Come Over and Help Us

Come Over and Help Us.  Dr. David Livingstone, who would later in life become the famous explorer of the African Continent, on November 20, 1840, was ordained for missionary service. He was 27 years old and had just finished his studies to become a physician. Detoured from his plans for service in China because of the Opium Wars (1839-42), Livingstone agreed to serve instead in the West Indies. But every plan he had made for Asia was changed the instant he heard the esteemed Scottish physician and missionary, Dr. Robert Moffat, speak while furloughing in London from his work in South Africa.

Moffat spoke passionately "of a morning he could stand at his mission station at Kuruman and, looking to the north, see the smoke of the cook fires of a thousand villages without Christ." Livingstone nearly immediately set sail for Cape Town, South Africa, arriving on March 14, 1841. For better or worse, over the next 15 years, plus his second (1858-64) and third (1866-73) far more political and scientific expeditions intermittently lasting until his death, at great personal cost Livingstone journeyed deeper than any European into the African Interior in the attempt to reach the people who sat around the cook fires of those thousand villages without Christ that Moffat saw from his base camp so many years before.

Arguably more compelling than the unreached tribes, the Apostle Paul was redirected in his missionary attention, too, but by personal invitation. Repeatedly, Paul and his company were “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia” (Acts 16:6, 7). Every plan he had made for Asia was changed the instant he received a vision, averting his gaze westward instead of northward. “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us’” (Acts 16:9).

The force of a personal invitation for divine intervention remains as compelling today as ever, whenever, and wherever the Holy Spirit brings it to the attention of praying Christians: in Spain, in Goldsboro, or most recently in Monrovia and Buchanan City, Liberia. Come Over and Help Us is more than an ask for charitable donations. People ask people for hand-outs, which may be entirely appropriate sometimes, but people cry to God for help. This kind of help only God can give. Help, therefore, is a theological plea more than recruitment to a humanitarian cause. Help is a cry to God for rescue. However, God’s intervention often passes through the agency of his church.

My teaching trip to Liberia (March 4-13, 2024) shares the force of a personal invitation for divine intervention. The 50 pastors there have asked God for divine help in their various ministries to “teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). God has crossed my path with their plea for his divine intervention. Subsequently, I am pleading for divine intervention for the funds to travel to Liberia to pass on to them that which was mercifully delivered to me by my mentors and Bible teachers. The $3000 that this trip requires is $3000 beyond our church budget and beyond my family budget. Perhaps God will pass his help to me through the agency of your generosity. When it works, everyone gets blessed, and God gets the glory.