Missions Quotes

"The mission of the church is missions"
Oswald J. Smith

"You wonder why people choose fields away from the States when young people at home are drifting because no one wants to take time to listen to their problems. Ill tell you why I left. Because those Stateside young people have every opportunity to study, hear, and understand the Word of God in their own language, and these Indians have no opportunity whatsoever. I have had to make a cross of two logs, and lie down on it, to show the Indians what it means to crucify a man. When there is that much ignorance over here and so much knowledge and opportunity over there, I have no question in my mind why God sent me here. Those whimpering Stateside young people will wake up on the Day of Judgment condemned to worse fates than these demon-fearing Indians, because, having a Bible, they were bored with it---while these never heard of such a thing as writing."
Jim Elliot

"And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives... and when the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted."
Nate Saint

"I have but one passion - it is He, it is He alone. The world is the field and the field is the world; and henceforth that country shall be my home where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ."
Count Zinzendorf

"I feel now, that Arabia could easily be evangelized within the next thirty years if it were not for the wicked selfishness of Christians."
Samuel M. Zwemer

"Today Christians spend more money on dog food then missions"
Leonard Ravenhill

"It will not do to say that you have no special call to go to China. With these facts before you and with the command of the Lord Jesus to go and preach the gospel to every creature, you need rather to ascertain whether you have a special call to stay at home."
Hudson Taylor

"Answering a student's question, 'Will the heathen who have not heard the Gospel be saved?' thus, 'It is more a question with me whether we, who have the Gospel and fail to give it to those who have not, can be saved."
Charles Spurgeon

"'Not called!' did you say? 'Not heard the call,' I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there. And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish his mercy to the world."
William Booth

"If God has fit you to be a missionary, I would not have you shrivel down to be a king."
Charles Spurgeon

"While sailing to the New Hebrides John Patton lead the Captain of the ship to Christ. At the close of the voyage John made it clear to the Captain the Island he wished to be let off on. The Captain knowing the Island was filled with head hunting cannibals refused saying they would be dead in minutes of arriving on the Island. John Patton boldly stated to the Captain. "Sir, we died before we came!"
John Patton

"As long as I see any thing to be done for God, life is worth having; but O how vain and unworthy it is to live for any lower end!"
David Brainerd

"God isn't looking for people of great faith, but for individuals ready to follow Him"
Hudson Taylor

"The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed"
Hudson Taylor

"The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become."
Henry Martyn

"He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose"
Jim Elliott

"Sympathy is no substitute for action."
David Livingstone

"The Bible is not the basis of missions; missions is the basis of the Bible"
Ralph Winter

"No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, while there remains someone who has not heard it once."
Oswald J. Smith

"Any church that is not seriously involved in helping fulfill the Great Commission has forfeited its biblical right to exist."
Oswald J. Smith

"We talk of the Second Coming; half the world has never heard of the first." Oswald J. Smith

"This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth!"
Keith Green

"There is nothing in the world or the Church -- except the church's disobedience -- to render the evangelization of the world in this generation an impossibility."
Robert Speer

"If you found a cure for cancer, wouldn't it be inconceivable to hide it from the rest of mankind? How much more inconceivable to keep silent the cure from the eternal wages of death."
Dave Davidson

"In our lifetime, wouldn't it be sad if we spent more time washing dishes or swatting flies or mowing the yard or watching television than praying for world missions?"
Dave Davidson

"The reason some folks don't believe in missions is that the brand of religion they have isn't worth propagating."
unknown

"The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time"
Carl F. H. Henry

"As long as there are millions destitute of the Word of God and knowledge of Jesus Christ, it will be impossible for me to devote time and energy to those who have both."
J. L. Ewen

"The command has been to 'go,' but we have stayed -- in body, gifts, prayer and influence. He has asked us to be witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth ... but 99% of Christians have kept puttering around in the homeland."
Robert Savage

"Believers who have the gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story."
K.P. Yohannan

"We Christians are debtors to all men at all times in all places, but we are so smug to the lostness of men. We've been "living in Laodicea ", lax, loose, lustful, and lazy. Why is there this criminal indifference to the lostness of men? Our condemnation is that we know how to live better than we are living." Leonard Ravenhill

"He is not seeking a powerful people to represent HIM. Rather, He looks for all those who are weak, foolish, despised, and written off: and He inhabits them with His own strength."
Graham Cooke

"If you want the Kingdom speeded, go out and speed it yourselves. Only obedience rationalizes prayer. Only Missions can redeem your intercessions from insincerity."
William Carey

” Whenever, in any century, whether in a single heart or in a company of believers, there has been a fresh effusion of the Spirit, there has followed inevitably a fresh endeavor in the work of evangelizing the world.”
A. J. Gordon

“If missions languish, it is because the whole life of godliness is feeble. The command to go everywhere and preach to everybody is not obeyed, until the will is lost by self-surrender in the will of God. There is little right giving because there is little right living, and because of the lack of sympathetic contact with God in holiness of heart, there is a lack of effectual contact with him at the Throne of Grace. Living, praying, giving and going will always be found together, and a low standard in one means a general debility in the whole spiritual being.”
Arthur T. Pierson

"It is possible to evangelize the world in this generation, if the Church will but do her duty. The trouble is not with the heathen. A dead Church will prevent it, if it is prevented. Why should it not be accomplished? God will have all men to be saved and come unto the knowledge of the truth. The resources of the Church are boundless. Let the will of the Church be brought into line with the will of God, and nothing will be found to be impossible. May God grant it!"
Griffith John

"While vast continents are shrouded in darkness... the burden of proof lies upon you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by God to keep you out of the foreign mission field."
John Keith-Falconer

"Here am I. Send me."
Isaiah

"Young man, sit down: when God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine."
said to a young William Carey

"Oh, that I had a thousand lives, and a thousand bodies! All of them should be devoted to no other employment but to preach Christ to these degraded, despised, yet beloved mortals."
Robert Moffat

"I pray that no missionary will ever be as lonely as I have been."
Lottie Moon

"Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God."
William Carey

"Obedience to the call of Christ nearly always costs everything to two people- the one who is called, and the one who loves that one."
Oswald Chambers

"When he landed in 1848 there were no Christians here; when he left in 1872 there were no heathen."
said of John Geddie

"Tell the students to give up their small ambitions and come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ."
Francis Xavier

"The mark of a great church is not its seating capacity, but its sending capacity."
Mike Stachura

"There is something wonderfully misleading, full of hallucination and delusion in this business of missionary calls. With many of us it is not a missionary call at all that we are looking for; it is a shove. There are a great many of us who would never hear a call if it came."
Robert Speer

"I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God; first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done."
J. Hudson Taylor

"I love to live on the brink of eternity."
David Brainerd

"Why doesn't your God speak my language?"
Guatemalan Indian to Cam Townsend, founder Wycliffe Bible Translators

"None but women can reach Muslim Women... So we have a solemn duty in this matter that we cannot shift. The blood of souls is on our skirts, and God will demand them at our hands."
Missionary wife from the Middle East

"I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light"
John Keith Falconer

"The primary qualification for a missionary is not love for souls, as we so often hear, but love for Christ."
Vance Havner

"If you want the Kingdom speeded, go out and speed it yourselves. Only obedience rationalizes prayer. Only Missions can redeem your intercessions from insincerity."
William Carey

“There is need of a great revival of spiritual life, of truly fervent devotion to our Lord Jesus, of entire consecration to His service. It is only in a church in which this spirit of revival has at least begun, that there is any hope of radical change in the relation of the majority of our Christian people to mission work.”
Andrew Murray

“If missions languish, it is because the whole life of godliness is feeble. The command to go everywhere and preach to everybody is not obeyed, until the will is lost by self-surrender in the will of God. There is little right giving because there is little right living, and because of the lack of sympathetic contact with God in holiness of heart, there is a lack of effectual contact with him at the Throne of Grace. Living, praying, giving and going will always be found together, and a low standard in one means a general debility in the whole spiritual being.”
Arthur T. Pierson

“In every revival there is a reemphasis of the Church's missionary character. Men return to Calvary, and the world is seen afresh through the eyes of Christ. The infinite compassion of Christ fills the heart, and the passion evoked by Calvary demands the whole wide world as the fruit of His sacrifice.”
John Shearer