No man is truly awake today who has not developed a supra-national horizon to his thinking. No church is anything more than a pathetic pietistic backwater unless it is first and fundamentally and all the time a world missionary church.
Quoted by Curtis C. Thomas, Practical Wisdom for Pastors, Crossway Books, 2001, p. 182.
The concern for world evangelization is not something tacked on to a man’s personal Christianity, which he may take or leave as he chooses. It is rooted in the character of the God who has come to us in Christ Jesus. Thus, it can never be the province of a few enthusiasts, a sideline or a specialty of those who happen to have a bent that way. It is the distinctive mark of being a Christian.
It is a tragedy that the Christian religion is in many minds identified merely with pious ethical behavior and vague theistic beliefs, suffused with aesthetic emotionalism and a mild glow of humanitarian benevolence. This is not the faith which first awakened the world like a thousand trumpets and made people feel it bliss in such a dawn to be alive. Men knew what Christianity really was – the entrance into history of a force of immeasurable range.
Thine is the Kingdom, Schribner’s, 1956, p. 22.
Union with Christ – this is the sum and substance of the Christian’s status, the definition of his relationship to Jesus, the large reality in which all the nuances of his new being are embraced.
A Man in Christ, Regent, 1935, p. 147.