Expect great things from God
William Carey's famous missionary sermon
William Carey is a cobbler who teaches himself Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Dutch, and French by reading while he works. He is also a Baptist minister in rural Northamptonshire who has become convinced of something his denomination's leadership finds presumptuous: that Christ's Great Commission to make disciples of all nations is still binding on the church today, not merely applicable to the apostles.
He brings this argument to a ministers' meeting and is reportedly told by an older man: Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your help.
He does not sit down.
On May 31, 1792, he preaches a sermon at the Baptist ministers' association meeting in Nottingham. The text is Isaiah 54:2–3. The theme is two imperatives that become the motto of the modern missionary movement:
Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.
His sermon persuades the assembled ministers to form what becomes the Baptist Missionary Society. The following year Carey sails to India. He is thirty-one years old.
The modern missionary movement — the global enterprise of intentional cross-cultural evangelism that will send hundreds of thousands of missionaries to every corner of the world over the next two centuries — begins with a cobbler who taught himself languages and would not sit down.
“Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.”
— William Carey, sermon at Nottingham, May 31, 1792 AD
“Enlarge the place of your tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of your habitations; don't spare: lengthen your cords, and strengthen your stakes. For you shall spread aboard on the right hand and on the left; and your seed shall possess the nations, and make the desolate cities to be inhabited.”
Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.
The two imperatives belong together. Expectation without attempt is wishful thinking. Attempt without expectation is mere activism — effort that does not depend on anything larger than the effort itself.
Carey expected and attempted simultaneously. He expected because he believed God's purposes were real. He attempted because he believed God's purposes required human agency, human sacrifice, human obedience.
The older minister told him to sit down and let God do it without his help. The missionary movement that followed demonstrates what happens when someone refuses to sit down.
What great thing are you expecting? And what are you attempting that is proportional to the expectation?