As a thriving university student working his way through one of the top undergraduate business programs in America, cross-cultural missions was nowhere on my radar. My only international aspirations were to one day take in the beautiful scenery of Switzerland as a tourist. After graduating, I found myself working in a coveted position with a global consulting firm in Washington, DC, serving in fruitful local ministries, and enjoying deep, meaningful, growing friendships, and myriad of wonderful life adventures. Life was good! You can imagine the incredible shock from those around me when I suddenly turned in my resignation and announced that I was moving across the world to a country which, months earlier, I didn’t know existed. The question on everyone’s lips, not surprisingly, was, “What could possibly have motivated you to make such a drastic change?!”

In a word, love

Love is a central theme of the Bible. Due to translation differences, it is difficult to determine a precise count of how frequently “love” is used. However, to provide a rough idea, the New International Version (English) uses the word 551 times.1 It is the key action word in arguably the most famous of Bible verses, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world…” Jesus himself spoke often of love. In fact, it is the core tenet of what we refer to as the Great Commandment: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matt 22:37b–40). So central to ministry is the role of love that the Apostle Paul devoted an entire chapter to it in his first letter to the Corinthians with this noteworthy summation: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13).

Given the incredible emphasis on love found throughout Scripture, it seems a worthy pursuit to consider the role of love in missions to frontier people groups. Let’s look at three of the ways love serves as our motivation in mission.

Love sends us out

In Luke 7, Jesus draws surprising attention to the link between forgiveness and love. In summary, one who has been forgiven little, loves little. Conversely, one who has been forgiven much, loves much. This principle is evident in the life of the Apostle Paul, who considered himself the chief of sinners, that is, one who was keenly aware that he had been forgiven much. Not surprisingly in his great discourse on being called as Christ’s ambassadors, Paul points directly to love being his motivation:

For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all… We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:14–21).

Is it any wonder that Paul, who was forgiven so much and thus keenly aware of Christ’s love for him, had as his ambition “to preach the gospel where Christ was not known?” (Rom 15:20). Motivated by the love of Christ, Paul led the way in taking the gospel to the frontier peoples of his day.

It was this same principle at work in my own life when God called me to take the gospel to unreached Muslim peoples in Central Asia. The tipping point for me was a deepening awareness of my own sin. The more I realized how much I had been forgiven, the more I realized just how great God’s love for me was. The love of Christ compelled me to lay aside a lucrative career in one of the world’s most dynamic cities and move to a dusty, remote city in Central Asia (by train, the nearest neighboring city was 30 hours away). I likewise saw love motivate Muslim-background believers whom I was so privileged to serve and serve with. Just a couple of the many who stand out are a roommate who was periodically beaten for choosing to follow and tell others about Jesus and a house helper, turned friend and zealous evangelist, who was ridiculed and severely persecuted physically but found no price too high to pay for sharing Christ’s message of reconciliation. As the Apostle John put it, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Love sustains us on mission

Love is pivotal as we are being sent out to frontier peoples, and it secures and sustains us on mission—that is, love grounds us and keeps us going.

I will never forget my first forays into Central Asia in the early-mid 1990s. While I was certainly motivated by gospel ambition, there were other motivations in the mix that helped get me to the field, specifically a love for adventure and a pride in outdoing my peers.

Upon my return to Central Asia several months later, to live indefinitely, I learned what poor motivations these were. There comes a point in which the newness wears off and the excitement and adventure are simply insufficient motivations to keep one going. Eventually, the challenges of living and serving cross-culturally take their toll. For me, that included the physical environment: searing summer heat with no air conditioning, bitter cold winters, limited water supply, and a rather bleak landscape.

Beyond that were the emotional challenges. Developing meaningful friendships with locals did not come easily between the significant language barrier and the extreme cultural chasm.

And then, of course, there was the ever-present spiritual component. When I began living in that region, there were only a handful of Muslim-background believers in a population of more than a million. One “friend” threatened to kill me if I ever spoke critically of Muhammad. In multiple cities, Bibles were gathered and burned in bonfires as mosques were being erected. New believers were frequently persecuted, often severely.

Amidst these various challenges, which are not uncommon for those serving among frontier peoples, only the love of Christ can sustain Christ’s ambassadors. There are two aspects of love that must be noted. First is the love of Christ for us and us for him. “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam 3:22–23). Romans 5:5 connects love with hope: “And hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” And perhaps one of the greatest passages in all of Scripture regarding God’s sustaining love is Romans 8:37–39: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that… [nothing] in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We are sustained by a living, active relationship with a loving, almighty God. His love motivates us on mission.

The second important aspect of this sustaining love of Christ is our relationship with other believers—family, teammates, and in some cases, local believers. Even love shown by those remote from us, through online interactions or mail, can have an incredible impact. As Paul testified to Philemon, “Your love has given me great joy and encouragement, because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the Lord’s people” (Phlm 7). The living out of the “one anothers” of Scripture refreshes our hearts, strengthens us, and helps us withstand the most challenging of circumstances. Choosing to love one another just as Christ has loved us is among the greatest forms of spiritual warfare we can wage as we press into the frontiers of missions to push back darkness and share the glorious gospel of Christ.

Love shapes our service

A third way that love motivates our mission to frontier peoples is by shaping our service among them. There are two ways we see this at work. First, love characterizes interactions between fellow believers, and this ongoing demonstration of Christ-like love spurs us on to love others. Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). In all three countries in which I was privileged to live in Central Asia, a common (and welcome!) refrain from people was, “There is something different about you; you are not like other foreigners.” Whether it was observing how we parented our children or worked through difficult conflicts with teammates and exercised forgiveness, “faith expressing itself through love” (Gal 5:6) cast a notable light, causing people to ask how we were able to care for one another the way we did. We did not live this out perfectly, of course, but the love of Christ at work in and among us set us apart from the culture around us. In a similar way, love distinguishes how we interact with the frontier peoples we serve, those whom we long to see enter a loving, saving relationship with Christ. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10–11). Jesus instructed us to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matt 5:44) The love of Christ motivates us to care for unbelievers just as we do with fellow believers and ought to be the hallmark of our witness among them.

Motivation to finish the task

According to the Joshua Project,2 there are currently 4,910 frontier people groups, totaling nearly 2 billion people, roughly one out of every four people in the world, each of whom was created in the image of God. He is worthy of their worship and promises that one day “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language” (Rev 7:9) will join us before his throne. What will motivate the Church to finish the task? As British missiologist Roland Allen shared, “Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love.”3 As we continue laboring to reach this gospel-deprived 25% of God’s image bearers, may it be the love of Christ that sends us, sustains us, and shapes our service.