Author: Jake Embleton
Every year after Christmas services, Central hands out a book to each family to read for the series that starts in January. This year’s book is titled “Crazy Love” by Francis Chan.
You can imagine from the title that the book is based on the enormous love that God has for you and I. I can tell you from experience, it is awesome! I love it! In fact, I would challenge you to find something better on this planet than God’s crazy love for us!
However, as I have been reading this book, one of the thoughts that keeps swirling around in my head is there are still so many people on the planet that do not know about this crazy love God has for them.
Did you know that approximately 3 billion people in the world are considered “unreached” by this crazy love? Unreached means less than 2% of the country are Christians. In other words, they do not have a thriving existence of a local church that could “reach” their people with the crazy love of Jesus.
Currently, there are about 7.5 billion people living on the planet, which means about 40% of the people are considered unreached! What?! How is that possible? This is 2018! We have radio, TV, internet, satellites all over the world, phones that can do all kinds of crazy cool things, and we still have billions of people who have never heard of Jesus in a meaningful way.
Did you know that the world has about 7,100 languages, but only 670 of the languages in the world have the whole Bible translated? What?! Less than 10% of the world’s languages have the entire translation of the Bible! That is astonishing to me. When I take in these statistics it is hard to imagine, especially since the command of Jesus to go into the entire world and make disciples was given over 2,000 years ago!
At this point, you may be asking yourself, what does all of this mean for me? In Matthew 24:14, , Jesus said, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” The Greek word for nations here is the word “ethne,” which means people groups, or people with their own culture, customs, language, and possibly even land. Regarding Matthew 24:14, hopefully those of us who call ourselves Jesus followers are striving to have Him come back. We want to be in his presence to experience more of Him. However, Jesus has made it clear that all the ethne (people groups) must hear the Gospel before He comes back. We see a glimpse of this beauty in Revelations 7:9 where it says,
“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”
The question becomes, what can we do to help hasten the day of his return? Here are five roles that each of us can play to help see the Gospel of the Kingdom (His crazy love) preached to all the nations.
Goer – We need more people to take the good news of Jesus to the unreached peoples of the world, plain and simple. Currently, there about 6,500 people groups around the world that still need to be reached for the Kingdom.
Prayer – We need more people on their knees in deep intercessory prayer for the nations to be reached, praying for miracles, divine intervention, the workers of the country, etc.
Sender – We need people to encourage, support, champion and love people who are planning to go overseas or who are currently living overseas. It has been said that it takes about 100 people to help send one Goer overseas to the unreached.
Welcomers – We need more people to help welcome the internationals that are coming to the US. There are currently over 20,000 international students studying here in Arizona’s universities and colleges. Many of these people come from areas of the world that are considered unreached for the Gospel! Unfortunately, 80% of International Students will never be invited into an American home. We also have refugees that come to the US who need the tender loving care of someone that will welcome them.
Mobilzer- We need more people to bring awareness and training to churches about the unreached people groups of the world. Mobilizers do this by helping train goers to live effectively in a cross-cultural environment.
I am not sure about you, but I long to experience more of the love of Jesus that can only fill an empty soul and bring true joy to this crazy world. I am convinced that the people of the world desperately needs to experience is more of the crazy love of Jesus. What are you doing to help hasten the day of Jesus’ return? Which of the five roles are you going to fill? If you want more information about any of them, feel free to contact the Global Outreach Department.
Come on church, let us hasten the day!