The Beautiful Hope of the Gospel

In the middle of our home hangs a painting. It’s a picture of how I want my life and family and church to count. It comes from trails I tracked among some of the highest mountains in the world. And for a few minutes, I want to take you there with me.

Something Needs To Change

I want to take you to a place where children are dying of preventable diseases. Little girls, as young as eight years old are being sold into slavery and almost no one has even heard the name of Jesus. I want to take you to a place where I wrestled with God and discovered that something needs to change in the world and in me.

Here we are in Himalayas, landed a little over 12,000 feet on a helicopter actually right there. We’re in a village right now. It’s kind of base for us in these massive mountains. I mean, we’re at 12,000 feet right now, but you look around and we’re halfway up some of these peaks around you. You feel like you’re in a valley compared to some of these peaks. So majesty of these mountains, really, it’s hard to describe.

We Need to Share The Hope Of The Gospel

As I walked those trails, I quickly realized that it’s not all beauty. This is a landslide that happened to my right. You can see the part of the mountain just fell off. And there used to be a village right here, like a large village. And one day it was just operating as normal, and then this landslide sent rocks tumbling down, and now the village, just like that became a graveyard.

I see faces in villages of people, old and young, little kids, and I’m walking over a place where 100s of them, I don’t know how many, but their bodies are buried underneath here. Little kids just like mine. These are individual people just like you and me, who died without ever hearing, many of them, without ever hearing the good news of God’s love.

Eternity is real and life is brief and we don’t have a lot of time. And others around us don’t have a lot of time. So how can we live with urgency right where we are? And then how might God be leading us to go?

These mountains, like every peak just shouts His greatness. Like these peaks, these mountains are ultimately insufficient, like they’re not sufficient to show the grace of God to the people in these mountains.

They shout His glory every single day, but not one moment have they ever shouted the Gospel, like the good news that Jesus has died on a cross and risen from the grave. And that’s what we have the privilege of proclaiming. We have the privilege of proclaiming something that’s even greater than what these mountains proclaim every day. We’ve got to take advantage of that privilege.

What an honor. We get to bring good news that the God who created these mountains loves you and has made a way for you to be forgiven of your sins and to be in a relationship with Him. Like this peak right here, the people in these mountains believe is a god. 60, 70 people have died trying to scale it.

They believe it’s a god who doesn’t want to be known. And praise God, the God who created that mountain and these mountains wants to be known. And we have the privilege of making Him known right outside our doors every day. And then we have the privilege of doing that among people who’ve never heard that news. Let’s give our lives making the good news of God’s grace known to people who’ve never heard it, doing what these mountains can’t even do.

God Created Us to Share The Hope Of The Gospel With Others

God has created us. He’s designed us, each of us uniquely to make a difference in a world of urgent need. We’ve all got unique gifts and skills, talents and resources to make His grace and His glory known in the world right around us and far from us. And so I think it just starts with taking a first step, just saying, “What can I do to make God’s grace and glory known in somebody’s life around me who’s in need?” He wants our lives to count for his glory. So start with a first step and then see where God leads as He takes the unique grace and gifts that He’s given you, and He uses them in ways far beyond what you could ever imagine.

I don’t know what’s happening here. I don’t know many scenes that are more sobering than this. When a friend or family member dies, within 24 hours of them dying they bring the body to this river. They place the body on the funeral pyre and they set it ablaze and they believe that as the ashes go down into the river, this is helpful in the process of reincarnation. It’s so overwhelming to look at a scene like this and realize you’re looking at a physical picture of a spiritual reality.

These people who 24 hours before we’re alive are in eternal suffering, a place where Jesus describes a fire that will never go out. Like never, ever, ever for all of eternity, and that they can’t place their faith in Him and receive eternal life if they don’t even hear about.

I remember the first time I came down out of these mountains, we were walking down a street just like this, looked like a normal street with shops and restaurants. I looked in one of the restaurants and it was like there were cubicles around the booths where people eat, and I remembered immediately what I had heard about trafficking, how many girls who were brought out of those mountains or taken in other countries. Those who are left in the city though, are put to work in what they call cabin restaurants where a man will come in and take a girl into this cubicle, close it, share a meal with her, and then do with her whatever he pleases.

When I realized what I was looking at, I saw on the steps a couple of girls and my eyes locked with one of them. She smiled at me and she motioned for me to come over to her. In this tense twist of emotions, I wanted to run away and be a part of rescuing her at the same time.

I looked away. I felt sick that she even thought I wanted to come over to her. And I kept walking and I saw another one and another one and another one, and I just wanted to get out of the scene, pretend that this wasn’t real.

I couldn’t get back to my room that night fast enough, and as soon as I got back, I threw my pack down and just fell on the floor and I couldn’t stop weeping.

(Singing)

You know, one thing I’ve learned in these mountains is that even in the midst of what seems like some of the most hopeless pictures in this world, there is hope that is shining through. I found myself in a room for art therapy with a group of young girls who had been trafficked and who’d been rescued, and they were doing a painting.

(Singing)

Finding Hope In The Gospel

These young girls who have found hope and found redemption and new life, they were doing this painting. I didn’t realize what they were doing until I prepared to leave the country, and my friend brought me this poster rolled up and I unrolled it and it was this beautiful multicolored map of the world. And right in the middle had Psalm 67 verse three, “Let the peoples praise you, oh God. Let all the peoples praise you.” My friend said, “This is what they were painting when we walked into that art therapy session.” And my heart just leapt because this is it. This is what happens when hope is brought into otherwise hopeless situations. When the love of Jesus is made known in the midst of urgent, spiritual, and physical need in the world, beauty is the result. Beauty that resounds to the praise of God.

(Singing)

This is what I want to live for. This is what we want to live for, right? I want my life to count for the spread of love and mercy and beauty from God in the most hopeless and the hard situations in the world. Don’t you? Don’t you want your life to count for that?

Let’s do this. Let’s lay down our lives, our families, our churches, and let’s live to show the love of God and see the beauty of God resounding to the glory of God among all the peoples. That’s what we live for. Let the peoples praise you, oh God. Let all the peoples praise you for your love and your grace and your mercy and your redemption and your hope, the hope that is found in Jesus alone. (Singing)