Everlasting Joy For All Peoples - Part 2

Southern Baptist International Board of Missions, missions board. Go to the website IMB, not IBM, that will get you the wrong place. I did it last night. What's wrong with this? IBM, this is what I'm supposed to type in. I kept getting this computer website. imb.org slash global research and you will find out a lot of information. Now there are other sites where you can get it, but I have a lot of confidence because they invest a lot of money in research so they're not spinning their wheels reaching the reach. They use, for their practical purposes, the number 11,227 people groups in the world total. I know you've heard 24,000 and 17,000 and other numbers. It just depends on how you divide up the dialects and things like that, but just go with 11,000 for now. Of those 11,000, 6,614 of them have fewer than 2% evangelical believers. 68 of those 6,000 plus have populations over 10 million. 433 have populations 1 to 10 million. 1,452 have populations between 100,000 and 1 million. And if you wondered which of these are the ones with zero evangelicals or at least zero churches, you can go there and find out, but I didn't go into that much detail here. The need for missionaries to cross cultures in order to plant the Church of Jesus Christ and bring about people praising the Lord from all peoples is great today. If you hear somebody say, the day of Western missions is over. Let's just send money and let the two-thirds world evangelize their own. That statement can be based on several mistakes. This is not a true statement. It's a false way of thinking. It could be that the person who says it doesn't believe that a person has to know the God and Father of Jesus in order to be saved, and God doesn't intend for it to happen that way. Or it could be that they don't believe in hell, and therefore missions is not very important and nobody's really perishing. Or it could be that they believe that local Christians would do better at evangelizing their own than a foreign American coming there with all of his cultural baggage. Problem. There aren't any local Christians to evangelize these peoples. That's the meaning of unreached. And where there are little struggling outposts of Christian discipleship, they don't have the wherewithal to do all that needs to be done. And here's another fact that a lot of people don't take into consideration, whereas if you talk to missiologists, they'll tell you, it is not obvious that proximity makes a person more acceptable in a tribe. There may be age-old hostilities across a mountain range, whereas a person coming from a thousand miles away might be the appointed one of God to bring the message, whereas it's going to take a hundred years of church discipleship to get these two tribes together. It isn't obvious. Don't ever say the day of Western missions is over. Oh say, say the day of two-thirds or one-third missions has come. Say that. That's a glorious thing God has done in the last twenty-five years or so to raise up thousands of mission agencies among the third world. Say that. But don't say the day of our involvement is over. Never say that. So, if you have children in your family, or you know any children, and they think peoples is not a word, you've got some work to do here. Can I suggest something? I raised four boys, and then I started over again with talent. I say I. We. Couldn't have done it without Noel. We raised them on this book, which is published every month, called the Global Prayer Digest. And what it is is one page for every day of the month on a people group. Our boys grew up expecting a story about a people group at the breakfast table every morning for years and years and years, which is why it was an absolute given, no-brainer, they would do a missions project overseas during their teen years. They even have pre-teen programs at Teen Mission International now in Florida, where Abraham did one when he was ten. Benjamin, being the radical in the family, wanted to go as far as he could go, so he went to Papua New Guinea. 30 hours in a boat, went up there, and was at the place where Marilyn Laszlo was. You need to breed missionaries in your family, and Ralph Winter used to say that nobody is changed by anything that they don't do daily. That's an overstatement. Ralph Winter only talks in overstatements. He's got to know that about Ralph Winter. But every overstatement is made an overstatement, because there's a point to be made, and that's a good point, that if you do something daily with your family, you can get this online, free, or you can do it like we do it and pay, what, six dollars a year or something, and have a book. So now it's in the front of our big family Bible, and when Noel and Talitha and I have our evening devotions, this comes out, and if I start on this first, Talitha says, what about the story? What about the story? So I fully expect my daughter to be gone some summers, all the summers, when she's a teenager, and then after that I pray forever, and then I'll see her in heaven, which will be just, oh may God give us as a church teenagers and children who not only know peoples is a word, but know why, and want to be involved in doing Psalm 117. Praise the Lord all peoples! And when the kids say that, they know what that means. You've got to get out there. You've got to tell them something. You've got to help them know this, Lord, and know how their sins have been forgiven, and know how Jesus has risen from the dead to obliterate the power of the devil so that they can be liberated by missionaries. May the Lord raise up people like Scotty, like the bunch of you sitting out there, to go. I pray that, I just wonder, I just throw this out for your consideration, I wonder how many of our personal problems as families and singles, personal problems, problems, are at least partly owing to the fact that our focus in life is so small. It's on the family, it's on us, and our health, and our condition, and our psychological makeup, and our kids, and their school, and our church, and this little community in the American way. And God is a God who says, I've got a purpose for the world. You want to get on board with me? You might get healthy. Your soul is made to expand with God around a global purpose so that these faces kind of draw you out with health, not kind of shrink you into your little self. I just think a lot of personal problems are owing to small-mindedness, narrow-mindedness, narrow-mindedness.