Challenges from the world's reality

The following is an excerpt from a John Piper sermon….what do these truths stir up in you?

Satan's great lie in the past generation has been that the Great Commission is completed, and so the church can forget her wartime mentality. People confused the "nations" of Matthew 28:19 ("Make disciples of all nations") with political nations of our day and concluded that disciples have been made in every nation, so the end can come. But they forget the song of heaven in Revelation 5:9 where Christ is praised: "Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals, for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation."

When Jesus commissioned his church to disciple the peoples, he did not have in mind merely political boundaries. He had in mind the distant, distinct groups including tribes and tongues and peoples. And today there are over 16,000 such groups undiscipled.

If every Christian in the world won all his neighbors to Christ, half the world would be unevangelized; because two billion people make up culturally distant people groups who do not have an indigenous witness. They are the "hidden peoples," the "frontier missions" of our day. The only way they can be reached is by cross-cultural missionaries. The day of foreign missions is not over. On the contrary, we stand on the brink of a new movement in the western and third-world churches to penetrate the last frontier.

One-hundred-fifty Protestant missionaries from North America serve among 733 million Muslims in 4,000 Muslim people groups; 100 missionaries among 537 million Hindus in 3,000 Hindu people groups; 200 missionaries among 405 million Han Chinese, and 200 missionaries among 255 million Buddhists, for a total of 650 Protestant North American missionaries among a little less than half the world's population who are basically unreached (1,930,000,000). And then we look at America.

There are more churches in the Twin Cities than there are missionaries to almost two billion Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, and Buddhist people. Is that obedience? Americans give $700 million dollars a year to mission agencies—the same amount they spend on chewing gum. Every 52 days Americans spend as much on pet food as they do annually on foreign missions. And the reason for these things is not that we are living for pleasure, but that we do not believe Jesus when he says that a hundred times more pleasure can be had by forsaking everything for his sake and for the gospel.