Do you every day feel people you meet are going to spend forever in hell? Are you moved in your heart with a seriousness and sorrow that makes you feel you cannot be silent? I daresay days elapse and it never crosses your mind. Where then is your motive for witnessing? If you only witness when the flames of hell are hot to you and you feel the urgency, then you are not going to be sharing Christ very often.

Neither did the Lord intend for us to share Him with others with an emotionless and rigid sense of duty. Witnessing for Christ is an act of worship. Therefore, witnessing to the lost is an expression of our hearts about our God. It is to unashamedly proclaim the worth of God to others. This should be what motivates us.

In Dr. John Piper’s book Let the Nations be Glad, he elaborates on this as the primary motive for why we should do missions. The book isPiper’s definitive work on the subject. The book’s opening paragraph follows.

Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more.  It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.

Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal of missions. It’s the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory.