Two Young Men on a Danish Dock

In August 1732, two young Moravian men — Johann Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann — stood on a dock in Copenhagen, about to board a ship bound for the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. They were going to share the gospel with enslaved Africans, people the established church had largely ignored. Dober was a potter. Nitschmann was a carpenter. Neither had theological degrees or missionary training. What they had was a conviction that the goodness of God was never meant to stop at the borders of their small German community of Herrnhut.

As the ship pulled away, Dober reportedly called out across the widening water: "May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!"

Within two decades, the Moravians — numbering barely six hundred — had sent missionaries to more places than the entire Protestant church had reached in two centuries. Greenland. Suriname. South Africa. The ends of the earth.

Psalm 67 carries this same breathtaking vision. The psalmist receives the ancient Aaronic blessing — "May God be gracious to us and make His face shine upon us" — and immediately turns it outward: "that Your way may be known on earth, Your salvation among all nations." The blessing was never meant to be a destination. It was always a current, flowing from the people of God toward every nation, tribe, and tongue, until all the ends of the earth would know the One who first made His face to shine.