What's a Missionary?

Missionary - a person sent on a religious mission, especially one sent to promote Christianity in a foreign country.

This is the definition of missionary that we think of when you hear someone use the term missionary...someone sent to a foreign land on a religious mission.  In all actuality, every follower of Christ is a missionary or at least we should be.  I am a missionary in prisons..."sent" on a mission to a "foreign" place, foreign to me anyway.  But this is where the Lord has sent me, a mission field surrounded and guarded by razor wire, steel doors, and corrections officers.  If you've ever been on any kind of mission trip I imagine that it is hard to leave to go home and go about your daily life.  You wonder if those who surrendered their lives to Jesus will realize how free they now are in Him, how loved, how precious.  You hope they will fall in love with the Word so it penetrates their hearts and grows them into the men and women of God that He has purposed them to be. You pray they will surround themselves with like-minded people, that they will deny themselves and not fall, that they won't compromise but that they will be bold ambassadors for Jesus Christ.  You pray they grasp what grace is.  I think about and pray for the souls we encounter, that they really get it and become missionaries right where they are.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  Matthew 28:18-20

A missionary tells the story of Jesus and we can do that anywhere, we should do that anywhere and everywhere!

Let's look at that definition again... a person sent on a religious mission.  Jesus has saved us and has instructed us to go, we have been sent to proclaim the Gospel.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?  And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. Romans 10:14-17

Now go...