Conclusion: The Commission Has Not Been Revoked

You have now spent time with ten lives that, taken together, constitute an argument against comfortable Christianity so powerful that it is difficult to answer. William Carey gave forty-one years to India and never came home. David Livingstone gave his heart to Africa — literally, in the soil of Zambia where his servants buried it. Catherine Booth took the gospel to the gin palaces and the slums of Victorian London while raising eight children. D.L. Moody preached to a hundred million people from a standing start as a shoe salesman with no theological degree.

Pandita Ramabai gave up the greatest academic honor India had bestowed on a woman, and spent the next four decades rescuing India’s most despised and translating the Bible into their language. C.T. Studd gave away twenty-nine thousand pounds and went to three continents. John Stott gave away his royalties, lived in a bedsit, and equipped the Global South church for a century. Helen Roseveare went back to the people who had violated her. Jim Elliot died on a Ecuadorian beach at twenty-eight having given everything he had. Elisabeth Elliot went to live with her husband’s killers and watched God convert them.

What do you do with lives like these? The same thing you do with the Great Commission that produced them: you take it seriously. Not as an interesting historical document, not as a mandate for professional clergy, not as a source of inspiring stories for occasional reading — but as a living command issued by a risen Lord to every person who calls themselves His disciple, in every generation, until the last one. The commission has not been revoked. The harvest is still plentiful. The workers are still few. The ends of the earth are still not reached.

And the promise that accompanied the commission has not been modified or diminished. The same Christ who sent these ten men and women is the Christ who sends you — and the same promise that sustained them sustains every person who takes His commission seriously: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20, NIV). Always. To the very end. Not “until the work gets difficult,” not “until the culture becomes hostile,” not “until your health fails or your resources run out.” Always. Carey proved it over forty-one years in India. Roseveare proved it in a Congolese captivity. Livingstone proved it on his knees in a mud hut in Zambia. The promise has a track record.

Perhaps you are reading this book as someone who is already sent — a missionary, an evangelist, a Bible teacher working in a place that costs you something real every day. If so, these ten lives are your company, and their testimony is your encouragement. You are not the first to find the work hard, the field resistant, the sacrifice real. Every one of these ten experienced exactly that.

None of them turned back. The God who sustained them is sustaining you.

Perhaps you are reading this as someone who has not yet reckoned seriously with the question of what the Great Commission asks of you specifically. That question deserves a real answer. Not a theoretical one, not a financial one that ends with a donation and a sense of having discharged the obligation, but a genuine, prayerful, costly reckoning with what God is asking of the one life you have been given. C.T. Studd would put it plainly: “Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.”

The grain of wheat is still being called to fall into the ground. The logic of Jim Elliot’s most famous sentence still holds: the life given away for Christ is the only life that cannot be taken.

The commission issued two thousand years ago on a hillside in Galilee is still the organizing document of the church’s existence. And the One who issued it is still, at this moment, saying to every disciple who will listen: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21, NIV).

The question is only whether we will go.

“I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me — the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.”

— Acts 20:24 (NIV)