CHAPTER 25

His Glory Made Visible

Jim Montgomery

Jim Montgomery was the founder and president of Dawn Ministries until he retired in 2004. He also served with OC International for 27 years. He authored six books on the Great Commission. Among them is DaWN 2000: 7 Million Churches to Go, which describes the vision and history of the DAWN movement.

From Then the end Will Come, 1997, William Carey Publishing, Pasadena, CA. Used by permission of the author.

All that is Mine is Yours, and that which is Yours is Mine; My glory is made visible in them. (John 17:10)

I long to see the incarnate Christ present in the midst of every small unit of population in a people group, a region, a city, a country, and in the world. How? By planting a church there.

This idea might sound obvious, but for me, it came only after twenty years of agonizing over how to go about making disciples of all nations.

Christ Alive and Well

A strategic breakthrough in my thinking came about at the conclusion of a very successful effort in the Philippines. We had seen over ten thousand evangelistic Bible study groups established in a short time. But I was not at all satisfied. Why wasn’t I thrilled? It was because there were still millions who did not have a personal relationship with the Lord.

“Why, Lord,” I began to pray, “did You give us a command that You knew was impossible to obey? Did You deceive us? Did You mean something different than what Your Word seems clearly to say?”

“If You truly wanted nations to be discipled, why didn’t You stay here on the earth? You could have gone about every village as You did in Galilee. You could have appeared speaking the language, wearing the dress, intimately knowing the culture, eating the food, and having relatives and contacts in every village and neighborhood of every ‘nation’ in every country in the world.”

“You could have gone on demonstrating Your power, showing Your love and compassion and forcefully communicating Your great message of the kingdom. Why did You leave it to us, when You knew it was totally beyond our capabilities?”

“Now that I have your attention,” the Lord seemed to say after weeks of praying this prayer, “I want you to know that is exactly how to go about completing the Great Commission.

“See to it that I, the Lord, truly become incarnate, as you have been suggesting, in every small group of people on the earth.”

In a flash of insight from the Lord, it all became very clear. Where does the Lord dwell?

“Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Col 1:27 NIV).

“The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4 NIV).

“Where two or three come together in my name, I am there with them” (Matt 18:20 GNT).

It became clear that Christ could be alive and well and present in all His power and glory and compassion. This could be done by communicating His wonderful message of the kingdom in a totally contextualized way in every small community of people on earth if only there were some truly born-again believers exercising the gifts of the Spirit and functioning in each place as the body of Christ.

I had felt the Lord saying to me in 1974 that to work most directly at completing the Great Commission would mean seeing the risen Christ become incarnate within easy access of every person of every class, kind, and condition in the world.

This translated into planting a Christ-centered church in the midst of every small group of people in every nation.

Church Planting in the Bible

This is a biblical concept. Take the ministry of the Apostle Paul, for example. While his methods varied and were highly contextualized, the fruit of his ministry was powerfully consistent: there were always strings of multiplying congregations permeating large populated areas left behind him. It could then be said “that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord” (Acts 19:10 NIV).

Later, I began to connect this multiplication of churches with an Old Testament vision and prophecy that was repeated in at least four books of the Bible.

Numbers 14:21, for example, records that “all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord” (RSV). Similar prophecies are recorded in Isaiah 11:9 and Habakkuk 2:14. Then a colleague pointed out to me the last two verses of Psalm 72. Verse 20 (NIV) says, “This concludes the prayers of David son of Jesse.” And what were the last words of the last prayer of David? “May the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen and Amen” (v. 19 NIV).

Where does the glory of the Lord reside? Certainly “the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps 19:1 NIV). But many verses also tell us that Christ—and therefore His glory—resides in us.

I saw this again as I was meditating and praying through the priestly prayer of our Lord recorded in John 17. As I was reading in my Spanish Bible, “mi gloria se hace visible en ellos” suddenly jumped from the page (v. 10).

“My glory is made visible in them.”

There it was again! More than planting churches, more than saving souls, we yearn for the day when it can truly be said that the earth is full of the glory of the Lord. And where is His glory?

“My glory is made visible in them.” In His people.

The Great Commission, then, is simply the task of seeing that there is the presence of Christ in every place in the form of a gathered body of believers.

Even so, we work at church planting not only because it is a good strategy for completing the Great Commission; we do it because we want to cooperate with the oftrepeated Old Testament prophecy that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord” (Hab 2:14 NIV).

We do it to answer the last recorded prayer of David: “May the whole earth be filled with his glory” (Ps 72:19 NIV).

We do it so that the glory of the Lord may be made visible in every small community of humankind in the world.