Our God Reigns

With all my heart I believe the reason so many wonderful Christians don’t accomplish more in their lives is that they don’t believe Jesus meant what He said. They’ve never come to believe that the all-powerful One who commissioned them could enable them to do these greater works.

The last thing Christ told His disciples was to go and teach all nations, and to see that every created being hears the gospel. What do you think the early disciples thought about that?

Paul was able to tell the Romans, “Your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.” And he said to the Thessalonians, “From you sounded out the word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place.”

How did the message go? Not by telephone or television, but by tell-a-person. That’s the only method they had. Everyone was to tell someone else. They could not help but speak the things which they had seen and heard. This was the impelling force. That’s how the gospel spread.

Today more people than ever in the world know about Jesus Christ because of radio, literature, mission societies, evangelistic meetings, and so on. But they only know about Him. They don’t know Him. Maybe our greatest problem is that we try to put on radio or in printed form that which should go from lip to ear and heart to heart. Tools by themselves are useless.

We don’t need anything that God can’t supply. Is it knowledge? Is it strength? God can do more through a weakling who is yielded and trusting than He can through a strong man who isn’t.

Do you have this thought securely in your mind: “God, I’ll never let the lack of anything persuade me that Your work is being hindered”? I would rather you went away with this in your hearts than with any methods or materials or ideas we could share with you, because I know the potential of the man who can say hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, “My God reigneth.”

You have an excuse if you want one. You have hundreds of them. But what holds us back is that we don’t live and preach the fact that God is on the throne.

The need of the hour is to believe God is God, and that He is a lot more interested in getting this job done than you and I are. And if He has all power to do it, and has commissioned us to do it, our business is to obey Him and trust Him to enable us to reach the world for Him.

The Lord could easily have said to the disciples, “You fellows are only eleven men, and you lack facilities and transportation, so all I want you to do is start the fire in Jerusalem.” But the believers in southern India say they are glad the apostle Thomas believed and obeyed Jesus Christ when He commanded them to go to the uttermost part of the earth. I understand that the Mar Thoma Church, the largest in southern India, traces its origin back nineteen hundred years to the work of this disciple. Aren’t you glad Thomas didn’t say to Jesus Christ, “I don’t have a DC-6 yet”?

Discipleship Journal, Issue 61 (January/February 1991) (NavPress, 1991).