May the Earth Be Blessed (Genesis 28:14)

Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
—Genesis 28:14

If you spend much time praying the Word through this podcast, I’m guessing you know where Genesis 28:14 is headed. Let me read it one more time, just in case you missed it. God is saying to Jacob, “Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

Genesis 28:14 teaches God’s purpose to bless all families of the earth.

We’ve already prayed this multiple times in Genesis, and we pray this over and over again in this podcast, because this is evident over and over and over again in God’s Word. We are called to pray according to God’s Word—God’s promise to bring his blessing to all the peoples, nations, tribes, languages, families of the earth. Note the phrase: families of the earth. Not just God’s blessing on one family, but God’s desire to bless all the families of the earth.

We often pray in light of these promises for families, peoples, nations, and ethnic groups who right now know nothing about the blessing of God—who don’t even have access to the good news of God’s grace in Jesus. Unreached people in the world right now are born, live, and die, and they never even meet a follower of Jesus who shares the gospel with them—never once encounter a Christian or a church.

Today, I think about the Jhalo Malo people of India—zero followers of Jesus among approximately half a million people. Not one follower of Jesus in this people group, which is very low caste in western India—at the bottom of the social rung, ignored, looked down upon, despised by so many—and they’ve never even heard the good news of Jesus’s love.

Genesis 28:14 points us toward sending the gospel to unreached peoples.

And God says all throughout his Word, “I bless my people for the spread of the gospel to all peoples.” So let’s think about this right where we live. Let’s realize that those of us who are praying right now and who know God’s love in Jesus are surrounded today by people who need to know God’s love in Jesus.

So yes, let’s be faithful to share the gospel today. Let’s pray that God would use our lives, our lips, to lead people to Jesus today. Let’s pray for that. At the same time, let’s realize that even if every single one of us, wherever we live, was sharing the gospel today—working to lead people to Jesus right around us—the Jhalo Malo people would still be unreached by the gospel because they don’t have anyone near them.

And so we must also pray that God would send people out to places and peoples where the gospel has not yet gone, if we actually want the blessing of God to be made known among all the families of the earth—all the nations, all the peoples, all the tribes of the earth.

A Prayer for the Jhalo Malo People

So we pray: O God, right now, for the Jhalo Malo people of western India. God, we pray that your grace and blessing and mercy in Jesus would be made known among them. God, we pray for this half a million people, none of them knowing your love and your grace in Jesus.

So God, we pray that you would change that—that you would cause somebody to go to them. Raise up laborers for the harvest field, we pray. Cause your gospel to go to the Jhalo Malo people of India, we pray and plead. And God, we pray that you might raise up somebody who’s praying right now to go, or that you would use our resources to get the gospel to them. Use our lives, God.

Yes, use our lives today to spread the gospel right around us. Help us to be faithful—to share the good news of your love in Jesus today. Help us not to be silent with the greatest news in the world, filled with the power of your Holy Spirit.

A Prayer for Gospel Faithfulness

God, help us to proclaim and share the gospel today. And God, don’t let us stop with places in the world—including where we live—where the gospel has already gone. We pray that you would send us out to places where the gospel hasn’t gone—that you would spend our lives, our resources, and our churches getting the gospel to every single family of the earth, every single nation of the earth, every single people group on the planet.

God, we pray: use our lives, use your Church toward that end, and don’t let us rest in a false sense of completion. Yes, of course, O God, we pray for daily rest in you—for enjoyment of the rest that you’ve made possible for us in Jesus. At the same time, God, we pray for a holy discontentment in your Church until the blessing of the gospel is made known among all the nations of the earth, just as you have promised you would bring about since Genesis 28, Genesis 26, Genesis 12, Genesis 1—your glory multiplied throughout the earth.

We pray for the spread of your glory among all the nations, that you would use our lives, our prayers—even right now—toward that end. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.