“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets.”
– Matthew 7:12
Matthew 7:12 is the golden rule, right? Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them. What if we lived like that? That changes your life and the lives of everybody around you. This is selfless, compassionate, caring love for the people around us, in our homes. And what would it look like for us to love our spouses in this way, to love our children in this way, for our children to love one another in this way, for children to love their parents in this way, for us to love coworkers in these ways, for us to love people around us, in neighborhoods and apartment complexes in these ways, for us to love enemies, as we saw in Matthew 5, in these ways, for us to love people who are without Christ in these ways?
This Verse Reminds Us to Love Others
Father, help us to love the unreached as ourselves. Might we be compelled to spend our lives for the sake of the nations being glad.
Let me take this to a full extreme. We pray often in this podcast for unreached people groups, and I’m always using the Joshua Project App. If you don’t have that app, let me encourage you to download that app and build that into your daily time and prayer before the Lord. It’ll take 60 seconds of your day to just pause and pray for a group of people who are unreached, who have never even heard the good news of God’s love. So I’m looking at today’s, the Malay in Indonesia. 3, 251,000 people among the Malay in Indonesia. Most of them, so it says 0.0%, there may be a few followers of Jesus. Among three million, a few followers of Jesus among the Malay in Indonesia.
Matthew 7:12 Leads Us to Pray for the Malay People
And there are a part of the Malay people group that goes far beyond Indonesia. Think about the Malay of Malaysia, one of the most unreached, hardest to reach people groups in the world, strongly identifying as Muslim. To be Malay is to be Muslim. I mean, it’s illegal in Malaysia to share the Gospel with a Malay, to desire for them to come to know Jesus. And there have been strong, stiff penalties, people disappearing or dying for sharing the Gospel with the Malay.
So I just want to ask the question based on Matthew 7:12, if you were Malay, you’d never heard the good news of God’s love in Jesus, which means you are in your sin right now on a road that leads to an eternal hell and nobody’s ever even told you how you can go to heaven. It’s illegal in your country, if you’re in Malaysia, for anybody to tell you that.
Matthew 7:12 Reminds Us to Share the Gospel
So if that’s you, what would you want someone to do for you who has the greatest news in the world about how you can be saved for all of eternity from your sin, how you can be restored to a relationship with God for eternal life? What would you want someone to do? Well, I’m guessing first and foremost, you’d at least want them to download a prayer app that reminds you to pray for them and to call out for them to come to know Jesus and then wouldn’t you want them to work, to make some kind of sacrifice, to help send the Gospel to them, to help send missionaries to Malaysia, or maybe to go to Malaysia yourself and to take the risk, to risk imprisonment, to risk your life, to make this good news known to you.
Wouldn’t you want somebody to do that? Wouldn’t you want that instead of them sitting back and doing nothing, never even thinking about you, never praying for you, never giving to help get the Gospel to you, never even being willing to take a risk, to get the Gospel to you?
This Verse Lead Us to Pray for Help Sharing the Gospel
No, you would not want them to do that. You would not want them to do what so many followers of Christ in churches who have the Gospel do, totally ignore her, the unreached. So, God, we pray that you’d help us to love the unreached as ourselves, to do what we would want somebody to do for us if we were in their shoes, to do whatever it takes to get the greatest news in the world to us, the news of Jesus’ love to us.
So, God, we want to do it now. God, we want to pray. We pray to you for the Malay. This is part of what you’ve told us to do. We pray that in your power you would bring Malay around the world to know you. God, we pray for that. We plead for that. We pray that whether it’s through dreams or visions, that you would open Malay eyes. God, we pray that they would somehow be exposed to your word. Send missionaries and send the followers of Jesus to them.
Matthew 7:12 Leads Us to Pray For Help Loving the Unreached
God, if you’re calling us to go, send us to them. If you’re not calling us to go, use our resources to help people get the Gospel to them. And God help us, whoever specifically, physically go to pay the price, to be willing to sacrifice so that Malay people might know your love for them. God, I pray in my own life, my own family, my own church and in every life, family, church represented in this podcast episode. God help us to love the unreached as ourselves. Help us to do for them what we would wish that others would do for us. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
