October 17

2 Kings 5:1-3

1 Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master and in high favor, because by him the Lord had given victory to Syria. He was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper. 2 Now the Syrians on one of their raids had carried off a little girl from the land of Israel, and she worked in the service of Naaman's wife. 3 She said to her mistress, “Would that my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”

Mission impossible—no cure for leprosy. Naaman had it all, wealth and power and favor. Yet, it couldn’t save him from leprosy and the social stigma it carried. No doubt he had exerted all his power and money and name-dropping to find healing. Yet to no avail.

But God… God so loved Naaman that he sent this little girl to him, to send him to Elisha, to humble him to wash in the Jordan, and thus to find the Living God! Naaman, the gentile Syrian, not seeking God, the enemy and oppressor of the Lord’s people, who had ravaged and pillaged and burned and killed the Israelites. But God showed his love for his enemies and went to this Syrian leper.

But God… God too must have revealed himself to the little slave girl. She perhaps saw her parents killed and her village burned by this very man. She certainly had been carried off by these Syrians and made a slave. But she so saw the heart of God, his grace, his forgiveness, his love for others and even Gentiles, that she sought healing and blessing for her master. She offered him the hope she knew. Her God was the Living God, who could heal leprosy and bitter enslaved hearts.

Missionaries are given supernatural eyes—they see the emptiness of wealth, power, and favor that Naamans all over the world have. They see the deep problem of leprosy, sin. And they know true Hope, the Healer. They see his heart, a heart so overflowing that he goes and seeks out the lost. Indeed, so much so that he sent his Son! His Son who touched the lepers, thereby becoming “unclean” himself but imparting his cleansing grace. It is this love and grace that propels missionaries despite all the impossibilities of their mission, despite a hostile government, or apathy or rejection from the culture, despite the people’s idols of wealth and power, etc. They see the love of their Savior.

Your Mission

·         Pray for the missionaries’ wisdom in discerning the empty idols of the culture, wisdom to speak the truth in love to uncover the emptiness and true problem that the nationals bear, and boldness to point to the true Healer!

·         How are you deliberately going to seek the enemy, the oppressor, the empty, the leper?

Mission Impossible Made Possible—Field Notes

Char Murdoch

Translating God’s Word for a group of people who had no other way to get it was my dream since I was 18 years old.  I was first directed to the Dani tribe, but then another opportunity for Bible translation suddenly appeared in another tribe, which was very isolated! However, serving here would be impossible without a “team.”  But God had already placed a team there several years before, made up of evangelists sent from the Dani tribe, and I was able to communicate with them in the Dani language, having just studied it for a year!  The Dani team had already had good response to the Gospel message, and were discipling the first believers. Yet, the Danis could not translate the Bible into the Duvle language and the Duvles chose me to translate! God took care of the impossibilities of airstrips and housing, and Dani teammates.

Not long before my 40-year mark on the field, the leading Dani missionary died.  Now his oldest son is working with me on the translation, having grown up among the Duvle, and having command of both of those languages plus the national language, Indonesian.  Those are the same three languages that I have learned, so we make an ideal translation team.

The mission of getting all of God’s Word into the Duvle language is not yet fully accomplished, and my part in it is nearing an end.  But that does not mean that nothing more will be done.  It is God’s mission, and He will accomplish it in His way.  But what a “ride” I have had, being included these many years in the pro­cess!  Only God could have imagined using such a person as I.

*Papua is a province within Indonesia, the easternmost of thousands of Indonesian islands. It occupies only the Western half of the island, directly above Australia.  It is not the same as Papua New Guinea, which is on the Eastern half of the island.

NOTES

Some of the insights I am indebted to Timothy J. Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power and the Only Hope that Matters (New York: Dutton, 2009).