Happy New Year’s everyone! God has given us another year to show the Lord’s love in our lives. Let’s not waste it!
This will just be a short post from something I have been reading this afternoon. It is an article in the January 2011 issue of Friends Journal – Quaker Thoughts and Life Today. The article is entitled The Meaning of Universalism by Phil H. Gulley. I will be discussing some of the issues he brings up about Universalism in future posts but I just wanted to give you one of the short stories in that article now. I found it comical and ironic at the same time:
It was about a church that decided someone needed to go preach to the Eskimos to go save them because they were lost. So they sent a missionary to the Eskimos, and he preached. When the missionary was done preaching, an Eskimo elder said to him, “Before you leave, let me ask you something. If we had never heard of Jesus and sin, would we have gone to hell when we died?” The missionary replied. “Well, no, of course not if you hadn’t heard.” And the Eskimo said, “Then why did you tell us?”
Are we condemning people who otherwise would not have gone to hell by our brief encounters with other cultures? That is something to think about. 🙂
RJ's Corner 
The Lord commands us to tell the whole world in scripture.
LikeLike
Peppy, not exactly. He tells us to to and make disciples who will do as he commanded. Making disciples is a long term process not a short missionary trip as described here. So the question still remains. Are we doing more damage than good with our brief missionary excursions into foreign cultures? If we can’t commit to being there long term should we be there at all. I just don’t know.
LikeLike
We see our Lord, Jesus Christ, instructing his disciples to go town to town and house to house. If not accepted they were to shake the dust off their feet and move to another home.
The book of Acts shows apostles and believers taking the Good News all over the world they new of and leaving the newly established church with the new local believers. They planted new churches everywhere.
I know many missionaries personally who have lived their entire adult lives in foreign ministries helping others and establishing churches.
When we encounter the Lord we choose. That is our freedom as a Christian. I do think, however, God is merciful and loving and will look at salvation far differently than humans do.
It was Jesus who told us about the sheep and the goats. Pretty straight forward.
LikeLike