Two weeks ago I made the point about the Baptist idea of the church as a believer’s church. That is, we are always one generation from extinction, since only those who freely and publicly profess their personal faith in Christ Jesus become members of the church. We do not baptize anyone without their consent, but we persuade them to follow Jesus of their own accord. Thus the church is itself a persuaded church.

Last week we looked at how the principle of persuasion applies to our view of religious liberty. We believe in a free church in a free state. We believe in the separation of church and state—not the separation of God and government; not the separation of religion and public life; not the separation of the spiritual from the secular. We simply believe that the state should be neutral and respectful toward diverse religious expressions, and that the church or any religious body ought not try to control the state. The persuaded church is also the persuasive church: we make our case in the public square like everyone else. We vote our conscience and we appeal to the conscience of others. We trust in God’s patient and longsuffering love to make the truth known through our Spirit-inspired witness to the world.

And that brings us to the last of these sermons. We need Spirit-inspired witness. The persuaded and persuasive church is also the persuading church. We are mission-minded people, witnessing to our faith in Jesus Christ with a view that others might come to know the power of God’s salvation.

Baptists have been a powerful missionary force in the world since at least 1792, the night a British cobbler named William Carey preached a sermon that birthed the modern missions movement. His sermon had two points: expect great things from God, and attempt great things for God. He and Andrew Fuller began the Baptist Missionary Society and the spirit of preaching the gospel to all the world became part of the DNA of Baptists from that time forward. Our heroes have always been missionaries. Our heroines, too, don’t you know?! This is how women really made it. Like St. Lottie (Moon) and St. Annie (Armstrong).

Across the last century, Southern Baptists did nothing better than missions. And today the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, of which we are a part, continues this work alongside them. Baptists have called out people from our own pews to give up everything and move to darkest corners of the world for the sake of sharing the good news of Christ. We have built hospitals and schools and drilled water wells and fed hungry children and started churches and nurtured the faith in the cultures they encountered without imposing all their own Western ways on everyone.

These days it is fashionable in some circles to question whether missionary work is even legitimate. After all, some say, shouldn’t we believe that all religions are essentially equal? Why should we be so narrow as to think that Christianity is an absolute religion and the only way to God?

Now, this strikes me as a peculiarly Western question, born out of the weariness of a culture that has grown up on Christianity and known its abuses and intolerance. But we do not expect Muslims think of their religion as one option among many equally true ways to God. And God knows they don’t think of themselves that way. So why should we think it wrong to claim the rightness of our faith in Jesus Christ? If we truly believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world, if we truly believe that the Son of God became flesh, suffered, died on a cross, was raised from the dead, if we truly believe that God’s love can be poured into our hearts in order to transform our lives from the mundane to the meaningful, and if we truly believe that Christ now invites the world to share in the joys of life eternal, how can we think to keep that to ourselves?

Most of the time when you hear sermons about witnessing and doing missions work they come from a call to duty. We are told that Jesus commanded us to witness, so we must. The Great Commission requires us to go to all nations and make disciples, so we must obey. But there is something deeper than duty that fuels our witness—it is astonishment or wonder or beauty or love. Call it by whatever name, it is the breathtaking experience of life from the dead that is too good not to be true.

I remember when my children were born. The world changed each time for me. I knew that nothing would be the same again. And I wanted everyone to understand that. First time parents are the worst about this (or the best). They act as if everyone ought to see things the way they do. They think that new child has altered the course of history for good. And they cannot understand how it is that others do not light up at the very sight of their child the way they do. And that is the very attitude that characterizes true witnesses for Christ. They can’t help themselves; they are so carried away by the gift of life that comes through Christ Jesus.

Jesus tells a parable in Luke about a king who throws a banquet and invites his subjects. You would think a king would simply demand attendance, but instead he invites. When some who are invited unimaginably decline the invitation, as if they could have anything better to do, he sends out his slaves to recruit anyone who will come. And when there is still room at the table, he sends them back out again to the highways and hedges, to the back alleys and underpasses. Compel them to come in, Jesus says.

Compel them. Now there’s a word that didn’t take long before it brought great abuse. By the fourth century, St. Augustine appealed to this passage to say that the state has the right to make Christians of every citizen, that baptism of persons without their consent is permissible. Since eternity is at stake for every person, servants of Christ are authorized to use any means possible to bring people into the church. He even applied this parable to justify persecution. The Inquisition and the Crusades and the forcible Christianizing of the heathen were all part of this dreadful misinterpretation of Jesus’ words. Today many Christians in America are still tempted to use whatever means possible to coerce faith or manipulate people politically to join the Christian cause. This is completely foreign to Jesus meaning and is totally uncalled for in Christian witness.

The word witness in the Greek language is martures, from which we get martyr. Christian witnesses vow to live the gospel and to love the gospel even if it costs them their lives. They will never take someone else’s life for the cause of the gospel, but they are always willing to give up their own, just as Jesus himself did. Christian witness is testimony to “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God.” We live it and we tell it with a view that anyone else and everyone else might know if for themselves. We do not believe it is our own private experience that might not be right for someone else; we believe that Jesus is Lord of all and all should come to enjoy the fellowship of his table spread out for all eternity.

We use persuasion to tell the Christian story, not coercion. We invite people to share in the joy of abundant life through the risen Christ. We respect the right of others to reject the invitation to life, even if we can hardly imagine why they would. But we reject the idea outright that respecting other’s right to reject should lead us not to invite!

And yet, that’s mostly what we do, isn’t it? The Baptist idea of the church is that everyone is equally privileged to share in the sharing of the gospel. We don’t delegate that duty to a few missionary professionals or overeducated preacher-types. But when we fail to live as if the gospel makes any difference to us, when we are more excited about telling people about our latest business opportunity or about our newest hobby or the NFL Draft, why should anyone want to come and join us in the faith?

I fear that we are like those in Jesus’ parable who found every kind of excuse for not dropping everything and going to the party. We have decided that other things are more important to us. We have to tend to business, to our family obligations, to our entertainment pursuits. The worship of God, serving the community, giving our money and time for the sake of showing the world what God cares about: these things can all take a back seat to our other preoccupations.

When is the last time you sought out a friend you knew was hurting and talked about what a difference faith in Christ could make? When did you last invite someone to church with you? When did you decide to sacrifice something you wanted so that you could contribute more to the things that would bring glory to God?

We have some wonderful opportunities in this church. We are located in a place where we can make a great difference for Christ in Dallas and in the world. We have enormous resources in educated and talented people. We have loads of wealth, if we would only admit it and not try to protect it by denying how much we really have.

And yet, we act more like our duty as Christians is to keep a secret rather than to publish it far and wide. Go figure. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved, St. Paul says. But how will they call on one in whom they have not believed? And how will they believe if they have not heard? And how will they hear if no one tells them?

You’d think we were holding on to bad news not good news? You’d think we have something to be embarrassed about that we try to hide it?

Mostly when Baptists say why they are Baptists it has to do with how nobody gets to have control over their soul. We are all priests of God. Yes, true, but I worry that we’ve got a largely retired priesthood! It’s time to come out of early retirement and take our place among those with beautiful feet.

How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news! It’s not about having painted toenails that people notice; it’s about being the kind of person that makes others always glad to see you coming. How beautiful are your feet? How beautiful? How beautiful?