A Call to Make Your Life Count in a World of Urgent Need

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David Platt at Biola

I don’t have a lot of time this morning, so I’m going to jump right in. I want to take you on a bit of a journey with me that should be on the screen in a second. So a few months ago I found myself helicopter into the height of the Himalayas and to remote regions deep in those mountains where we would spend many days hiking through those villages.

And I try to travel overseas three or four times a year as a pastor, but these mountains for me represent the clearest, most urgent collision of spiritual need and physical need. So urgent, spiritual need, urgent physical need, give you a picture of the physical. They did some research years ago and they found that about half of the children in these villages were dying before their eighth birthday.

So I have four children in my home right now, one who we’re in the process of adopting from China. One of my biggest fears is something happening to one of them. Like I can imagine that being an expectation for half of them and they’re dying of things like preventable diseases. They don’t have clean water. They have an infection that I could go, you could go and get over, counter them over the counter medicine for on a cut, but without that infection, deepens takes over their entire body.

Trafficking

One of the worst byproducts of poverty in these villages is trafficking. So you’ll go through some of these villages and you’ll hardly see girls much older than this. So if you just kind of picture the way it plays out, a trafficker will come through. See a family struggling to provide for their daughter who may or may not be able to live.

And so they say to her, to the parents, Hey, we’ll take your daughter down into the city. We’ll get her a good job and, a good education where she can be supported and be healthy, even be able to start making money where she can send that back up to help you and your family. We’ll take really good care of her.

And they give the equivalent of about a hundred dollars as a, it says, we’ll pledge this, and then she’ll be able to come back up and visit at different times and bring things to you to support you and your other kids. That whole talk is fairly persuasive for family and poverty. And so they send their daughters down sometimes as young as eight years old, 10, 12 down to the city where they will not get a good job.

Abuse

They’ll be put into a brothel where they will be broken and abused, drugged, raped, and then put to work with whatever the men who come in there want to do with them. And they will never, ever go back home. They’ll either stay there in the city or be taken across the borders into other areas.

So urgent, physical need on top of urgent spiritual need. So these mountains are the birthplace of Hinduism and Buddhism and the gospel has in most of these villages, never even gone there. I’ve mentioned a couple of times yesterday, that these are situations where when you meet somebody on a trail and you say, what do you know about Jesus?

Their response is, who’s that? I’ve never even heard his name. So in 2000 years, the gospel has not even gone there. I shared last night an event in this room about watching bodies burn on a funeral pyre. This is one particular setting where they bring a body and set it ablaze, and they believe that. So the ashes go down into this river beneath this funeral pyre that will help them in the process of reincarnation. It’s a sober scene.

And so in the few minutes I have with you this morning, I just want to plead with you in view of a world of urgent, spiritual, and physical need to refuse to settle for living a nice comfortable Christian spin on the American dream in your life. I want to plead with you.

There is An Urgent Need for God’s Word

Based upon God’s word and light of a world of urgent need, I want to plead with you to make your life count for the spread of God’s grace, and God’s love and God’s goodness and God’s mercy and God’s justice, and God’s glory, and a world of urgent need.

I had actually originally planned to be in another text this morning, but as I was praying for you this morning, even just spending time yesterday, this is my first time at Viola. I’ve heard so many good things about Viola and I’ve been so encouraged just being on this campus. I see so much evidence of God’s grace here.

I trust there’s so much evidence of God’s grace, but as I was praying for you this morning, I was just praying God caused your grace on this campus to resound to your glory. In a world of urgent need, I raise up students who are zealous to make their lives count for your glory and a world of urgent need.

Luke Chapter 9

And I was just provoked to pray based on one passage of scripture that I want to take us to. So if you have a Bible, and I hope you or somebody around you do that you can look with, I would invite you to open me to Luke chapter nine, Luke chapter nine, and I just want to share with you the three ways I was provoked this morning to pray for you on this campus.

And they’re straight from Luke chapter nine, verses 57 through 62. So let me read the passage and then I just want to share with you the three ways I am praying for you, and I hope that in sharing these with you, you would be encouraged in these three ways. So here’s what God’s word says. Luke nine verse 57. As they were walking along the road, someone said to him and he is Jesus.

In this story, someone said to Jesus, I will follow you wherever you go. And Jesus said to him, foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head to another. He said, follow me.

But he said, Lord, first let me go and bury my father. And Jesus said to him, leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. Yet another said, I’ll follow you, Lord. But first, let me say farewell to those at my home.

Jesus said to him, no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. So three interactions with three men introduce us to what it means to follow Jesus. It is a very different definition than what we sometimes give for what it means to follow Jesus. This is not admit, believe, confess, pray the prayer and you’re much more involved than that.

I am Compelled to Pray

So here are the three ways I’m compelled to pray for you based on these three interactions between these men and Jesus. So one, I pray that Jesus will be enough for you. I pray that Jesus will be enough for you.

This first guy says to Jesus, I’ll follow you wherever you go. Now, we know from Mark’s version of this story, Mark eight, that this was likely a religious teacher and it was common in that day for religious teachers to attach themselves to a higher teacher or to one with more standing, more crowds even, and that would kind of help them advance their own standing.

So it’s likely this guy is trying to see that Jesus is very popular, and has all kinds of crowds around him. So he’s kind of trying to get in and Jesus is kind of a means for him to climb the ladder, so to speak, among the religious teachers.

Jesus is the End

So Jesus pulls this guy aside. I can almost picture him just kind of putting his hand on his shoulder and saying, I want you to look down this road I’m headed on. I want you to look past all these crowds that are following me right now.

Look past all those crowds one day that will wave palm branches before me. Look past all this, and there’s a cross at the end of this road. And by the way, there are no holiday inns between here and there. I don’t even have a place to lay my head.

In other words, if you follow me, I’m all you’ve got, if you follow me, I’m all you’ve got. You’re not even guaranteed a roof over your head. Jesus is making clear to this man, he is not a means to an end. He is the end. I want you to think about how significant this is.

The Prosperity Gospel

As I travel around the world, I see the rampant spread of what’s called the prosperity gospel. It says it’s all over our country. It’s all over Latin America. It’s all over Africa. Different parts of Asia like Come to Jesus and you’ll get good health.

Come to Jesus, you’ll have wealth. Come to Jesus, you’ll have prosperity, you’ll have success. You’ll have comfort in this world. Come to Jesus and you’ll get these things. And it’s not the gospel. We don’t come to Jesus to get health, wealth, prosperity, comfort, and success.

We come to Jesus to get Jesus. He’s the one we want. He’s the one we need. And the picture here is this man needs to realize, in a way I pray that we will all realize that he is enough, that he is. There’s a security that’s found in him that’s not found in having a shelter over your head.

The Joy of Jesus Compares to Nothing

There’s a joy that’s found in him that all the possessions of this world cannot compare with. So what I’m pleading for you and even my own life is I pray the same things from my own life that we would see Jesus as enough for us and that we would not see Jesus as a means to all these other things in this world.

He’s better than all the best things this world has to offer us, that that would be true in our lives, in our community, together in churches. I think about being in the Himalayas. So it was days before we got to a place where we actually met believers and there was this one night we had hiked up this really high mountain and it was a tough hike and I mean guys are struggling and I mean other guys, not me, but okay, I was struggling.

Pray

So you just kind of take 10 steps and pause to observe the beauty and pray and sit and then 10 more steps. It was just a grueling hike. So we get to the top there and when we get there, we find out that there is a little church that’s meeting that night and I’m thinking, these guys must be the most stout followers of Christ in the world because they come up here for church.

And so I’m thinking all these guys do CrossFit, and so it gets dark and we start seeing these tiny little lights coming up, the trails coming up the mountain, just a few here, a few there. I think these guys have got to be stout. And they get up there.

We Gather to Pray

It’s older women with little children on their backs and they’ve hiked up there where they gather in this little room just cram in. There’s probably 2030 crammed into this little room, one little light bulb hanging in the middle. We’re practically sitting on top of each other and for a few hours they sing, they pray, they read the word.

We encourage one another with the word. They’re talking about how they’re facing persecution in different ways. They’re talking about how they can help one another amidst persecution.

They’re talking about how they want to share the gospel, this person or that person that’s persecuting them. It’s just pure church. So I look at this setting and I think they have so little in this church, it’s so simple. And we might be tempted to think, well, what can we do? Can we send some resources over there to help them?

Spreading the Spirit of God

And this is where I just want to encourage us. The Holy Spirit is doing just fine in that group of people all the resources we surround ourselves with in the church, apparently the word of God, and the Spirit of God are enough to be the church.

And I just want to encourage us, is that enough for us? Or do we need bells and whistles? Do we need all the stuff that we fill our church culture with? There’s Jesus enough for us? Is this word enough for us?

It reminds me of times when I’ve been in underground house church locations, in another part of Asia where I remember the first time I ever met with this small group of church leaders. Now this is a country where it’s illegal to gather together as followers of Christ. And they had heard that I had taught at a seminary in the past.

Studying the Bible

I was a pastor. And so they said, Hey, can you come meet with some of our leaders? They told me to put on a dark jacket and dark pants with a hood over it, and they sneak me into this place where we meet in this secret location.

I thought we’d be doing a Bible study for an hour or so and we start diving into the word and eight hours later we’re still going strong. And they’re like, we want to do this again tomorrow. I was like, okay, maybe tomorrow night they’re like, no.

Tomorrow morning. It’s like, okay, early morning bible study. They said, well, early morning until tomorrow night. It’s like, okay. So the next day we got together, that started a week and a half, 12 hours a day just sitting down with them in these underground locations with the word, they’re just eating it up.

The Book of Nehemiah

I remember early on I was walking through the book of Nehemiah. I was showing ’em background history, the book of Nehemiah, the importance of God’s word in the middle of God’s people.

They came up to me afterward when we were taking a break and they said, we’ve never heard all that about Nehemiah. Can you do that for us? With all the books of the Old Testament? It was like, that’ll take a long time.

They’re like, we want to know God’s word. Okay? So we just started walking through and they wanted to ask all kinds of questions. We get the Song of Solomon. It was a little crazy, but anyway, they’re just hungry. They’re eating it all up. I remember. So for 10 days, pretty much we walked through the Old Testament. We finally finished Malachi. We had one day left and I’m like, okay.

The Proclamation of Jesus’s Kingdom

They’re like, we want to go a full 12 hours. I’m like, okay. So the next morning, I don’t remember where I started. I started something else and somebody in the back raised their hand. They said we have a problem teacher. I was like, what’s the problem?

He said, you’ve taught us the whole Old Testament, but you’ve not taught us the New Testament. And they said we would like the New Testament today. So it’s like, okay, so that’s 12 hours. We just walked from Matthew Revelation.

They love this word. They love it. It’s the word of Jesus. They love it. It’s worth their lives to know it. Is this the way you feel about his words? Is his word enough for you? Is it better for you than anything else you have or can go to in this world?

You live on this word. I mean, I pray that Jesus will be enough for you and his word, his spirit relationship with him, intimacy with him. And you’d be like, Jesus, you’re the end of my life. I got to move on Second. Second, I pray that the proclamation of Jesus’s kingdom will be the priority and all your plans and dreams. I pray that the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom will be the priority in all your plans and dreams.

We Must Follow Jesus

This second guy, Jesus says, follow me. He says, Lord, first lemme go and bury my father. Some scholars kind of disagree, others whether or not this guy’s dad had actually died yet or not, maybe he was about to die or he had just died.

So either way though, think about it. This man, his dad, has just died. So of course he wants to go back and give his father a proper burial, which is something he would want to do and something he would be expected to do to honor his dad. Some people believe his dad was just about to die.

So he just wants to spend the last couple of days with his dad and then give him a proper barrel. Then it’ll come. And Jesus says, leave the dead to bury their own dead. As for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. I remember the moment I got a call when my dad, the best friend in my life, had passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack.

Jesus’ Word is Powerful

I can’t imagine hearing those words and those moments I leave, letting somebody else do the funeral. You have more important things to do. So that’s why I say I pray that the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom will be the priority in all your plans and dreams.

Basically what the Bible is teaching us here is that there is a priority, if I could use the word, an urgency to the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom that supersedes everything else like we are here on this earth for the proclamation of Jesus’ Kingdom. Just so important, right? When there are people in the world who for the last 2000 years have never even heard the good news of the kingdom, why is that? Because we’re apparently not prioritizing the proclamation of his kingdom.

We Must Proclaim Jesus’ Kingdom

It would not be possible if the church, if we as followers of Christ, were prioritizing the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom to the ends of the earth, then there would not be 2 billion in the world today who have little to no knowledge of the gospel. So I pray that this will be the priority in all your plans and dreams.

So as you think about your life see the grace God has given you unique grace that God has given you for the proclamation of his kingdom. So you go into those mountains and there are all kinds of people that you meet who have this priority and meet teachers who could be teaching anywhere in the world, but they’ve moved to teach in those villages for the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom.

There are medical nurses who’ve moved up into those mountains working in health outposts for the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom.

Aquaponics and the Gospel

I think about one guy, Ben, he’s an aquaponics expert. Do you know what aquaponics is? It deals with trout, poop, and waste. I can’t really explain it. He can, with zeal, explain how you can take trout poop and turn it into fruitful agriculture for people who are in need using PVC pipes and all kinds of other things. It’s crazy the way it works actually, bamboo.

But anyway, I’m getting into details that I shouldn’t be getting into. The beauty is though, I’m sitting there listening to Ben and I’m like, I didn’t get this in seminary. I didn’t get this in college, but that’s the beauty. He didn’t go to seminary. He has skills in aquaponics and he’s using these skills for the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom to the ends of the earth. And so I just ask you the question, what are the skills God has given you?

What Unique Gifts Has God Given You?

What are the unique grace gifts God’s given you? The education you’re getting now? I was talking with one student yesterday in engineering and just said, okay, I see the need in the world, so maybe I just need almost like, should I just forget about engineering? Forget about school here and just go be a part of that?

It’s like, no. Use engineering to open up doors for the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom in the world. And I think about one nurse, who finishes nursing school. She starts looking for a job. She strategically looks for a job in a part of the world where there is no gospel access. She goes and moves into the Middle East, and now works in a hospital right in the heart of the Middle East.

She’s risen up in the ranks of that hospital in the Middle East. She’s now head of nursing over that hospital in a significant city in the Middle East. She’s head over nursing. She had a Bible study every week in her office with Muslims and nobody stopped her. Do you know why? Because she’s really good at nursing.

Better the World with God’s Grace

I want to exert you to excel in all the grace that God has given you for the spread of his kingdom and his glory to the ends of the earth to see what if God has designed the globalization of today’s marketplace for the spread of his glory to the ends of the earth, the degrees you are getting here, open up all kinds of doors for the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom in the world.

So may this be your priority, then See your degree through this lens as you think about your plans, your dreams, as you think about marriage. Don’t marry somebody whose heart doesn’t beat for the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth. Prioritize the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom and your plans, your dreams for your life. This is the most important thing. There are people right now. More bodies are being put on funeral pyres in the Himalayas.

Proclaim Jesus’s Kingdom

They need our campus filled with an urgent priority on the proclamation of Jesus’ kingdom. So I pray that it’ll be so. Finally, third, I pray. I pray that you will love Jesus more than your own life. I pray that you’ll love Jesus more than your own life. This last guy says, lemme just say farewell to those at my home.

Just want to go back and say goodbye to Mom and Dad, brothers, and sisters. Jesus says, no one who puts his hand in the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. In other words, when you follow Jesus, there is a superior affection here that supersedes all the other affections. And that’s, I think, the heart of the issue. Like when I go into these mountains and meet those who have followed Jesus, I think about one couple that chose to follow Jesus knowing it would be costly for them.

They were immediately ostracized in their village. They couldn’t use the water source. I mean, you depend on the community for so much, they’re totally ostracized from that community. One day they were out working in the fields and Word came back to their daughter who I was talking with, that a landslide had come and killed their parents, killed her parents.

Let Us All Believe in Jesus

And the village leaders said this is because they started believing in Jesus. Don’t believe in Jesus. Bad things will happen to you. Their daughter later came to find out that a landslide did not kill her parents. Village leaders had actually stoned. Her parents made up this story. And to this day in that village, people when they hear about Jesus will say, oh, don’t believe in him. Remember what happened with a landslide?

Here’s a couple who love Jesus more than their own lives. Our daughter, who now loves Jesus more than her own life. So I just want to invite us to join with them and see Jesus as more precious, the life itself and to live as Christ, to die is gain.

And when that is your perspective on life when you realize that by the power of the gospel, the very worst thing that could happen to you, death has actually been turned into the best thing that can happen to you. Eternal life with Jesus, and you are free to live very differently from the rest of this world. You’re free to live with love for him and love for others laying down your life for that which matters most in eternity.

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