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Great Commission

The church has made great progress in missions in the past century. Consider the last 25 years. I vividly remember being challenged as a college student to pray for, give toward or go to the USSR, Albania, Romania and China. At the time these four countries represented some of the most difficult, thorny, rock-hard fields for the message of God’s love in Christ. Yet today all four of these nations have been fundamentally changed. The USSR no longer exists. Albania has been saturated with the gospel and hosts a thriving church. Romania has student-led movements all over the country and has been sending out missionaries for years, even to China. On a typical Chinese campus one in every five students who hears the good news will begin following Jesus.

What happened? God worked. He worked through the prayers of the saints, the obedience of his church, and the life-on-life impact of faithful believers. Wow. Be amazed!

But…we’re a long way from done. My friend Paul frequently updates me on how well the church is doing on “getting to where we’re not.” Here are a few stats to bring some hard – and uncomfortable – data into the equation. One day people from EVERY tribe, tongue, people and ethnic group will worship God together, but…

Did you know…

  • 2,251 languages have no Scripture and no one working on them.
  • 1,953 languages have someone that has begun work but, as yet, they do not have one book of the Bible available.
  • Impact: 300 million people living in 4,204 groups have no access to Scripture in their own language.
  • There are many ways of figuring the number of unreached groups in the world. Since 2000, about 6,000 of 12,000 have been “reached,” meaning there are at least 2% evangelical believers. Of the remaining 6,000 groups, 3,400 have no known witness for the Lord. There are about 600 million people (twice the population of the USA) in these Unengaged Unreached People Groups (UUPGs in missions lingo).
  • We need revolutionary approaches to rekindle intentional outreach to the 1.3 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus and 700 million Buddhists alive today.
  • The easy and difficult places have been reached. The most challenging, difficult places remain before us.

In spite of this…

  • 94% of active missionaries are working among the 14% of the most evangelized ethnic groups.
  • Of every $1,000 given toward Christian missions, only 10 cents goes toward Muslim evangelism.

I invite you to download this 3 page summary from the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelism and join me in praying through the top 11 priorities of the global church. Let’s do what we can to change the world.

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During the Go! Missions Conference in College Station, Texas, I’ll walk through these twelve passages which progressively reveal God’s heart to bless the nations through the person of Jesus Christ.

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Genesis 12:1-3

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us,

that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. Psalm 67:1-2

And now the Lord says, he who formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him; and that Israel might be gathered to him— for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord, and my God has become my strength— he says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Isaiah 49:5-6

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction…. These twelve Jesus sent out Matthew 9:35-10:1, 5

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:16-20

And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.” Mark 16:15

And [Jesus] said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Luke 24:46-47

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” John 20:21

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Acts 1:8

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. 2 Peter 3:9

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands… Revelation 7:9

All Scripture quotes from the English Standard Version

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“Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!” – God, Psalm 46:10

We are currently witnessing a resurgence of spiritually motivated student activism around the world. “God will accomplish His purposes,” our former pastor used to say, “with us if He may, without us if He must.” The longer Ann and I are involved in God’s global harvest, the easier it is to believe we are on the brink of seeing His Great Commission fulfilled.

One of my many lame excuses for few recent blog posts has been extensive travel over the past two months. From Cape Town to Cairo, from LA to Canada, and from Hungary to Thailand, dozens of conversations with field staff and student leaders confirm that God is accomplishing His work at a seemingly accelerated rate.

• Kristoff, a German student who attended the CM2007 missions conference in Korea last July, was convicted by those students sitting in the “no photos” section because they came from countries where they faced persecution. “We’re not risking anything,” he said. He has mobilized a prayer movement, calling fellow students to believe God together for gospel-resistant German campuses.

• I recently attended a gathering in Hungary of about 500 Christians who minister throughout 19 countries in Eastern Europe and Russia. A majority of these teams saw between 5-20 students indicate decisions to follow Jesus Christ just last semester. Several of these locations have been notoriously hard soil.

• In “closed” East Asia, one multinational team comprised of 4 staff members and 5 volunteers has seen God open up student-led ministries on 30 campuses in 4 cities. Please read that again and let it soak in. I asked Andy, the team leader, what his secret was. “Asking students to be in a prayer group or join a Bible study is not a challenge,” he replied. “We show them God’s big heart for the nations from day 1, then invite them to change their world. We’ve discovered that this way the students don’t think ‘Hey wait, I need a staff member to help me,’ or ‘I need permission to….’ They just go for it and start leading.”

Lesson for us: History is moving toward a very clear end which culminates in the God of the Bible being glorified in every nation. Students have always been the lever that moves the world. Let’s get everyone we can think of out of the bleachers and onto the field.

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