Our Love Is Insufficient

The COVID years were hard everywhere, but in my country, children who tested positive were forcibly seized from their parents and quarantined alone. I watched videos of screaming children being ripped from their parents’ arms and wept at the thought that this might happen to me. If it did, there would be nothing I could do but pray that my kids would recover and be returned to me weeks later.

I had no love in my heart for the authorities nor for the locals who allowed this to happen.

It was a moment to reflect on my motivations. Why was I suffering the stress of not knowing whether my kids would be taken away from me? I could leave—so why endure it? These questions took me back to Scripture where I discovered something that surprised me and flew in the face of that missions speaker’s message: Nowhere does the New Testament ground missions or evangelism in our love for lost people.1

Though Evangelicals frequently invoke love for the lost in missionary appeals, the New Testament never grounds missions in that motive. I can’t survey the entire New Testament here, but a brief scan shows that love for the lost is absent as a foundational justification, even in places one might expect to see it.

When Paul was converted and called into his mission, neither Jesus, Paul, nor Ananias speak of love for the lost (Acts 16:1–19; cf. 22:1–21, 26:12–23). Love is absent when the Antioch church sent Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey (Acts 13:1-4); it’s absent when Paul responds to the Macedonian vision (Acts 16:9-10); surprisingly, the word love does not appear anywhere in Acts, the book which describes the early church’s missionary efforts.2 Love for the lost isn’t mentioned when Peter calls believers to be witnesses (1 Pet 3:15) or when Paul seeks support for his missionary efforts in Spain (Rom 15:22–29). When Paul speaks of his ministry of reconciliation, his motivation is not love for the lost but the “love of Christ” which compels him (2 Cor 5:1–21).3

Strikingly, Jesus never bases an evangelistic commission on a love for the lost; indeed, he doesn’t even mention love when sending the twelve (Matt 10:5–42), the seventy-two (Luke 10:1–24), urging prayer for the harvest (Matt 9:37–38; Luke 10:2), or delivering the Great Commissions (Matt 28:16-20; Luke 24:47–48; John 20:21; cf. Mark 16:15–20). The utter absence of love for the lost is striking in New Testament discussion of missions.

The absence is even more conspicuous when you consider that loving the lost is biblical! Jesus’ commands to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:39–40)4 and his call to love friends and enemies (Matt 5:43–48) surely both include the lost. Further, God’s love for the world motivated him to send Jesus (John 3:16) and not only are we to imitate God (Eph 5:1) but also Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21).

Precisely because we are so clearly called to love the lost, it is conspicuous that the New Testament does not motivate our evangelism or missions by that appeal. It’s almost as if the authors intentionally avoided mentioning love for the lost in these contexts.

The Dangers of an Appeal to Love

One day we may be able to ask why God determined that the inspired and inerrant New Testament would not speak of a love for the lost. Instead of speculating about God’s purpose for the absence of love—dangerous ground which I will not tread—allow me to share dangers I have witnessed that come from basing one’s mission on a love for the lost. These dangers may not be inherent to missionary appeals based on love for the lost, but they occur so frequently alongside such appeals that I do not believe their co-occurrence is mere coincidence.

First, I’ve observed that missionaries motivated primarily by a love for the lost often quit when suffering intensifies. When love for the lost entails suffering for one’s family, love of family usually—and perhaps even rightly (1 Tim 5:8)—prevails. An exodus from the field usually comes next. Love for the lost rarely sustains ministry amidst suffering and persecution.5

Second, missionary appeals to love the lost often result in pride. While there is a rightful compassion that seeks to help those who are lost (Matt 9:36, Mark 6:34), care for the less fortunate can be motivated by pride (Matt 6:1–4; Luke 18:9–14). Sadly, I observe that many appeals to love the lost are motivated by pride in possessing the truth that others lack. If one witnesses out of such pride, one’s demeanor will subtly contradict the gospel which declares that we are no better than others and are saved by faith apart from works (Eph 2:4–10).

Third, and most dangerous, missionary appeals to love the lost often undermine the gospel by creating guilt. It often goes, “If you love the lost and believe in hell, you must evangelize.” That may sound like love, but most listeners feel guilt. Yet, a guilt-motivated proclamation of the gospel not only is evident and unappealing to unbelievers, it contradicts the gospel message that in Christ guilt is removed and there is no condemnation (Rom 8:1). A guilt-based appeal to love the lost does not a gospel evangelist create.

The Basis of Missions

If the New Testament does not ground our evangelism and missions in a love for the lost, and if there are potential dangers of doing so, what is the right appeal? Put differently and personally, why did my family stay despite the danger of our kids being taken away from us during COVID? My love for the lost is fickle, fading, and not large enough to justify our suffering. Our love for the lost is an insufficient and dangerous foundation for missions.

The glory and love of God, though, is. No modern pastor has articulated God’s glory as the basis for missions more powerfully or passionately than John Piper. The reader will do well to read his seminal work, Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, in which Piper surveys all of Scripture to argue that the foundation of missions is the glory of God. Neither space nor ability allows me to improve upon his words, so I will quote them here:

Missions exists because worship doesn’t... [Worship is] the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory. The goal of missions is the gladness of the peoples in the greatness of God. “The LORD reigns, let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad!” (Ps. 97:1)... [W]orship is also the fuel of missions. Passion for God in worship precedes the offer of God in preaching. You can’t commend what you don’t cherish. Missionaries will never call out, “Let the nations be glad!” if they cannot say from the heart, “I rejoice in the LORD”... Missions begins and ends in worship. If the pursuit of God’s glory is not ordered above the pursuit of man’s good in the affections of the heart and the priorities of the church, man will not be well served, and God will not be duly honored... When the flame of worship burns with the heat of God’s true worth, the light of missions will shine to the peoples on earth in the greatest darkness.6

Our love for the lost is not enough to fuel or sustain our evangelism or missions, but the love of God, which creates a passion for the glory of God, is. For all eternity, the members of the Triune God have been pouring themselves out in love for each other—the Father for the Son, the Son for the Spirit, the Spirit for the Father, the Father for the Spirit, the Spirit for the Son, and the Son for the Father—in an unending, unbridled, infinite, incalculable, all-glorious love as they plumb the depths of each other’s infinite perfections and love every immeasurable facet of each other even as they receive back boundless and inestimable love from each other. This is the vast, eternal, inexhaustible, description-defying glory of the Triune God who has always and eternally poured himself out in love for others!

The Glory of the Gospel

We not only do not deserve this love, but we are infinitely unworthy of it. The same love that delights in exploring the holiness of the members of the Trinity recoils in judgment at the utter unloveliness of our hearts.

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:4–10 ESV).

In Jesus’ high priestly prayer to God the Father, he says that his disciples are loved by the Father “even as you loved me” (John 17:23), and he made the Father’s name known so “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). Somehow, in the immense beauty of the gospel, we may enter the Trinitarian love of God and be loved by the Father with the same love with which he has eternally loved the Son!

What wonder and glory this is! What delight and joy it stirs in the heart to be loved by God the way that he loves himself! We cannot earn this—it is utter grace! We don’t deserve this—it is utter grace! And thus, we proclaim this to the nations—for it is utter grace!

Oh, may God give us “strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:18–19) so that we, filled with his love, love him passionately in return and, out of an overflow of the love of God, declare his glory to the nations! Such a declaration cannot be motivated by guilt or pride, for we are saved by grace!

Rather, we declare his glory so that others would know this love, so that God would be glorified by the love of people from all nations, and so that our delight and joy in God will increase as we join with others in worship!

Just as a sports team’s victory is a hundred times more joyous when you are with other fans than when you are alone, and just as a beautiful sunset is a thousand times more lovely when you share it with a loved one, the glory and love of God is infinitely more soul-stirring and joy-filling when you worship him with people from every tribe, tongue, language, nation, and race!

May our hearts blaze with the infinite, unending, immeasurable, soul-satisfying, suffering-justifying, worship- creating, and missions-enabling love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord! Oh, that we would declare with Paul, “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38). If we do, we can endure suffering with joy while faithfully proclaiming God’s glory to the nations, even when our love for the lost has grown cold, for the all-satisfying love of God shines all the greater when we suffer for it.

The glory and love of God is central to missions, vital for endurance, and critical for a joy-filled witness; may we not even think about going to the mission field until we overflow with delight in the glorious love of God.