Why the Unreached Need the Gospel

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Why the Unreached Need the Gospel

If you have a Bible, and I hope you or maybe somebody around you does lemme invite you to open with me to Romans chapter 15. I don’t have a lot of time, but I do have a lot of expectations for what’s going to happen in the next few minutes.

I have prayed that God would do work and the next few minutes that will change the trajectory of many people’s lives in this room from this point forward. So I want to cut right to the chase.

I have a conviction that with approximately 2.8 billion people who’ve never heard the gospel in the world, I have a conviction that God is calling many, many more people to take the gospel to them, multitudes, more people, including many people in this room. Now, in order to understand that from the start, we’ve got to change our paradigm, our understanding of the way we think about those who take the gospel to those who’ve never heard.

What we traditionally think of, we hear the word missionary. We’ve got to change our paradigm from the very beginning, an understanding of what a missionary is because as soon as I mentioned people taking the gospel to those who’ve never heard, many of you think of a small group of select people, some of whom wear weird clothes and that small group of people, they leave their jobs and they go to work in remote parts of the world.

And indeed that’s true for some people. And the IMB, we’ve got nearly 5,000 people who’ve done something along those lines, but I’m convinced that we haven’t even touched the surface of the numbers of people God is calling to go because we have a limited view of missionary.

What if missionaries are not just people who leave their jobs to take the gospel around the world, but missionaries also include people who leverage their jobs to take the gospel around the world? You look back in Christian history and you’ll see a group of people called the Moravians.

It was said that one out of at least 92, some say one out of 58 of them were crossing cultures for the spread of the gospel. We’ll just take the more conservative number one out of 92, were crossing cultures for the spread of the gospel.

The IMV represents about 40,000 churches. I think about what would happen if we had that kind of ratio today, 40,000 churches, they say there are about 16 million members in those churches.

I know how pastors are with numbers, so let’s just assume 10 million of those people are actually alive and living members in their churches. That’ll make the math easier anyway, if that was happening among just this group of churches, this one denomination, one group of churches, that’d be over a hundred thousand missionaries, not 5,000.

But we don’t even think in that kind of terms and I’m convinced we need to think in those kinds of terms. Now the beauty is Moravians weren’t doing this because they had a well-financed sophisticated mission program.

No, they were doing this because they were leveraging the opportunities God had given them to move to other cultures and work there for the spread of the gospel. They would look for jobs in other countries and cultures and contexts and they would deliberately work there and spread the gospel as they worked there.

Some of them would even sell themselves into slavery. They’d see a slave ship about to go to this country that didn’t have the gospel and they’d say, well, that’s one way to get the gospel to that country.

And so they would sell themselves to become slaves in order to get on the boat, in order to get to that country and proclaim the name of Christ multitudes of them going all around the world. And I’m just wondering what would happen if we had that kind of mindset.

And so I look at this arena full of followers of Christ who are getting a world-class education in all sorts of different degrees, and I am pleading for you based upon what we’re about to look at in the word I’m pleading for you to leverage this education, to leverage your degree, to get the gospel to people who’ve never heard it, to open your life up to the possibility that the default might not be getting a degree and getting a job here in this country where you can coast out your Christian life and a nice comfortable Christian spin on the American dream. I’m pleading for you to see that your life was made for much more than that.

I’m pleading for you to pick a major not based on what feels best for you, but based on what will give you marketable skill and opportunity to get the gospel to people who’ve never heard it. Romans chapter 15, verse 20, I’m pleading for you to make it your ambition to preach the gospel not where Christ has already been named or where he is not been named or there’s no foundation so that those who have never been told of him will see and those who have never heard will understand.

Now, you might wonder, are there really that many people who’ve never heard of Christ? And this is where I want to just take a minute to paint a portrait of what is commonly called the unreached in our day.

Everybody has Access to God

So I mentioned 2.8 billion people spanning about 6,500 people groups who are unreached by the gospel. Now we hear numbers like that. You hear 2.8 billion. It’s kind of hard to get your mind around a number like that.

And so I want to bring it down just to one person. I want you to imagine somebody just like you in another part of the world who’s unreached by the gospel. So don’t picture, don’t try to picture 2.8 billion people.

Just try to picture one person. And if you’re unreached, so practically, what does that mean? Maybe you’re a student in some other place in the world, a teacher, you’ve got a family. What does it mean for you and your life, your family to be unreached?

Well, to be unreached means practically you don’t have access to the gospel. And that word access is key. You don’t have access to it. In other words, you likely don’t even know it exists either.

Like some people in the world, you’ve never heard about Jesus. I’ve met people in different parts of the world, go up to them and I say, do you know anything about Jesus? They say, who’s that at?

So maybe you’re unreached. You’ve never even heard, literally never heard the name of Jesus, or maybe you have heard the name of Jesus, but as much about him as you do about Confucius.

Well, I think he taught personal governmental philosophy and maybe influenced Eastern thinking. But that’s about all you know. And you don’t know any Christian. You don’t have any churches around you that are preaching the gospel, who are telling the truth about Christ.

So you’ve never met anyone who knows the truth about Christ. You don’t have access to the gospel. So this is key. This is why we don’t say, well, I don’t know why we talk about unreached people around the world when there are unreached people that I work with or unreached people right around me right now.

Well, those people aren’t unreached say, how do you know? Because you work with them. They live around you. In other words, they have access to the gospel. You are their access. We’re talking about people who don’t have access to the gospel.

They don’t know a Christian. They don’t have access to a church, to somebody who would tell them the truth about Christ, which means practically so keep yourself in their shoes. If you’re unreached, you don’t have access to the gospel, which means you are born, you live and if nothing changes, you die and you never once even hear the gospel.

You’re not reached by it. You’re born, you live, you die, and you’ve never heard the gospel, which begs the question, right? Okay, if there are a couple of billion people who are born live, and die and they never hear the gospel, then what happens to them when they die?

I so again, put yourself back in their shoes. What happens to you? If you’re born in this part of the Middle East and you live your entire life and nobody ever tells you the gospel, you die without ever hearing the gospel.

What happens to you when you die? Do you go to hell forever even if you’ve never heard the gospel or if you go to heaven? If so, how do you go to heaven without ever hearing the gospel? That’s where we got to think, okay, not just practically what does it mean to be unreached biblically?

What does it mean to be unreached? And that’s the whole point of the book of Romans. If you turn back to Romans chapter one, verse 18, you’ll see Paul who is saying, it’s my ambition to get the gospel to those who’ve never heard it saying Why this is his ambition. Because biblically, well, four things.

If you’re biblical, what does that mean? Well, number one, it means you have knowledge of God. So from the very beginning, Romans 1, verse 18, since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power, and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse for although they knew God.

So what he’s saying is everybody in all creations. So if you’re unreached, whether you’re in the middle of the desert in Sub-Saharan Africa, or you’re in a jungle in the Amazon or you’re in a village in Asia, if you’re unreached, regardless of where you are in the world, you have knowledge of God, God has revealed himself.

There are 7.2 billion people on the planet today, and God has revealed himself to all of them. His invisible qualities are eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen everywhere so that no one is without excuse.

So if you’re unreached, you have knowledge of God. Now, obviously not everybody in the world confesses faith in God or believes that there is a God who exists. That doesn’t mean that God has not revealed himself.

The Unreached Have Rejected Knowledge of God

Everybody has knowledge of God. That actually leads to the second truth. If you’re unreached, you’ve rejected God, you’ve rejected the knowledge about God that you have. That’s what Paul goes on to say in Romans chapter one, verse 21.

Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened, although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. So if you’re unreached, you have knowledge of God, but you’ve rejected the knowledge that you have about God, you’ve turned aside from God, and it’s not just them, it’s us.

It’s all of us in this room. This is the human condition. Every single one of us has turned aside from the one true God to worship other gods, namely ourselves. We’ve turned aside from his way to our own way.

Now it looks different in different places. Maybe you’re in West Africa and you practice voodoo and your attempts to appease and direct different spirits around you. Maybe you’re in India and you’re unreached, and so you offer incense every day to different gods that you’ve crafted with your own hands.

Maybe you’re in Saudi Arabia and five times a day you bow down in a certain direction and pray to a false God. Maybe you’re in the mountains of Nepal where you worship the Buddha and you firstborn, you’ll send your firstborn son off to a monastery to attain Buddhahood.

Maybe you’re in China or in North Korea and you’ve rejected the idea of all God altogether. You hardly even have a concept of God, so it looks different for different people. But if you’re unreached, you have knowledge of God and you’ve rejected the knowledge you have about God.

Again, it’s not just them. It’s not just Muslims here or Buddhists there or Hindus there. It’s every single one of us. It looks different in every one of our lives. The sinful nature that’s in us plays itself out in a myriad of different ways.

But what fundamentally unites all the people in the world is that we have knowledge of God and we’ve rejected the knowledge we have about God, which means number three, biblically, if you’re unreached, you stand condemned before God. This is what Paul does in the rest of chapter one chapter two and chapter three, some of the most depressing verses in all of the Bible, as Paul talks about the sinfulness that pervades all of our hearts, he starts with the Gentiles, then he goes to the Jews, and then he comes to his conclusion in chapter three verse nine through 20.

He says, what should we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all. We’ve already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. There starts quoting from the Old Testament.

There’s no one righteous, not even one. No one who understands, no one who seeks God all have turned away. They have together become worthless. There is no one who does good, not even one.

It gets to the end indictment on humanity. Verse 19 and 20. We know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law so that every mouth is silenced and the whole world is held accountable to God.

No one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law because through the law we become conscious of sin. In other words, he’s saying every single one of us is silenced before God in our sin.

Everyone is Condemned Before God in their Sin

This applies to every single person in this room and it applies to every single person in the world, including those who have never heard the gospel. They stand condemned before God for their sin.

They have knowledge of God. They’ve rejected the knowledge they have about God, and so they stand guilty before God. And this is so important because I think we have a tendency to gloss over this.

People will ask me, well, what do you think happens to the innocent guy in Africa who’s never heard the gospel? What happens to that guy when he dies even though he has never heard the gospel?

And my answer is always, well, that guy goes to heaven without question. People say, well, even though he hasn’t heard the gospel, I said, yes, absolutely. I’ll go to heaven if he’s never heard the gospel.

I say, well, doesn’t that make you a heretic? And why in the world are you leading the IMB until you ask the follow-up question and you ask. But are there any innocent people in Africa who’ve never heard the gospel?

Well, of course, if they were innocent, they would go to heaven. They have no sin that they need to be forgiven, for they have no sin, that there needs to be a price paid for. Of course, they’d go to heaven.

The problem is there are no innocent people in Africa or Asia or America anywhere. You see how we bias the question from the very beginning as if there are innocent people all over the world just waiting to hear the gospel.

There are no innocent people all over the world waiting. There’s guilty people all over the world. That’s why they need to hear the gospel. It’s foundational from the very beginning, begin to point the finger at God like God, how could you condemn people to an eternal hell?

They’re innocent before you. They’re not innocent. We’re not innocent. It’s the core truth of the gospel that our sin warrants eternal wrath from only God. As a result, unreached people at this moment stand condemned before God, and at this point people will start to think, well, surely there’s a way they can still go to heaven.

They’ve never even heard the gospel, surely because they’ve never heard the gospel. God will make a way for them to still go to heaven. Now, let’s think about that. If that were true, if they’re not hearing the gospel and some way gives them a pass into heaven, if that were true, then what’s the worst thing we could do for them?

Go and take the gospel to them right before we get there. A hundred percent of them going to heaven. Now that we came to share the gospel, there’s a chance they could go to hell. And thanks a lot for your global missions week, liberty sins like you sin, like stop sending, keep it to yourself.

We’re going to heaven without you. Just be quiet. It would make no sense, right? It would undercut the very foundational mission enterprise of the entire church. The reality is there are people around the world who stand condemned before God and there’s no pass for them to get into heaven because they have sinned against God and haven’t heard the gospel.

The Unreached Have Never Heard of Salvation

That leads to the fourth truth biblically, if you’re unreached, you have knowledge of God, you have rejected God, you stand condemned before God and you’ve never heard the good news of how you can be saved by God. Nobody’s ever told you.

Romans 3 21 through 26, and Paul says, but now a righteousness from God has been made known a righteousness that comes from God through faith in Jesus Christ says Romans 3 23. So if you know it, there is no difference for all. Have what?

Sin and fall short of the glory of God and our Now, don’t just memorize the bad news. There’s good news in verse 24, justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

God has presented Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. In other words, God has chosen to pour out his holy wrath. Do you and me upon his son in our place.

He has paid the price for our sins. He’s taken the punishment. We are due. Not only that, he died for our sins and then he rose from the dead. We’re not talking resuscitation, not talking reincarnation, talking, resurrection.

We’re talking, not talking. Went to heaven, came back, and wrote a bestselling book about it. We’re talking dead for three days and then walking around life, we’re talking. You go to a funeral tomorrow and you see a man’s body put in a coffin and laid in a grave and then dirt poured over that grave.

And then Sunday, that guy comes up to you on campus and says, hello. That’s unusual. This is the greatest news in all the world. Death has been defeated. Eternal life is possible for everyone who just trusts in Jesus.

It’s the greatest news in all the world. But in the words of Carl Henry, the gospel is only good news if it gets there in time. And we’re talking about people who never heard this. Do you realize what this means?

Just put yourself in their shoes. They’ve never heard how much God loves them. Nobody’s told them what God has done to make eternal life possible for them. They’re born, they’re living and they’re dying.

And nobody’s even telling them the greatest news in all the world. Do you realize the ramifications of this? What does this mean? We’re talking about 2.8 billion people whose right now their knowledge of God is only enough to damn them to hell forever.

Do we feel that they have enough knowledge of God to show them that he exists, that they’ve turned aside from him, that they’ve rejected him, they stand condemned for him, and that’s all they got? That’s all they got is the bad news. They don’t have the good news.

It’s not long ago I found myself in one of these parts of the world where they’d never heard the name of Jesus. We had a group, small group of guys that had gone over to Nepal. We had landed in Kathmandu.

We flew on helicopters up to the height of the Himalayas, right on the border between Nepal and Tibet. And we spent about six days hiking out of those mountains. And it was five days before we even met somebody who had heard the name of Jesus before we started talking to him.

So people you go up to, he said, you know about Jesus. They said, who’s that? They never heard living in poverty, never heard how much God loves them. The most humbling moment that whole time though was when we came to a place and nobody prepared me for what we were about to come to, but a place called Pash Potty.

It’s a Hindu Holy river. And we were around the corner here at this place and I saw a scene that just stops me in done silence. Just picture it with me, okay? This Hindu Holy River, has funeral pires on top of it up and down the river.

And their custom is, their custom is whenever a friend or family member dies, within 24 hours, they bring that body of a friend or family member to this river. They place it on a funeral pyre and they set it ablaze.

And they believe that as the ashes go down into the river, this will be helpful for them in the process of reincarnation. And so I around the corner and I stop and I see the scene just burning bodies on funeral pyres and it hits me.

I’m looking at a physical picture of a spiritual reality. Come looking at bodies burning those people and I’m looking at the moment are in hell and they’re going to be there forever. Forever and ever and ever without end.

They’re going to be there forever, 24 hours before they were alive, and now they’re, and they’re going to be there forever. And then if that wasn’t heavy enough, then it is to me that most, if not all these people that I’m looking at ’em watching their bodies burn, most if not all of them are in hell right now. And nobody even told them how they could go to heaven. No one even told them.

What will it take for the concept of unreached people to become totally intolerable to us in the church? Surely we can’t know that more bodies right now are being placed on those funeral prayers. We can’t know that.

And just continue on with a nice, comfortable Christian spin on the American dream. It makes no sense. Not when we know we know this gospel. When they hear it, it has the power to save. That’s the whole point of Romans.

The Gospel is the Salvation of Those Who Believe

This gospel is the power of God for the salvation of those who believe. When they hear what Paul says in Romans 10, they’ll believe. They’ll believe. Obviously, not every one of ’em is going to believe, but many of them will believe this gospel has the power to save them.

So how can we not make it our ambition to get this gospel to them, to say to God, Lord, here’s my life. Here’s my gifts, my decree, my education, my skills, everything. I’ve got my future. You use me, use me.

However, you want to get the gospel. People have never heard of it. Would you say that to God today or wherever you want me to go? Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. I want my ambition. I want it to drive me.

I want to see Christ named among all the peoples of the earth. Would you say that wherever, however, and some might say, some might think, well, that’s a big commitment to make? I don’t know if I’m ready to make that kind of commitment to Christ.

I would just follow up and say, this is not a big commitment to make. This is the essence of what it means to be a Christian in the first place. If anyone would come after me, he says anyone. So this is initial elementary discipleship.

If anyone’s going to come after me, he must deny himself. Take up his cross and follow me. Die to your plans. Die to your dreams, die to your preferences. This is the essence of what it means to be a follower of Christ in the first place.

So I’m calling you to basic elementary discipleship today to say, here’s my life, here’s my degree, here’s my education, here’s my future., however, knowing the weight of what that wherever could mean because unreached people’s unreached for a reason.

They’re hard to reach, they’re difficult to reach. They’re dangerous to reach. All the easy ones are taken. And so we’re talking about places in the world where Christian missionaries aren’t going to be welcome, but it’s the beauty of what God has designed even in the globalization of today’s marketplace.

Because there are businessmen and businesswomen who are welcome there, and there are teachers who are welcome there and there are doctors who are welcome there. And there’s this type of professional, this type of student retirees who are welcome there.

And even if we’re not welcome there, we find ways to get there even among people who don’t want us there, who don’t want to hear the gospel, who will oppose us sharing the gospel with them, who will fight to keep us from getting the gospel to them who want to kill us. If we try to take the gospel to you, say, well, why would I give my life, my family, and my future to get in the gospel to them?

Here’s why. Because there was a day when you were rebelliously running after God and everything in you opposed him. And yet in his mercy, he came running after you. He sent his son to die for your sins as a sacrifice for your sins.

So now it just makes sense saved by this gospel to say, here’s my life. Make this good news known through me to wherever however you want me to do it in this world. And if there is, as we were singing earlier, I just was praying for you.

If there is any hesitancy whatsoever in you saying, God, I’ll go wherever. However, if there’s any hesitancy at all with saying that, let me just remind you who you’re saying it to. You’re saying that to the God who loves you so much, who knows better than you, what is best for your life, and you have no need to fear you.

Bow your heads with me in the quietness of this room. I just want to ask you where you are sitting to say to God, wherever, however, you want to use my life to make this gospel known where it’s not been heard. I’ll do it wherever, however, and just say that to him just right now.

Oh God, I pray for a spirit of surrender across this room right now, surrender to and trust your love and your mercy, your goodness for your glory. And I pray, oh God, that you would take prayers across this room and you would in the days to come lead and guide and direct multitudes from this room to men and women around the world who have yet to hear the gospel.

God may unreached people be reached with the gospel because of lips and lives in this room right now. I pray, I pray, oh God, that people groups, entire people groups would feel the ripple effects of what your Spirit is saying to hearts in this room right now,

All for their good God, that the nations might be glad and sing for joy in you and that you Lord Jesus, might receive the glory you do. Worthy is the lamb who is slain. For you have purchased men and women from every tribe and tongue, and people and nations use us.

We pray. We pray for a Moravian-type mission movement in our day with multitudes, more people getting the gospel to those who’ve never heard it again. We want to be a part of that. We want to see your kingdom come, your will be done.

We want to get to the day where we’re not talking about unreached people anymore, where we’re talking about the return of the king. So use us to hasten the coming of that day, bless students and faculty members all across this room today to hasten the coming of that day in.