The Christian is a God-Explorer

 I love Tom Wells on the Christian's life and missionary vision as God-explorers teaching others to be God-admirers:

 

"I have said three things about the Christian life.

    1) It is born in the knowledge of God. 

    2) It matures as it grows in the knowledge of God.

3)       3) Its goal is the fullest vision of God’s glory and greatness. Here, in other words, is the meaning of life.

The man who does not know God is dead. The man who knows God, and is coming to know Him better, is powerfully alive. As we have already repeated, Jesus said to His Father,

               This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, whom thou hast sent (John 17:3).

Men must know God. That is the one thing they must do. And this can mean nothing less than that God is eminently worthy to be known in all the length and breadth and height and depth of His character. The Christian is a God-explorer. The Christian vision is the vision of God.

The missionary vision is the vision of God also. It is not something different from the Christian vision. It is the same vision being shared rather than merely enjoyed. It is the same vision being shared with men who have no natural taste for it, in the hope that God will create that taste so that they too will become “God-admirers.” Sharing the vision of God – that is the work of missions.

In this sense – the deepest and truest sense – we are all missionaries. You must not suppose, and I must not imply, that the impulses and inspirations that move our missionaries are at all different from the motives that ought to move every Christian. That must be the furthest thing from our minds. Perhaps we have no thought of going abroad. It may not be the thing for us to do. But that will make no difference. We too must have the highest and best inducements for what to do. And they will turn out to be the same motives that the missionary ought to have, no more, and no less.

But we have come to use the word ‘missionary’ for one who leave his culture, if not his country, to serve Christ. That is the way I will use the word also. The principles, however, will apply to us all.” 

 

Tom Wells, A Vision for Missions (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), pages 26-27.