On Sunday, I had the privilege of preaching at our home church, CrossWay Bible Church, on Luke 10:1-7. (Click on the image above if you would like to hear the sermon.)

One of my sermon points was that there is a place for short-term missions teams to assist on-field workers to advance the Gospel with extra manpower for large projects. This is especially applicable for our church now since this summer, we are sending a team to Sisak, Croatia, to put on a vacation Bible school and teen day camp for Roma.

To help raise awareness and funds, we held a brunch with Croatian food. Pam, the ladies of the church, and our missions committee put out quite a spread, and everyone enjoyed it. Some were even brave enough to try the Turkish coffee!

The central idea of my sermon is that all believers in Christ have the privilege and responsibility of sharing in the work of bringing in the Lord’s spiritual harvest, by giving, going and praying.

Luke 10:1 (ESV) says: “After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go.” 

Jesus appointed 72 (or some Greek manuscripts say 70) “others.” We presume that “others” means other than the twelve apostles. The apostles were Jesus’ long-term missionaries, whom he had commissioned to spend the rest of their lives spreading His message. But here in our text, he sends out others on a short-term trip. 

But why did he send 70 or 72? Why that number? One interesting theory is that 70 (or 72) was the number used to describe all the various nations of the world that had descended from Noah after the flood. There were 70 of them listed in the Hebrew text (72 listed in the Greek translation of the OT, called the Septuagint).  

In his Gospel, Luke makes it clear that the Gospel is not just for the Jews. The Good News is for all nations (Luke 24:46-47). Perhaps the choice of 70 or 72 short-term missionaries indicates that there need to be enough missionaries sent out to reach all the nations. These messengers probably went into Perea, an area east of the Jordan River, where Jesus had not spent as much time compared to the amount of time He had spent in Galilee or Judea. It was a Jewish area, but there was also a fairly large Gentile population.  

The main point is that Jesus needed a lot of workers. The time was short before He needed to be in Jerusalem to be crucified at the Passover. He only had a matter of months before he would be killed, so to cover that many cities and villages, He needed 35 or 36 pairs to go ahead of Him and start the work of spreading the Gospel. 

Here, we can see the importance of short-term missions trips. Since Jesus could only be in one place at a time if He were going to visit the most strategic towns and villages while on a deadline to get to Jerusalem, He would not have much time to spend in each locale. He would want the people to be as prepared as possible, with hearts eager to hear, so He could go to the places that had shown acceptance to his missionaries and were willing to hear more. 

Now, the most effective way to do pioneer missionary work is to have Christian workers living among the target people. They should be there long-term, learning the language and the culture. But on-field missionaries cannot do everything. Short-term teams can provide the manpower for larger-scale outreach, both in the places where the long-term missionaries live and in hard, out-of-the-way places where the long-term workers don’t live. 

Jesus recruited shorter-term workers. 72 others, besides the apostles, went short-term and played a crucial role in preparing the way for Jesus’ work. Will you follow their example and do the same?