Mission: 2018
You can be the next link in the chain
By Gary Fallesen, founding president, Climbing For Christ
“God’s plan is for a chain of witnesses from the apostles until He comes again. I have the privilege of being part of that chain. We have the opportunity to make the next link in the chain.” — Dudley Woodberry, legendary missionary to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and many other Islamic countries
What an incredible invitation. You and I have the opportunity to be witnesses to the glory of God. We are offered front-row seats to watch God at work.
In Nepal. In Indonesia. In Peru. In Malawi, Tanzania, Turkey, Pakistan, Haiti, Morocco, China, and more. In any mountain range or on any remote mountain where someone waits to hear about Jesus Christ — to the ends of the earth.
“Hasten the day,” said Greg Livingstone, another living legend in the mission field, who in 1959 went to a prayer meeting and when he asked what country hadn’t been claimed he was told, “You’ve got Libya” (the title of his 2014 autobiography). He has spent his lifetime serving in the Muslim world and he founded the mission organization Frontiers.
I have been encouraged by the likes of Woodberry and Livingstone and many others this past year, and I hope to encourage you to be a part of this blessed movement to preach in the whole world as a testimony to all nations (Matthew 24:14) and hasten the return of our LORD (2 Peter 3:12).
This is not the stuff of armchairs. This requires boldness. Gotoitiveness (a word I made up).
A dear brother who monitors Muslim unreached people groups said: “My friends, the easy places are gone.” What are left are hard-to-reach people in hard-to-reach places. These are people and places to which Climbing For Christ has been, is, and will be called. Until all have heard.
“Do not be afraid,” said Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission, a human rights organization.
Haugen spoke about how that was the one command Jesus gives most often to His disciples, including at the Last Supper. “Fear,” he said, “is the enemy of the love that produces dreams.”
God puts a dream on your heart to GO on a Climbing For Christ mission in 2018 and immediately the evil one fills you with lies that plant seeds of fear and doubt in your mind. “What if…”
“Fear,” Haugen said, “turns the focus to (your)self.”
You lose sight of the big picture — delivering the Good News to every tribe and language and people and nation (Revelation 5:9) — and start thinking about an ineffectual selfie.
“Being brave is going to be hard,” Haugen said.
But if you are abiding in Jesus and Jesus in you, “you will bear much fruit.” Apart from Him, you can do nothing (John 15:5).
“Courage, like fear, is contagious,” Haugen said. Especially when you put your trust in the LORD.
“God calls us to make the transition from being those who have been rescued from the world, to those through whom God is literally rescuing the world,” Haugen wrote in Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless Christian.
“‘You are the light of the world.’ According to Jesus, we are it. You are it. The world is a dark and hurting place, and the Creator of the universe has one plan to bring light to it — and through Christ, we are that plan. Jesus is telling us that we have been rescued out of the darkness so that we can be the light of the world.”
And if Jesus is the One extending the invitation to be this light, it’s our job to “seize it,” according to Just Courage. It’s HIS job to make it succeed, or not.
“We are nothing but servants in the battlefield,” one of the indigenous workers in International Justice Mission told Haugen after three others were killed for the cause in Kenya. “The real soldier is Christ Himself.”
There is work that God has prepared for us to walk in (Ephesians 2:10). It may take you to high places, to hurting people, to widows and orphans, to those living obliviously in darkness.
If you have a holy ambition to be a witness and glorify God, here are some opportunities to be the next link in the chain:
Climbing For Christ needs PRAYer warriors, those who will GIVE financially, and those who will GO! Please join us on this blessed adventure. 
The Word
Isaiah 58:10-11(CEV)
10 Give your food to the hungry
and care for the homeless.
Then your light will shine
in the dark;
your darkest hour will be
like the noonday sun.
11 The Lord will always guide you
and provide good things to eat
when you are in the desert.
He will make you healthy.
You will be like a garden
that has plenty of water
or like a stream
that never runs dry.
NOTE: Evangelic Expeditions are open only to Climbing For Christ members. CLICK HERE for the free membership. Members must request a mission application at info@ClimbingForChrist.org. We will pray with and for you as you seek to join Climbing For Christ on Mission: 2018.
2887