Calvin and Missions - World Evangelical Alliance

Clowney: The Missionary Flame of Reformed Theology (1976) 117
a sinful world. Confused and overwhelmed by that mystery (can the Father
love sinners more than his Son?) we can only say that grace means that
God loves guilty sinners more than himself. The Son of the Father willingly
gives himself, laying down his life for his friends. Yet the Father also
gives his Son – and if he delivers him up for us all, “how shall he not with
him also freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32).
When the gospel is secularized or politicized it is simply destroyed. The
Lord of love calls us to take up our cross and follow him. Those who call
men in Christ’s name must promise what he promised: persecution, hatred,
family strife, suffering – and eternal life.
Jesus said, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me” (John
12:32). John tells us that the ‘lifting up’ of which Jesus spoke was the lifting
up of the cross, the lifting up of his death. Our zeal to reach the lost in
our generation springs from the conviction that men are eternally lost without
Christ, and that the crucified and risen Christ draws them by faith to
himself.
The crucified, risen, ascended Christ is the Lord who sends his disciples
to the nations. The Spirit he gives is the inbreathing of his own risen life
and power (John 20:22). Because Christ’s victory is accomplished, the
fulfillment of his purposes is not only assured in the future but realized in
the present. Just as the Christian’s victory over sin is gained by appropriating
the finished work of Christ – because we are raised with Christ, we
walk in newness of life – so, too, the mission of the church is fulfilled by
faith as the church recognizes and acts upon the reality of Christ’s present
authority and dominion in heaven and earth. “Go ye therefore, and make
disciples of all nations …” The gift of the Spirit as the promise of the Father
not only provides power for witnessing but also seals the actuality of
the fulfillment of God’s purpose in extending saving blessing to the nations.
The doctrines of grace are not only the key to the sanctification of the
believer, they are the key to the evangelization of the world. That is because
grace and faith forever go together. We triumph over the bondage of
sin in our lives as we recognize what Jesus Christ has accomplished in our
place on the cross and on the throne; we triumph over the bondage of sin in
the world as we recognize that what Jesus Christ has accomplished on the
cross and the throne redeems all his people from every nation. The distorting
of this truth in the unbiblical universalism of ‘ecumenical’ theology
must not blind us to the universalism of Christ’s resurrection triumph.
Paul’s opponents argued that his doctrine of justification by faith would