John 3:35-36 Declaring His Glory Among the Nations

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

Well, first of all, I'd just like to say thank you to Recast. Thank you for your prayers. Thank you for your support for our ministry at Western Michigan University. And thank you for the invitation to your marriage retreat coming up later this month.

Abby and I are very excited to join you for that. So, for those of you who are going, we look forward to getting to know a few of you better in that environment. This morning, we're going to do something a little bit different.

The Gospel Preached to All Nations Before Christ Returns

And I'd like to just start by reading one verse of Scripture. It's probably a verse that you know well. In Matthew 24, verse 14. I'll give you a chance to turn there. Matthew 24, verse 14. So, in this passage, Jesus is talking really about the end of the age.

And what are going to be some of the signs that occur before he returns. And he gives a number of things that are going to happen. And all of them are negative. We hear about earthquakes and wars and rumors of wars and false teachers.

But there's one positive thing. One sign of the end of the age that will occur immediately in the era prior to Jesus returning. And in verse 14, we read, Now, in this passage, Jesus is not saying that everybody is going to believe in him before the end comes.

But he is saying that the gospel will be preached among all nations prior to his return. And so I'd just like to ask a simple question this morning. As a Christian community, and I mean not just recast, I mean as a Christian community, global Christian community, how are we doing with that task?

Where are we at in relationship to that? Is the gospel, in fact, as Jesus predicted, being preached to all the nations today? What is the status of world evangelism today? What still needs to be done?

What are some of the encouraging things that are happening? Where are we in relationship to this task? And so we're just going to look at that question this morning. We're going to ask ourselves, you know, why do we believe in missions?

Where have we been in the last 200 years? You know, we've seen some incredible things happen in the last 200 years in world evangelism. And what's happening right now globally? So that's kind of our overview of where we're going.

Consider it kind of a helicopter flyover, you know, of the situation in modern missions. You know, just to kind of frame this thought with a sort of anecdotal kind of story, I received really encouraging, an encouraging kind of Facebook message about two weeks ago.

So I work with international students at Western. And there was a man last year who was a visiting scholar at Western from China. His name was Alan. And Alan and I got to know each other because he was an English teacher in China.

I have experience teaching English, so we kind of bonded over, you know, talking about methods and things related to English teaching. He came to an English class that we were holding on campus. He came to a trip to the Smoky Mountains where we took students hiking.

And I had a chance to talk to him about spiritual things there. But Alan always struck me as an individual that was maybe kind of marginally interested in spiritual things, but not really seeking, not earnest in his pursuit of Christ.

And so we had some spiritual conversations, but it really never went too much deeper than that. He stayed for his one year, and then he went back to China. This is the message that I got through my friend Emily.

Alan had sent her a message just about two weeks ago. This is what he writes. I'm going to read this to you. My mother told me that one of her friends was a member of a local Christian fellowship. This is in China.

They have Bible discussion and sing songs on Sunday in her garage. So she invited me to join them. Actually, I observed that there are a large number of Christians where I live. I'm learning. I don't know how to say in English, chapter John.

It talks about how Jesus died. I'm convinced, friends, that we live in an exciting time in human history because the gospel of Jesus Christ, just as Jesus predicted, is going forward into all the nations, and Jesus is glorifying his name among every tribe and people and tongue and nation on this planet.

We're going to look at how he's doing that this morning. So please pray with me, and then we're going to enter into a time of worship. Father in heaven, I ask that this morning our worship would be pleasing to you.

I ask that this morning you would give to us hope and encouragement, and I ask that you would give us just vision about what you are doing in this world. Thank you, Jesus, for dying for us. Thank you for rising again.

I ask that your name would be glorified in all that we do and say this morning.

Amen.

Why Evangelism Matters: Human Need and Christ's Supremacy

Well, good morning again. About three weeks ago, I was sitting in a Starbucks, having a drink with one of my friends, a Muslim man from the Middle East, and as we sometimes do, we were talking about Jesus.

He had questions, and then really at the end of our conversation, he asked me a really interesting question. He said, why do you do it? And I said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, I notice that Christians are always trying to tell people about Jesus, and they want people to follow Jesus.

Why do you do it? What do you get out of it? And I thought, well, I don't know that we get anything out of it, but let me explain to you why we think it's really important for people to follow Jesus. And what I'm going to share right now with you from the Scripture are the same two reasons that I shared with him in that coffee shop.

So take a look up on the screen or in your Bibles to John 3, verses 35 and 36. It says, Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life. But the wrath of God remains on him.

I would like to suggest that these verses give us two reasons why evangelism and missions are so important. And the first one, we'll take them in from the least to the greatest. In verse 36, I want us to observe the human condition.

Now, what I'm going to say is not politically correct. It may be offensive to some people in our culture, but it is the biblical truth that people cannot be saved and brought into a right relationship with God apart from Jesus Christ.

This passage is very clear. Here it says that God's wrath refers to his personal anger and his judicial anger against human rebellion, human pride. You know, people don't love God, enjoy God, or yield to God.

In fact, they resent His intrusion into their lives many times. And it is into this darkness that God sent His beloved Son, Jesus. And there are really only two responses to the person of Jesus. You see, the man, Jesus, is the hinge upon whose...

He is the hinge, and people's eternal destiny depends on their response to this man, Jesus Christ. You believe or you disbelieve. You embrace or you reject. You kneel or you resist. Jesus died a brutal death on the cross to pay for our sins.

And He did not die a brutal death on the cross to give us one more option on the religious buffet bar. Jesus died a brutal death on the cross because there is only one way to God. Now, in our kind of tolerance-championing culture, we like to think that all roads lead to God eventually, and everybody is okay.

And while we can love people and embrace different cultures, we have to understand Jesus is the way to God. He is the only way to God. He is very clear about this. He makes no apology for it, and neither should we.

There is no other way for people to be saved. The choice, Jesus presents a choice to humanity. This choice is urgent, it is compelling, and it is eternally consequential. So the first reason why we even care about missions and evangelism in John 3 .36 is because people cannot be saved and reconciled to God apart from Jesus Christ.

But I say we're going to speak from the lesser to the greater because I believe that although this is a very biblical, godly reason, if this reason is your only motivation for evangelism and missions, and if you hold this reason in isolation, then what you have is an unbalanced theology because there is something even greater than loving your neighbor, isn't there?

The greatest commandment is to love God. And John 3 .35 says this, The reason why we do missions, the reason why we care about the nations is because God has put all things into the hands of Jesus. Jesus, our Lord, is supreme, and He has all authority in heaven and earth.

God has given Him authority to forgive sins, He has given Him authority to raise the dead, and Jesus has authority over all nations to reign and rule forever. This is our Lord. I want you to notice the supremacy and the authority of Jesus.

Our motivation for evangelism and missions, more than anything else, more than any human-centered reason, is a Christocentric reason. It's that Jesus is worthy of the worship of all nations. God the Father has conferred upon Jesus the Son a kingdom, and in this day the Holy Spirit is bringing this kingdom together for the worship of Jesus to the glory of God the Father.

That is why we care about missions and evangelism, is because Jesus is worthy of the worship of every tribe and tongue and people and nation. It's about Jesus. You know, many Christians, we all know the verse, right, John 3 .16, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.

But has it ever occurred to you, John 3 .35, For God so loved the Son that He gave Him the world. This is why we do missions, because people are lost apart from Christ, and we love people, and because Jesus is worthy of the worship of every nation.

And we love Jesus. So having kind of gotten our theological footing this morning, I would like to just turn to what I shared before, is that we're going to take kind of a helicopter flyover now, and just take a look at modern missions and ask ourselves, God is building a kingdom for His Son Jesus.

Where are we at with that? Jesus predicted that in the era immediately prior to His return, this gospel of the kingdom would be preached to all the nations. What's the status of the preaching of the gospel?

So we'll take a look at, just a brief look at the last couple hundred years of history in missions. We're going to take a look at just what is the task specifically that we've been called to, and what are some of the trends that are happening today.

And hopefully this will be encouraging and hope-giving to you. So our story really starts, it's the story of the last 200 years of modern missions, really centers on three men. And each of these men represents an era in missions.

William Carey and the First Modern Missions Era

The first one is a man named William Carey. And for some reason, I keep wanting to call him John Carey. So if I make that mistake, I apologize. But William Carey was born in 1761, and he was raised in, I'd just like to tell you a story.

He was raised in an obscure rural village in the middle of England. Now he worked as a shoemaker. His life was hard. His family lived in poverty. His first daughter died when she was only two years old.

And even though he was poorly educated, he described himself as a plotter. And what he meant by that is, if I set my mind to it, and am persistent and hard-working, I believe that I can accomplish almost anything.

And this is a man, although he was poorly educated, taught himself biblical Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was an avid reader, and he became very interested in foreign cultures, and reading about events in different nations.

Now I want you to keep in mind, in the late 1700s in Europe, there really wasn't anything going on in Protestant missions. Okay, ministry to the nations was largely unheard of. There were a few examples, but this was something that the church had, a doctrine, a teaching, a practice that the church had largely overlooked, with a few exceptions.

So, William Carey became very impassioned about reaching the nations for Christ, as he studied his scriptures. And he, after studying the scripture and teaching himself these languages, as a young man, he became a lay minister.

And so he went to a meeting of Baptist leaders in the late 1700s, and he stood up in that meeting, and he began to argue for, he began to say, We need to give our attention to reaching the nations with the gospel of Christ.

Anybody guess how he was received? An older minister said to him these words, Young man, sit down. You are an enthusiast. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do so without counseling you or me.

So, in response, William Carey wrote a book. And this was probably his greatest contribution to missions. Now, bear with me. It's not a best-selling title. An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen.

But this book was like a bombshell in Europe, and people started reading it, and it really just sparked a fire for missions in evangelism. In this book, William Carey just outlined, basically saying, The Great Commission is not something that was only for the Twelve Apostles.

This is something for the Church today. And it lit a fire in Europe. Well, Carey didn't stop there. In 1792, he organized. See, there were no missions organizations. If you wanted to be a missionary at this era, who sends you?

Who processes your payment? What do you do? There's no mission organization to join. There's only the Church, and the Church is not equipped to send missionaries at this time. So what did he do? He started his own mission organization.

And then he picked up with his family, along with one of his friends, a surgeon, and the two of them and his family, they moved to India. And Carey's first years in India were miserable. His ministry partner, after a time left, they suffered from tremendous poverty.

Illness hit his family hard. He suffered from loneliness. Regret set in. His five-year-old son died. His wife, after the death of their son, his wife actually even lost her mind and had to be confined to a room, seeing delusions.

And he said, This, for me, is the shadow of death, but God is here, and I am here, and I will be glad. It took seven years before they even saw one person turn to Christ. But even though, but Carey was a plotter, he continued through his effort.

He translated the entire Bible into Bengali, the language of the people he was working with. And over the course of the next 28 years, he and his assistants translated the Bible into all of India's five major languages.

He brought about social reform. He started a theological school. And after 41 years in India, without a furlough, they had seen about 700 people come to Christ. But his greatest contribution was that book with the long title that shook Europe.

And what you see as a result of William Carey's ministry is small missions outposts starting to spring up in response to this call for missions. But where are they springing up? On the coastlands of China, of India, and some of these unreached countries.

And so we like to say that William Carey started the first era in modern missions. Let's move to our second person, somebody that might be more familiar to you, many of you already know, James Hudson Taylor.

How many people have heard of Hudson Taylor? Most people. Hudson Taylor is credited with kind of launching the second era in modern missions. He was born in the United Kingdom, and he was fascinated with the Far East.

In fact, as a baby, his parents even prayed for him, God, please ordain that our son should serve you in China. Well, he got saved as a teenager, and he spent many years learning medicine, studying Mandarin, immersing himself in the Bible and prayer.

And at the young age of 21 years old, he set off for Shanghai to do missions work. But you know what? He was not happy with many of the missionaries that he had seen. See, this initial flurry of missionary zeal had established these missionary outposts, but as is often the case, there's an initial excitement, and then things kind of taper off.

And Hudson Taylor was discouraged by what he saw in China, because he saw missionaries that he felt weren't doing any evangelism. And he thought that really missionaries spent their time working, earning extra money as translators, and hobnobbing with kind of British diplomats and so on.

And so he was passionate that it's not enough just to plant some small church in a coastal city. You have to go inland. There are millions and millions of Chinese without the gospel in inland China. And so his passion was to take the gospel to the unreached inland of China.

And so he made a radical decision. He decided to wear Chinese clothes. He grew a long pigtail in the back to represent just the way that Chinese men wore their hair in that time. And he set off with a friend into the inland of China distributing Bibles and tracts.

And his fellow missionaries were scandalized by this. They thought he was a loose cannon. Well, Hudson Taylor said this, China is not to be won for Christ by quiet, ease-loving men and women. The stamp of men and women we need is such as it will put Jesus, China, and the souls first and foremost in everything and at every time.

Even life itself must be secondary. Well, Hudson Taylor in 1861 became very ill. He had to return to England. His mission could no longer support him, so he left his mission. Guess what he did? He started his own mission, the China Inland Mission.

Still exists today under a different name. And Hudson Taylor recruited, what was it, 24 missionaries. Two for each of the provinces in China and one for Mongolia. And he went back and began to evangelize the interior of China.

But other missionaries, again, were scandalized by his methods because he did something even more scandalous than wearing Chinese clothes. He sent single women out into the field. That was unheard of in his day.

He also suffered much. His wife Maria died at the age of 33. Four of his eight children died on the field before they even reached the age of 10. But by the time that Hudson Taylor died in 1905, his missions agency was supporting 825 missionaries working in the interior of China.

And they had seen some estimates of 25 ,000 people come to Christ. Hudson Taylor was the spark that is today the modern missions movement in China. And he prompted the church to take the gospel inland.

That's the second era. The third personality I want us to look at, representing the third era, and the area that really where we find ourselves today, is a man named William Cameron Townsend. Anybody heard of Townsend?

A few, less. William Cameron Townsend was born in California in 1896. And he attended college in Los Angeles. And it was there that a visiting speaker challenged young people to give their lives to missions.

And so Cameron Townsend was moved by this and dedicated his life to serving God in the mission field. Soon after, in 1917, at the age of 21, he left for a one-year mission trip to Guatemala. And near the end of that mission trip, he was, you know, sitting at a table.

This is a famous story. Maybe some of you have heard it. He was sitting at a table, and he was selling Spanish Bibles, the language of Guatemala. And a man from... Okay, I'm going to kill this pronunciation.

The Ketchikal Indian tribe. There are 200 ,000 Ketchikal Indians in Guatemala. A man from this tribe came up to his table and said to him, Well, what is this you're selling? And he said, Oh, these are Bibles.

This is the word of God, the word of the living God. And the man looked at it, flipped through it. It was a Spanish Bible. He said, Well, if your God is so great, why doesn't he speak my language? And he walked off.

And this, again, was like a bombshell for Cameron Townsend. And he realized that missions is not just about planting a church in a country. There are people groups in that country that have a different culture and a different language, and we need to translate the Bible into different languages.

And so he spent the next 13 years, a one-year mission trip, turned 13. He translated the whole Bible into the language of the Ketchikal Indians. And then he came back to America, and he started Wycliffe Bible Translators.

And he is commonly credited, you know, thought of at least by missiologists, along with Don McGavren, who is a missiologist as well, with popularizing this third era that we are living in, where it's not just about the coastlands.

It's not about just going inland. It's about reaching every people with the gospel, every distinct ethnic group. And so what we've learned from, now if you can see the screen here, what we've learned from Cameron Townsend is that, you know, the lines on the map don't necessarily tell the whole story.

Take, for example, the country of India. India is one nation, right? But India is made up of 2 ,245 distinct people groups. Those are groups of people with a distinct ethnicity and a distinct language.

So you can't simply plant a church among the Kumhar people of 15 million who speak Hindi and follow the Hindu religion and expect that it's automatically going to spill over into the Bora people who speak Gujarati and follow Islam.

You must plant a different church among each people group. And so instead of thinking of the world as a lake, where you throw one stone in and the ripple effect goes to the far shore, we need to think of the world like a series of puddles.

And each separate puddle requires a separate stone to be dropped in it. And that's how the gospel travels forward. We need to reach each specific ethnic group with the gospel. Does that make sense? So consider the Great Commission.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go make disciples of all nations. We can go back one, sorry. Now, when Jesus says, Go and make disciples of all nations. Of all nations. In Greek, now I'm not a Greek scholar, but none of us have to be a Greek scholar.

Pantita ethne. What do you see in that phrase?

Ethne.

Ethnic group. Jesus didn't just have in mind lines on a map when he said, go make disciples of all nations. He had in mind, take the gospel to every cultural ethnic group. A cultural ethnic group, an ethne, so to speak, is a people with a distinct language and culture.

There is an estimated, now nobody knows for sure, there's an estimated 16 ,591 ethnic groups in this world. More than 6 ,700 of these groups are classified, say, as unreached. That is 42 of the world's population is still unreached by the gospel.

So our goal, the goal of modern missions, if we can phrase it, is to think about planting a viable, indigenous, reproducing church among every single one of these 16 ,591 ethne. Viable because this church can stand on its own without help from any kind of foreign support.

It's indigenous because it's composed of national believers, and it's reproducing in that they have a vision for evangelism and for reaching their own people. Our goal is to see that every person should be able to hear the gospel from somebody who dresses like them, speaks like them, and understands their culture.

That is the goal of modern missions. And I found that to be true. My wife and I served for five and a half years in Turkey, and I could talk with Turkish people. We would have great conversations. But you know what?

You know who is the most effective evangelist? The Turkish church. So this is our goal. This is what Jesus has commanded us to do, and this is what Jesus prophesied would happen in the era immediately prior to his return.

The Great Shift in Global Christianity

So now let's just ask ourselves the question, I mean, is it happening? Is what Jesus prophesied happening? Is the gospel being preached among every ethne? Are we fulfilling the Great Commission as a global church?

Well, I'd like to share with you kind of three trends that I see in modern mission, encouraging trends. I hope this will be hope-giving for you. And the first I'd like to call is the Great Shift. Now I can see that it's going to be very difficult for you to read that, so I will help you out.

In the year 1800, 99 of all evangelical Christians, those are Bible-believing, Christ-honoring Christians, okay, not just Christians in name, but 99 of Christians globally lived in either Europe or North America.

1%, correspondingly, of Christians, Bible-believing Christians, lived in Latin America, Africa, or Asia. A hundred years later, 95 of Christians still lived in Europe or North America, and only 5 of evangelical Christians lived in Latin America, Africa, or Asia.

Now, let's fast-forward today, 2016. By our best estimates, only 24 of Bible-believing Christians live in Europe or North America. 76 of Christians live in Asia, in Africa, and South America. God is causing the gospel to explode in South America, in Africa, in Asia.

Consider the country of Nepal. Okay, go to India, head north, little country of Nepal. In 1951, in the 1950s, being a Christian in Nepal was forbidden, and there were zero known Christians in the country of Nepal.

Today, official government estimates put the Christian population in Nepal at 375 ,000, or 1 .5 of the population. But Christian leaders in Nepal say, that's a huge underestimation. The government is covering over the statistics.

They say 10 of the population of Nepal is Christian, more than 2 million people. The gospel is doing explosive work in many different countries. I could give you many other examples. Consider that receivers...

You know, in the past, we always used to think of missions like this, didn't we? There were missionaries that go forth from America and maybe a few other countries, but mostly America and, you know, South Korea, and they go to unreached countries, right?

Can I suggest to you that that paradigm is about 100 years out of date? It's not about just missionaries going forward from America to the rest of the nations. Everyone is going everywhere today. Consider, here's the top 10 missionary sending countries, okay, in no particular order.

America, Brazil, South Korea, India, South Africa, Philippines, China, Mexico, Colombia, and Nigeria. This is where missionaries are going out from today. Everyone is going everywhere. I met, last fall, students, a group of students came to Western Michigan University, about 30 students from Indonesia.

Now, when I first heard there was a group of students from Indonesia coming, of course I'm interested, I work with international students, but I initially assumed they'd be Muslim. Well, the director of our language school, where I work occasionally, part-time, said to me, actually, no, they're Christian, or somebody said that to me.

And I was really surprised, Christians in Indonesia? Well, so these students came, I got to meet them. They're from Papua, Indonesia. They are all Christians, or at least most of them are Christians. And one of them, I was talking to actually two of them, and I said, well, what are you studying here at Western?

They said, oh, we're studying aviation. And I said, oh, well, why are you studying aviation? What's the draw for that? And they said, because we want to take the gospel to our own people. We want to fly airplanes into these remote villages, and aid in development and sharing the gospel.

Everyone today is going everywhere. The most efficient missionary-sending country in the world, any guess? Of course, it's on the screen. It's not America. If you consider the number of Christians, in accordance with the number of missionaries sent out, do you know the most effective country, the most efficient country in sending out missionaries is Mongolia, north of China.

The Chinese church has a vision called the Back to Jerusalem Movement. Have you heard about this? Their goal is to raise up missionaries. They believe, okay, whether this is right or wrong, you can decide, but they believe that the gospel heads west, and it's made a circuit around the world, and now it's come as far as China.

And they believe the baton has been passed to them, and they are going to take the gospel on a complete circuit around the world. It's going to head back through Central Asia and end in Jerusalem, before the Lord comes.

That's their vision. And so their goal is to take the gospel through Muslim Central Asia, through the Middle East, back to Jerusalem. That is their passion. That is their vision that God has given the Chinese church.

Now, couple that with the Nigerian church in Africa. They have what's called the 50 -15 Movement. They want to raise up 50 ,000 missionaries in the next 15 years to take the gospel to northern Africa, Muslim northern Africa, and back to Jerusalem.

You have Chinese coming from this direction, the African church coming from this direction. Everyone is going everywhere. Let's look at our second trend here. These will move faster. Bible translation.

Now, we're talking about the availability of scriptures here. There are about 5 .1 billion people on this planet have the whole Bible in their native language. According to Wycliffe statistics, that leaves about 680 million people who only have the New Testament available in their language.

421 million people only have some small portion of scripture available in their native language. And some 250 million people don't have any kind of scripture available in their language. But Wycliffe Bible translators and other groups partnering with them have a vision that by 2025, every needed translation, every language that needs translation, now some languages are dying, some languages are obscure, but every needed language by the year 2025 will have translation started.

And by the year 2045, now that might be an overly ambitious goal, but their goal is by the year 2045, every language on this planet will have the full Bible translated. So people of every culture and tribe and tongue and nation will be able to read the scriptures in their own language.

The Jesus film has had 3 billion showings. 99 of people on this planet can watch the Jesus film in a language that they know. The Bible is being translated into every language. And the final trend that I'd just like to share with you, this is from David Garrison's book, A Wind in the House of Islam.

If you can see the screen, Islam started in the 6th century, in the 600s. So from 600 to 1800, the first 1200 years that Islam was around, there were zero known people movements to Christ among Muslim, among followers of Islam.

Now what is a people movement? A people movement means in a 20-year period, you have a thousand converts to Christianity or you have a hundred churches planted. So that's what a people movement is. So for the first 1200 years of Islamic history, we have at least recorded zero people movements.

Church didn't do a very good job reaching out to Muslims in the Middle Ages, did they? From 1800 to 1980, there were two recorded people movements in Ethiopia and Indonesia, two people movements among Muslims.

In 1980 to 2000, there were 11 recorded people movements among Muslim peoples to Christ. And in the first 13 years, 2000 to 2013, there have been 69 people movements recorded in this book of Muslim peoples turning to Christ in different nations around the world.

Now, that still represents a very, very small portion of the Muslim world, but what I hope that we can see is the ascending curve here in that God is doing magnificent things around the world. The availability of scripture online, Christian television, radio programming, dreams and visions, this is fueling an increasing revival in the Muslim world.

God's Kingdom for His Son and the Call to Join His Work

So that brings us really to the conclusion of our talk for today. Let me just end this conversation at the same place we began. Jesus predicted that the gospel would be preached to every ethnic in the area immediately preceding his return.

And we are seeing this today like never before in Christian history. There's a lot to be done still. The task is not even close to being finished, but we're closer than we have ever been in 2 ,000 years.

God the Father loves Jesus Christ the Son and has placed all authority in his hands. God is building a kingdom for his Son, Jesus, and he is bringing people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation into the worship of Jesus Christ and God the Father.

You know, working with college students, sometimes what they ask is, What is God's plan for my life? It's a popular question. I don't like that question so much. I like to think not as, What is God's plan for my life?

I think it's a better question to say, What is God's plan? Because Jesus said, I can only do what I see the Father doing. And the Father shows the Son all that he does. Jesus looked at where God was at work and then he joined him.

God is doing magnificent things in our world. He is bringing glory to Jesus. He is building his church and establishing the kingdom of his Son. Sometimes Christians think about the glory days. Oh, if I had lived in the days of Peter and Paul in the book of Acts, wouldn't that be great?

I could have seen Pentecost. I could have seen these great things. I think Peter and Paul are going to say, Oh, that I could live in the 21st century and see the things that God is doing in this world.

Never before have we seen the gospel go forward to all nations like we do today. That should be hope-giving and life-giving to us. This is a magnificent, extraordinary time to live in. I hope, I pray, that perhaps some of our young people will be moved to consider how they might participate in God's plan to reach the nations.

I pray that all of us will be encouraged by what God is doing worldwide. So let's go ahead and pray together and then we will conclude this message. Father in heaven, we worship you. We worship your son, Jesus.

We praise you that you are building a kingdom for your son. I ask that you would glorify the name of Jesus all the more. I pray that you would cause the name of Jesus to be glorified and honored among every tribe and tongue and people and nation.

Show us what you would have us to do in response to your work. Father, give us passion, give us heart, give us vision. We pray for this in Jesus' name, amen.