The Great Commission in 2026
On New Year’s Day 2026, I had the great privilege of taking a group of young adults to Cross Con in Louisville, KY. The group was comprised of young adults from two different churches in the Cincinnati area and one church just outside of Montreal, Quebec. All-in-all, there were nineteen of us who attended this amazing conference, which works to commission young adults to live meaningful lives, finding their unique callings from the Lord. Keynote speakers were John Piper, Carl Trueman, Rosaria Butterfield, David Platt, Allistair Begg, among many others. Over the three days of the conference, the young adults discovered that the calling of the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus Christ is not just urgent, it’s mandatory for the people of God to pursue after the people of the world for the spread of God’s love and grace.
This blog, called the End of Gog Blog is so named because of Ezekiel 38, in which the typological Christ-like prophet, addressed as “Son of Man” by the Lord, is told to “set his face against Gog, of the land of Magog,” who is an ally of Satan’s and an eschatological enemy of God’s people. Revelation 20 enlightens us further on the Gog/Magog imagery that is irrefutably connected with the return of Christ. The call to missions is urgent and mandatory because, although the Lord wishes for no one to perish, many are, indeed perishing apart from Jesus Christ, the savior and king of the universe in which we live.
Revelation 20:7-15
7 When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison 8 and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. 9 They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. 10 And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. 13 The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. 14 Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. 15 Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
For all those still reading, in this space we will deal with difficult questions about Heaven and Hell, condemnation and justification, wrath and mercy, and the hard truths of the Old Testament and New Testament.
Today, we will start light though with a short book review on Andy Johnson’s book on missions. Join me here every week for discussions on the most important issues of our time, and how the Word of God speaks into our greatest, most pressing questions.
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Johnson, Andy. Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global. Crossway: Wheaton, Illinois. 2017.
Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global, a book concentrated on building healthy churches globally, looks deeply at the biblical call to missions—how local churches can support missionaries well, how to foster trusted partnerships with missionaries, reforming short-term missions, and some of the pitfalls and calls to action in engaging unreached people groups. In the second chapter, ironically titled “First Things First,” the author, Andy Johnson, speaks about the urgency of sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ to a lost world, who outside of faith in the Lord, is destined for Hell. Moreover, he works to define what it means to be on mission to share Christ with those who lack awareness of their sinfulness before a holy God, arguing that a missionary is “sent out by local churches to make the gospel known and to gather, serve and strengthen local churches across ethnic, linguistic, or geographic divides” (36).
As the book progresses, the book emphasizes sending qualified missionaries, who are well-trained, biblically grounded and whose theology aligns with the mission statement of the local church. Johnson mentions that, while Christ will lose none that the Father has given him, that, “We can be both urgent and wise” in our sending of missionaries because, “sending unqualified people may produce bad consequences that cascade far beyond the individual” (42). Over the course of the book, Johnson emphasizes that long-term missionaries need both generous financial support and effective short-term missions’ partners and pastors to serve and encourage them as they seek to effectively handle the daily task of picking up their cross, thereby losing their life for the sake of saving others.
Evaluation
Johnson’s book worked to help his readers better understand and define how churches can successfully partner with missionaries throughout the world, and he offers six principles for successful partnerships, including being servant minded, pastor-led, relationship-based, commitment-centered, congregation-wide and long-term focused. While Johnson points out that none of these principles are explicitly stated by Scripture for said partnerships, he does indicate that all these principles are grounded in the biblical calls to wisdom and humility in evangelism and Christian living.
In my opinion, Johnson left the most important principle of all out in creating and maintaining successful missionary partnerships—to trust in the Holy Spirit’s power to do the work as missionaries are sent out in obedience. And that obedience should be centered in regular, fervent prayer and a zeal for miraculous conversion of the nations. Indeed, it’s such a great privilege to serve the Lord that both the church and the global servants should be increasingly faithful, even willing to take risks financially and personally to go throughout the world. In reading this book, I felt that the book was too programmatic and instructional, sometimes offering great examples like Adoniram Judson to contrast long-term work against short-term missionary work, but not enthusiastic enough about the great prospects of serving as a missionary or supporting a missionary.
Moreover, Johnson had a section titled, “Focus on the Local Church” in which he laid out two scenarios of two different missionaries—one who is working among hundreds of churches and thousands of Christians (in a generally already reached people group), and the other who is laboring in an unreached area where there is very little (if any) church presence. Johnson points out that many people would lean toward supporting the missionary in the unreached setting, which absolutely has biblical grounding. The problem, says Johnson, is that the goal of mission is not just to reach those who are unreached directly, but to gather local churches to plant other churches. In the first scenario, just because there are plenty of churches in that region, there may be a need to plant more churches to create a stronger Christian community in the area, possibly extending into urban centers or rural outposts. I thought this was an insightful point by Johnson to say that, while it is exciting to support pioneer missionaries, we should not direct all our attention to the pioneers, but sometimes ground our support in areas that already have a foundation, but need to start expanding parameters.
As with most books on this topic, Johnson also addresses the need to spend the right amount of time planting churches, training up leaders and pastors, and not abandoning new churches before they stand on their own two feet. This is a salient point that cannot be overemphasized. And lastly, Johnson’s instruction for short-term missionaries toward the end of the book was important and insightful. He gave ten helpful points that can often be ignored by short-term missionaries, including “be flexible, be humble, be a learner and be extravagant in service.” The goal of the short-term missionary is not to behave like a savior, or even a relief team flown in to give the people on the ground a break. Rather, the goal is to encourage and to share the magnificent gospel of Jesus Christ to emulate him when he says, “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). Indeed, this needs to be the attitude of any missionary, long-term or short-term, but especially for the short-term missionary who is less knowledgeable with the local context or familiar with the struggles and hardships on the ground.
