Mountains of information.
Closed Borders.
A task with long periods of unmeasurable progress.
Is their eternity worth it?
God thinks so.
I want to use this post to bring measurements to the Great Commission. All of this has been done before, so none of it is my own. But let's start with some statistics of our situation:
About 42% of the world are "unreached" in the sense that they:
are less than 2% evangelical Christian
have no mention of Christ, no Scripture in their languages
have no church
and
cannot know Jesus even if they wanted to
Per the traveling team, that means that about 3.1+ billion people can't know Jesus at all.
Per Radius International, that means that "There are still approximately 3,000 ENTIRE LANGUAGE GROUPS that have NO VIABLE CHURCH planted in them yet".
Ok. so what does this mean for you, here, on this blog post? Because entire courses have been written and taught on the subject. It's a lot. What it means is that, if you aren't already started on your journey of understanding how you, yes, YOU play a role in the greatest purpose of human history, you are missing out.
How do I not miss out?
What is the appropriate path one should take? Everyone's path looks different, yes, and, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge..." (Hosea 4:6)*
So if you want to understand what you're missing out on, it starts with God's promise to Abraham: "in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed". Galatians 3:7-14 makes it clear that we believers are IN Abraham. Which looks kind of like this:
God rained blessing on Abraham, then Israel, then all those In Christ. You always have to be a part of the fountain to get the rainwater. the blessing. God wants everyone to join his pool party. Ok, poor metaphor. But he DOES want everyone to know him personally.
Step 1 on not missing out? Go back and understand your place in history. Start with God's promise to Abraham and read through to the Great Commission, where Jesus says something like,
"Ok guys, just in case it hasn't been really clear this whole time, God wants to be in a relationship with everyone because He loves everyone. So go invite them to the fountain of blessing."
Or maybe he said something like, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20) .
Yeah, that sounds more like Jesus.
Wait, so how do I not miss out again?
Oh yeah! Here's some things you can do to be a part of God's mission to bless the world:
Read the story from Abraham to Revelation (where is God in it? where are you?)
Think about what you're good at
Apply those skills to:
going
making disciples and baptizing
teaching your disciples
Pray that God would raise up more laborers
Pray for current laborers
Pray for your own disciples (lots of praying)
Resource those who are going (i.e. free up their time to multiply their work!)
Lastly, educate others. Millions of Christians have no idea that they have a part to play in blessing the world with Jesus Christ. If they do, they usually think that it's a very small part to play.
If you know me, you know that I am training now to go and be with one of these unreached peoples. Will you drop me an email at the1040guy@gmail.com so we can pray for each other?
You can read the next post in this series below.
In Christ, In Abraham,