July 8, 2024 Show with Co-Host Brian Mclaughlin & Guest Kevin Christian on “Bringing the Gospel to Indonesia”

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Introduction and the Iron Sharpens Iron Purpose

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Pastor's Luncheon Announcement and Guest Introductions

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this eighth day of July, 2024.

Before I introduce to you my co-host and guest for the day and our topic, I have an important reminder for all men in ministry leadership. Would you like to attend a free pastor's luncheon where you get fed for free, not only physically but spiritually, with a keynote address that is sure to edify and bless and challenge you, in addition to having a fun fellowship, rest, relaxation, and edification with fellow ministers in the gospel?

And, on top of that, a heavy sack of free brand new books personally selected by me and donated by generous Christian publishers in the United States and United Kingdom? Well, if you do want to receive all that absolutely free, please register for my next free Iron Sharpens Iron Radio biannual pastor's luncheon, this time featuring, for the very first time, as our keynote speaker, Dr. Joe Boot, founder and president of the Ezra Institute.

And I want to thank Dr. Boot for sending me today an absolutely superb commendation that he wrote for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio after his last interview, which was his second interview with us. But this will be his first time as our keynote speaker.

And the event will be held Thursday, October 10, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania. So if you'd like to register, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and put pastor's luncheon in the subject line.

That's Thursday, October 10, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, which is Perry County, Pennsylvania, featuring Dr. Joseph Boot, founder and president of the Ezra Institute.

Well, I am absolutely thrilled to have a returning guest who is actually serving as my co-host today. His name is Brian McLaughlin. You hear his voice every day on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio because he is the president of Securecomgroup .com, which is a major sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

He is also a deacon and board member at New Hyde Park Baptist Church on Long Island. And today we are going to be interviewing an old friend of his, actually a closer friend of his son's. His name is Kevin Christian, and that's an alias we're using today because he is a missionary to Indonesia and will be discussing bringing the gospel to Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.

And first of all, let me welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Brian McLaughlin.

Hey, Chris, pleasure to be here, an honor to be here and to be with Kevin is incredible. I really can't wait to dive into everything that God has done in this young man's life. He's starting, I guess, over 20 years ago, and you're going to hear a tremendous and incredible testimony and just where, how and where God is using him to bring the gospel to a lost people.

So I'm really excited about it.

And welcome to you, Kevin, for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Thanks. It's good to be with you guys. Appreciate it.

Well, I'm going to give our email address right away for any listeners who would like to ask questions about being on the mission field in a predominantly Muslim country and anything that would be associated with evangelizing Muslims.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least city and state or country of residence. And if you live outside the USA and only remain anonymous, if your question involves a personal and private matter, let's say you are a Muslim and you're beginning to question the authenticity of your own religion.

And you obviously don't want to draw attention to your identity at this point. Well, things like that, we would understand immediately being valid reasons to remain anonymous and there may be many others.

So we will obviously honor anyone's request to remain anonymous when submitting questions. But if it's a general question, we would just ask you please to give us your first name, city and state and country of residence.

Kevin Christian's Salvation Testimony and the Sovereignty of God in Salvation

Well, first of all, Kevin, as a first time guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, we have a tradition here where whenever we have a first time guest, that guest gives us a summary of their salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere, if any, in which the guest was raised and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in that person's life that drew him or her to himself and saved them.

And we would love to hear your story, Kevin.

Sure.

I grew up in a pretty secular part of New York. You know, there was a pretty good population of people that I would say are Catholic in the sense of, you know, Christmas and Easter, but very secular otherwise.

And Brian happened to be the first person that I that I met that I can recall that actually believed Jesus was a historical person. Wow. So, I mean, I just kind of had my head in the clouds and just went through life.

And, you know, as Brian shared and I think you mentioned earlier, I was best friends with with Brian's son, Chris, and, you know, just always being at their house.

And are you still there, Kevin?

You sound like you dropped off, you know, Brian, this just remarkable, you know, father and, you know, just just an all around great, great guy. And we had gotten into a discussion and he believed that not only was God real, but, you know, the Bible was accurate and trustworthy.

And that just kind of sparked in me a strong desire to refute that, you know, my life was just self-absorbed.

You know. Yeah, it looks like we're having some technical difficulties with Kevin's.

Connection. We'll let we'll let Kevin reconnect. But the the story of what took place with our first encounter, it was around Christmas and I wish Kevin a Merry Christmas. And I said, what do you think of Christmas?

Kevin turned to me, the 17 year old cocky kid, he turns to me and he goes, there is no God. Well, well, well, that sparked that sparked the conversation. And Kevin, I'll let you pick it up again from there.

Yeah, I mean, that that sparked a series of conversations that that turned into some real deep self-reflection on my part, you know, that for the next couple of years of my life, I spent reading the Bible, you know, trying to to disprove it in many ways, you know, with the acknowledgement that that if what if what if what this book was saying was true, I was a condemned man and there was no doubt about it.

And, you know, a few years go by and I had kind of worked through the Bible from cover to cover a number of times and started filling out these marble notebooks of, you know, just questions I had, things that that disturbed me about the scriptures or just I couldn't make sense of.

And I would kind of bring those home and, you know, talk with Brian about it. And at some point he connected me to the pastor of church that he was attending. And, you know, God just brought deep conviction into my life through his word.

And I I reached a point in my senior year of college where I knew the scriptures were true and I knew that that I I was condemned before God. And I struggled for another about a year and a half after that with.

Just trusting that there was hope for me and, you know, I just just sharing this with Brian the other day, I you know, it was it was for me, it was a moment I had I had come to the realization that that Jesus had died for my sins, that he didn't just die in a general sense, you know, for the sins, you know, of all people for all time, but that he took names to the cross and that that verse that says everyone everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

That verse worked in my heart to produce a confidence that God had produced this this conviction and this crying out for him and that his word it just came to life to me. And I just I in a moment I trusted that he had died for me.

And I remember just having alien thoughts, alien conviction in my heart, grievous, just a grievousness over, you know, since from, you know, 15 years earlier and, you know, and just as a young kid, I'm just recalling these, you know, grievous things that I had done in the sight of God and just repenting over that.

Well, you know something, you said something that was one of the most profound aspects of my own transformation after I was saved by the grace and mercy of Christ. I initially, like most Christians, was an Arminian, although I would never have used that word because I didn't know what it meant.

I was somebody who after attending services and Bible studies at the church where I eventually was saved and baptized. I was beginning to hear the doctrines of sovereign grace taught and discussed, and I had never heard anything like that before.

And my immediate reaction, my immediate reaction was these people are nuts. And I and when it came to me being baptized and I was being interviewed by the elders, I said, I love you guys. I want you to be my elders.

I want this to be my church. I really feel confident that this is where God wants me to be. But I got to tell you, I don't think I'm ever going to buy into this Calvinism stuff. And someone in the church had later heard about my struggles believing these things.

And he gave me a booklet published by Chapel Library, George Whitfield's letter to John Wesleyan election. And when I read that booklet, my first reaction was, oh, no, this is true. But I still hate it.

And then then within about two months or less, I came to fall in love with those teachings. And one of the primary reasons why it felt like a radical transformation of my thought process was because Jesus's death was no longer an attempt by Jesus on Calvary to save a faceless, nameless sea of humans.

He specifically died for me and mission and mission accomplished. He redeemed me on that cross with the certainty that he would later at some point in my life give me the gift of faith and draw me to himself, adopt me.

And so I am just praising God for that. And it's very similar thought process as you had regarding the contrast in the way most professing Christians view Christ's death for them and what the Bible really teaches about it.

Amen. Hey, Chris, can I add, can I add to that? Because I also struggled when God saved me in 1996. Same thing. I felt God revealed himself to me. And then I made this choice of repenting and surrendering and trusting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

And what took place after that, I was raised at a a Catholic home, a pretty, I would say, you know, active Catholic family and everything, attending church all time and, you know, going through catechism and everything else.

So when this took place, this really there was shock, shock waves, you know, through my my family, my immediate family, extended family. And one of the things that that took place was I'm trying to, I guess, debate, argue, convince, especially my wife, that what what I now believe, and this was over months after coming to faith and and then, let's say, a year later and, you know, studying more and kind of understanding the gospel more.

But I'm kind of like, oh, like, how don't you get this? I'm explaining this to you. You know, I'm your husband. You know, you should, like, believe what I'm saying. And I'm getting frustrated, but I'm frustrating my wife.

And I'm not really loving my wife the way Christ loves the church. I'm not loving my wife and being patient with my wife because I think I have to debate her, convince her into the kingdom. So it was a difficult time for us and is definitely a difficult time for her.

And I was wrong in how I was relating to her and communicating to her. The day that God opened my eyes to the sovereignty of God and how he saves fallen, unregenerate, dead sinners, the day I understood that from Scripture, and it was actually Pastor Gary Scott, who was who mentored Kevin, mentored me, was so patient with me and just kept pointing me to the scriptures, pointing me to the scriptures.

And then one day I was trying to say this. It's almost like being born again, again, you know, when when you understand that, you know, before the foundation of the world, that God had sovereignly, according to his good pleasure and will, decided to save a wretch like me and that it was all God, none of me.

And I it stopped me in my tracks. And I said, how can I be upset with this woman, my wife, who's ten times better than me, nicer than me in every way, shape or form, compassion and everything? She's a wonderful woman, wonderful wife.

And I'm like making her miserable because I'm, you know, you know, I'm trying to debate her into the kingdom. Anyway, the day that happened, I understood. I said, wait a second. I said, you need to love your wife.

You need to be patient with your wife. You need you need to trust God and whatever he decides to do, that's. Salvation is of the Lord, I can plant, I can water, but he he's the one who gives the increase, he's the one who removes hearts of stones and and puts in a heart of flesh.

And it was an incredible thing that took place over years. This is twenty five years almost to the time that really that my wife and I are together. We attend church together. My wife is trusted Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior.

And in what made such a difference in how God used me instead of using me as a sledgehammer that was unproductive and counterproductive of softening me to my wife and just loving her and and just being just being patient, a woman who never you know, she didn't want me praying.

She really hated everything about what was going on in my life. And all of a sudden I see God softening her heart little by little by little. And it was and I can just obviously praise God for everything that took place.

But what a difference coming to the understanding of the doctrines of grace and that it is nothing of us and nothing that we decided to make a decision and of ourselves in coming to faith in Christ. It was that God moved first.

God gave us a heart to love him. And that's when we act upon that faith that God gives us and that and that we now respond. And it's all 100 percent because of him.

Amen. If anybody listening is in that theological system outside of the doctrines of reformed theology, the doctrines of sovereign grace, also nicknamed Calvinism, I want you to really challenge yourself with just these two questions.

I know that if I asked you, do you give 100 percent of the praise, honor and glory to Christ for your salvation? You would say yes, like every single right minded Christian, authentic, truly regenerate Christian would say, but then begin to ponder if that is really a consistent and logical answer.

If you really delve into what you believe on how you became saved, how much you believe you contributed to that, even if it was just your faith that you believe it was conjured up somehow by your own will from your own dead heart.

And also contemplate for a moment what your view is of the cross. Did Jesus only make the salvation of men possible on the cross? Did he only make men redeemable? Was this a hypothetical salvation he provided or did he actually redeem men on the cross?

Those are things for you to contemplate, because in Christianity, only the reformed faith actually logically and consistently teaches that Jesus Christ actually redeemed everyone for whom he died because he only died for those who are his elect, who will eventually on this earth come to saving faith in him and follow him.

But Kevin, tell us when it was and how it was that you began to develop a heart of compassion for the Muslim people.

Developing a Heart for the Muslim People and the Call to Mission

Well, I think like so many things, you kind of come into the church and you are focused in on some things first and God sort of begins to put more of the piece together. So as I came into the church, doctrine and understanding the doctrines of grace, the work of God and all of scripture and history and developing sort of a systematic theology was where the beginning of my Christian life was.

And it wasn't until a couple of years into that where I had kind of been part of some local ministry. I was running a youth program for unchurched kids. We were you know, I had gotten married. We were we were sort of investing in different.

He's in stateside ministries, and our church had invited a missionary to come in and speak at the church, and he began, you know, talking about unreached people groups, and this was something I had never heard before.

You know, it was a concept that was new to me. You know, I kind of had, I think, done what many, you know, many Christians who have kind of come into Christianity in the West have done is you sort of just lump evangelism and mission into kind of one category.

And the guy that had come and spoken, he talked of mission as distinct from evangelism as something that, you know, has overlap with evangelism. Of course, you know. Mission is is opening the gospel, opening the scriptures to people, but mission usually entails crossing some kind of geographical or language, cultural barrier.

And it's kind of the thing that makes evangelism possible in a sense. And, you know, those two concepts, you know, just what is mission and what are these unreached people groups? It caused in my wife and I at the time this sense that something was greatly lacking in our Christian walk, that we had invested ourselves into the local church.

We were invested in local ministry, but we had not yet looked outside of that into this bigger picture of what God was doing in all the world. And, you know, we went home that day. The preacher had sort of I think he was borrowing from John Piper and he said, you know, when it comes to mission, you can you can you can respond in three ways.

You can go, you can send or you can disobey. And, you know, we went home and we thought, OK, well, we we had some means we were I was working full time, we were doing well, we had just bought a place, you know, and I thought, well, well, clearly the Lord has called us to send because we're people of means.

And so we tried to reorganize our life in more of a posture towards, you know, participating in global mission. So, you know, we adopted some some missionaries and we began giving more in that direction.

And, you know, after a couple of months, we sort of did an inventory and we looked at looked at the way our life was was working and not working, I should say. But, you know, there was still this really.

Gross imbalance in where we were investing our time, our money, our prayers, our energies. And, you know, that was a personal thing. I think that was the Lord's calling us into mission. We were we were not satisfied with the level of engagement that we had in global mission.

And so we started asking the question, why shouldn't we go? Why shouldn't we be the ones who go? And little by little, we began to reorient our lives in the posture of go. You know, for us, that meant attending a mission conference out of state.

It meant, you know, looking into some mission training. What does it look like to pursue the qualifications of an elder in the church? And, you know, those sort of things.

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break, if you do have a question. Once again, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com. Give us your first name at least city and state and country of residence.

Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages.

Greetings. This is Brian McLaughlin, president of the Secure Comm Group and supporter of Chris Arnzen's Iron Shopping Zion radio program. Secure Comm provides the highest level of security systems for residential buildings, municipalities, churches, commercial properties and much more.

We can be reached at Secure Comm Group dot com. That's Secure Comm Group dot com. But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters, of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur. In the film Chariots of Fire, Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt God's pleasure when he ran.

He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God. I sense that same God given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God. That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.

That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672. That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church. A congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

God bless you.

I'm Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You with John MacArthur. I've been a frequent guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I highly recommend this show. But today I want to tell you about one of its advertisers, Rare Document Traders.

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We are now back with Kevin Christian, which is an alias. He is a missionary in Indonesia to the Muslim people and co-hosting the program with me is Brian McLaughlin, who is not only an old friend of mine but a proud sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio through the SecureCom group and also through New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

If you have questions, send them to chrisorensen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. And Brian, obviously feel free to chime in whenever you have a question.

Since I can't see you, I don't know when you are poised to ask a question. So just jump right in whenever you feel the moment is appropriate. And also, I am always ready, sir. I am always ready. Well, let's before you do that, let's let's have Kevin tell us why of all the world religions and cults did you choose the Muslim people of Indonesia to be the primary people to be.

Blessed through your mission endeavors? Sure. Our our our goal when we were finishing our mission training was not actually to go to a Muslim country or to pursue.

Why Indonesia and the Unreached People Groups

OK, we're losing Kevin again. Hello. Hopefully, hopefully we'll get him back just real quick.

Before Kevin comes back is I actually tried talking Kevin out of going or going into, you know, foreign missions. I wanted him to stay local because he was so effective with with the youth on Long Island and the group of, you know, young men, adolescents that teenagers that he was reaching.

So I think God was really convicting himself and his wife very strongly about, you know, that this was the path that God was carving out for them, was calling them, calling them to pursue, because I was I was actually trying to discourage and keep him local.

I mean, I love Kevin. You know, I'm so long and just seeing God save him and God grow him in the faith. And so I didn't want to I didn't want to lose you, man, you know, but to see what God has been doing now for over a decade in their lives is is incredible.

It's beautiful itself. Kevin, pick up, pick up where you left off. Sure. Thanks for that. We we we.

Weren't particularly targeting targeting a religion or a country. We kind of started with looking at where the most unreached and unengaged peoples were. So, you know, it became apparent to both Sarah and I that the gift that God really gave us was a willingness to go where the gospel had never been.

And, you know, as we kind of just took stock of of, you know, what research has been done, we're looking at, you know, hundreds of unreached people groups. There was this concentration in Indonesia, something like two hundred and forty unreached people groups within Indonesia alone.

Wow. And we started investigating that. We took a trip over there in 2012, I believe, and or 2013, if I'm not mistaken. And we started moving from different regions of Indonesia and meeting with missionaries and pilots and, you know, trying to figure out what work was being done, what work was not being done and then what work was not being done that the Lord might allow us to be part of.

And the key word there is privilege. I mean, that God would allow us to minister to anybody. I mean, is it a remarkable grace that he would allow us to pursue bringing the gospel to where it hasn't been?

I mean, there's an honor in that for for him to open that door is a tremendous privilege and an honor. And you can say we were pursuing that. We wanted to be part of.

That. Well, tell us what you first experienced when you stepped off the plane into Indonesia.

Oh, well. Some of the first things you can notice in Indonesia is is there's a lack of sleep, I would say. You're going to you're going to hear the mosques, and it's usually not just one. If you're in a village area or anywhere where it's not a major city, you're going to hear multiple mosques going off at slightly different times that, you know, four in the morning, seven in the morning.

And it's just going to be blaring Arabic recitations. And they're not in sync. There's not not a sort of. It's not an organized, you know, single denomination. There are many denominations of Islam. There are many individual mosques that sort of operate, you know, with with a level of autonomy.

And so, you know, just the glaring sound of the Koran and the Islamic teaching just blaring from those mosques all day long and especially first thing in the morning. There's a heaviness to that that just weighs on your heart from morning till night.

Now, was that a in the area, the specific area that you were in, was it underdeveloped? Was it rural or was it inner city? Tell us about that.

The first place that we went to and we went there because we were learning the Indonesian language. We were trying to to study the general culture. I mean, there's 14 ,000 populated islands of tribal people.

So even on an island like Java, you have the Javanese and you have the Sundanese and you have you have different tribal populations. And so we went to this one farming community in central and, you know, there's rice paddies in our backyard and people still using oxen to plow their plow their land.

And, you know, four minutes away on a small city center type area where there's a market and there's shops and everything like that.

And is that the basically the atmosphere where you wound up staying?

No. Once we once we were proficient with the Indonesian language, we began exploring where some of these most unreached people groups were. And just in the Lord's Providence in direction, we got turned on to a very small island off the coast of Sumatra, a village that may be at maximum if you kind of expand out into the jungle, there's maybe three thousand people in the history of their people.

There's been one evangelical guy that went there and was murdered about 25 years before we got there. And it just became apparent that, you know, if we if we had been serious about trying to bring the gospel where it hasn't been, that was a place that fit the bill.

And so we began seeking the Lord if he would allow us to be part of that.

And you're when you say we you're talking about you and your wife. Yes, sir. Yeah. Did you have any children at this time?

We had we had one one child that we brought with us to Indonesia, and then we had two boys in the first first three years while we were learning language. So we were a family of five when we moved into the village on that island.

Wow. So that takes a lot of conviction because you are, in essence, not only risking your own life, you're risking the life, the lives of your wife and children as well. And what what was tell us about their attitudes?

Are you there, Kevin?

Well, that's I'm there. Yeah, I'm just trying to to think through that. That's a heavy question. So Sarah and I have always really wrestled with fighting for the balance of wanting to take risks as a family with our kids, but to not risk our kids on the altar of ministry.

And so we've at times, you know, failed in doing that well and at other times had to, you know, of course, correct and have done well. But we have tried to make all of our decisions as a family and to move slowly and and carefully into the work that God has given us.