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply" -- Hudson Taylor

32: – "Missions is not the 'ministry of choice' for a few hyperactive Christians in the church. Missions is the purpose of the church." -- Unknown

33: – "The church’s goal has not been reached -- until

the unreached have been reached! "

34: – "Any church that is not seriously involved in helping fulfill the Great Commission has forfeited its biblical right to exist." -- Oswald J. Smith

35: – "Missions; not an option, but an absolute."

36: – "We are debtors to every man to give him the gospel in the same measure in which we have received it" -- P.F. Bresee

37: – "Only as the church fulfills her missionary obligation does she justify her existence." -- Unknown

38: – "God had only one Son and He made that Son a missionary." -- David Livingstone

39: – "God isn't looking for people of great faith, but for individuals ready to follow Him" -- Hudson Taylor

40: – "Lost people matter to God, and so they must matter to us." -- Keith Wright

41: – "All the world; every creature; every nation; to the uttermost parts of the earth; to the regions beyond; where Christ has not been named"

42: – " The mission of the church is missions" -- Oswald J. Smith

43: – "He was not willing that any should perish"

44: – If we found a cure for cancer, would we not tell others about it? Why then do we not tell others about the cure for sin and death?

45: – "Millions dying there have never heard—and millions there have never cared!"

46: – "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose" -- Jim Elliot, missionary to the Auca Indians

47: – "You can give without loving. But you cannot love without giving." -- Amy Carmichael, missionary to India

48: – "The Bible is not the basis of missions; missions is the basis of the Bible" -- Ralph Winter

49: – "'Not called!' did you say?
'Not heard the call,' I think you should say.
Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face -- whose mercy you have professed to obey -- and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world. " -- William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army

50: – "Is Christ’s final command our first concern?"