Outpouring in Papua New Guinea (Part 1) — David Sitton

God's Name Among All Nations

A wonderful Savior and an awesome King. And this God of ours, this awesome God, He will be preached and He will be praised among all of the nations of the world. Listen to the Word of God through the prophet Malachi 1 .11.

And as I read these words, I want you to realize that this is not something that God hopes will happen. God doesn't hope. This is something that will happen. What I'm about to read to you this morning is a divinely inspired prophetic certainty.

Malachi 1 .11. God says, My name will be great among the nations from the rising to the setting of the sun and every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to My name because My name will be great among the nations, says the Lord God Almighty.

God is making His name to be great among the nations. And I guess I just need to stop right here because I don't know you. I don't know how much of this you know when I talk about missions. But when the Bible uses the word nations, do you know what it's talking about?

You know, often we talk of nations and we equate it with countries. And we talk about a nation of Japan or China or some other nation. Mexico. But in Scripture, that's not the way the Bible uses the word nations.

Most often, almost always, maybe always, but almost always at least, it's used in terms of ethnicities. In fact, the Greek word is ethne. It means ethnicities. And this is the way in both the Old and the New Testaments that the word is used.

It's often like what we talk about when we talk about North American Indian tribes. We talk about the Choctaw Nation. Talk about the Apache Nation or the Cherokee Nation. That's the way the Bible uses the word nations.

Not countries, but ethnicities. And as just a further illustration of that, in Revelation 5 and Revelation 7, you know, when we get that little glance into that throne room scene around the throne and in heaven, who's going to be there?

Who's going to be there in heaven? Representatives from every nation, but then the next few words describe the word nation. From every tribe, every people, and every language group. That's what a biblical nation is.

And so when we read passages like Malachi where it says that God is making His name to be great among the nations, that's what He's talking about. Papua New Guinea. I'm going to be talking about that a little bit.

Papua New Guinea's Many Peoples and Languages

One country, but 880 different nations within the one country of Papua New Guinea. 880 different tribes. 880 different languages. Not dialects, but for the most part, unrelated languages. And the Gospel's intended for every one of them.

Because every one of them are different ethnicities. Some of these tribes can be as small as 30 people that have a language and culture all their own. But they're not outside of the text, right? The intent of the Gospel, the intent of the death of Christ was for them as well.

And there will be representatives in heaven from every nation, every tribe, every tongue, and every people. So God is making His name to be great among the nations. He's making His name to be known among the nations.

Other passages that I like a lot speak about God making His name to be famous among the nations. Don't you like those passages? And then you read the testimony and you just see God's fame spreading across a region.

And so God is doing this in a lot of different ways. He's making His name to be known and great and His fame to be spread. And He's doing it primarily through the preaching of the Gospel and through the planting of churches in places where the Gospel has never, ever gone.

And it's an exciting thing to be a part of. And that's what I want to talk to you about this morning.

Yes, sir. You can point to them exactly where New Guinea is. Well, the island of New Guinea.

Would be directly north of the island of? Yeah, some of you kids remember from the class. There's Australia. There's New Guinea. One half of the island of New Guinea is called Papua New Guinea. That's the orange half.

The other half is Erienjaya, which is a province of Indonesia. That's a tough map there. It rolls up. But that'll give you an idea of where we've spent most of the last 27 years or so. Now we're working in Mexico as well.

We're continuing in Papua New Guinea. But we lived actually in New Guinea for 17 years. And I'm going to tell you some of these stories. But before I do, I wanted to speak to you directly. I was really encouraged by your worship this morning.

And the one brother that couldn't even read the text because the Spirit of God moved on him so heavy. I don't see that a lot in a lot of churches. I appreciate that, brother. I appreciate the Spirit of God and His work in you and moving you and bringing you to tears to weep over the living water.

You know, I don't know this church very well, but I'm suspecting that some of you are new believers. Maybe a lot of you are new believers. And thank God that the newness of your conversion has not worn off yet.

And you can still weep over that sweet grace. You know, some of us old timers, it's gotten too old. It's gotten too familiar. It's like an old pair of shoes, you know? They fit. They're just old and too familiar.

And we just take it for granted. And I was greatly impressed, not by you. You're nothing, just like I'm nothing. But impressed by the greatness of our God and what He's doing among you today. It was a great encouragement.

The Potential of a Small Church

And so as I look out among you, you may think, wow, you know, we're just a really small little old church. And what can we do? We don't have very many people. We don't have very much money. We don't have very much of anything to be able to do anything.

Well, I want to encourage you to remember what our Lord accomplished with 11 men. Fishermen, at that, for the most part. And that when we consider our advantages in terms of excellent education and incredible theological and technological advance and just financial resources, even for the poorest among us, comparatively speaking to the rest of the world, what we have even represented in this room right here this morning, I'm just struck by the awesome potential that I see in your faces.

God often has done a lot with a little. In fact, I think He specializes in that. And so be encouraged by your small number. But you know, as I think about our technological advance and our financial resources and all of the advantages that we would have over generations that precede us, there's something more than all of that that is needed.

If we're to see Christ proclaimed to the nations in our generation, and I just want to be really upfront and blunt and just kind of throw it right out there to you, what's needed is a new generation, a new army of missionaries who are willing to die for the cause of Christ among the nations.

Missionary Sacrifice and the Call to Martyrdom

I don't see that very much. In fact, I get real tired like John Piper. Some of you hear John Piper and read John Piper. Like John Piper, I'm real tired of American Christianity. The first question we always ask ourselves is, is it safe?

Is it safe for us? Is it safe for our children? Jesus never promised that it would be safe. Quite to the contrary, Jesus said unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone. It's a single seed.

But if it dies, it produces many seeds or much fruit. And He told His disciples that when you go out in My name, here's a promise for you. You guys like to claim daily promises? Here's a promise for you.

If you go out in My name, if they hated Me, they're going to hate you. There's a good promise for you. If they kill the Master, what are they going to do to the slaves? And I just believe that one of the missing components in our day in the training of new missionaries is the preparation of these new missionaries for the very real possibility that they may be called upon to literally lay their lives down all the way, even to death, in the reaching of the nations for Christ.

In the book of Revelation, again, you don't need to turn there, but there's a great little verse there that says that the crown of life is given to those who what? Who are faithful even to the point of death.

Remember that passage? It does not say, and it is not exhorting these believers to be faithful until you grow old and dumb. I mean, that's cool too. But the exhortation of the text is be faithful to the point of death.

And you will receive the crown of life. And if you go back and look at the context of that, it's very clear that the context is persecution and martyrdom. And so as we're talking about a very difficult thing, I can think of no better human example of this kind of commitment than Ed McCulley.

I don't know if you've ever heard that name, Ed McCulley. Ed McCulley was one of the five missionaries who were martyred by the Alca Indians. Remember that story? Some of you new believers, maybe you don't know that story.

Five missionaries were speared to death by the Alca Indians on January 4, 1956. Jim Elliott was the best known of these missionaries. Their story is pretty well known. My point is not to retell that story, but I did want to read to you something that Ed McCulley wrote to Jim Elliott just a few years before that incident happened.

And keep in mind, these guys were college students when he wrote this in their early 20s. Listen to what he said. Here's what he wrote to Jim Elliott. He said, I have just one desire now to live a life of reckless abandonment for Christ.

And I'm putting all of my strength and energy into it. And then he says, maybe the Lord will send me someplace where the name of Christ is unknown. Four years later, just days before that final flight into Alca territory where they were just slaughtered horrifically by the spears of these Alca tribesmen, Ed scribbled a little note into the margin of his journal.

And it simply said, I'm willing to give my life for a handful of Indians. And a few days later, he did it. I've already mentioned John Piper. A lot of us enjoy his writings and preaching, and I'm certainly one of those.

And I've noticed something in his preaching recently. And if you don't know of John Piper, I encourage you to go out and get some books or tapes or something. He's just a tremendous teacher in our day.

But a reoccurring theme in his preaching is the idea that in his opinion, one of the divine strategies for breaking open the remaining unreached peoples of the world is missionary martyrdom. It's one of his strategies.

It's a divine strategy. And so, I'm saying again this morning as I've been saying for the last five years as I travel through the churches, I'm on a campaign to recruit martyr missionaries. I have an agenda here this morning.

I'm here to recruit martyr missionaries for the least reached people groups of the nations. That's what I'm looking for. And you know, this idea of martyr missionaries didn't originate with John Piper.

I mean, he goes to Revelation 6 and some other places to talk about that. But really, it goes back before that. It goes all the way back to Jesus Himself. It goes all the way back to Acts 1. Maybe even before that, but I'm thinking in terms of Acts 1 where Jesus told His disciples.

This is moments before the ascension. And He told His disciples, you're going to go back into Jerusalem and you're going to wait. And when you receive the power of the Spirit, then you are going to be My witnesses starting there in Jerusalem, and then you're going to go to Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Do you know what the Greek word for witnesses is? In Acts 1? It's the Greek word martyreia. It's where we get the word martyrs. And so here we have Jesus just moments before His ascension giving His last message to these disciples.

And here He was recruiting martyr missionaries. And I think He took care to use that very word so that they would not misunderstand what He was calling them to. And that reminds me of my second favorite missionary in the world.

Second to Jesus. The Apostle Paul. This is one of my favorite verses in all of the Bible. In fact, I love it so much, I have it englossed on the nosedeck of one of my surfboards. So I see it quite often.

But I love this verse. Acts 20 .24 You have plenty of chairs back there for everyone? Yeah, make yourself comfortable there, brother. Acts 20 .24 Paul said, I consider my life worth nothing to me. Boy, that's going against the grain of American Christianity, isn't it?

If only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the gospel of God's grace. Paul said, I consider my life worth nothing to me. Oh yeah, my life's important.

But compared to this, compared to the task of taking the gospel to places where it's never gone, compared to that, my life isn't worth anything. It's one of the things I love about Paul. He didn't require self-preservation as a prerequisite for whether he would go or stay in a place.

You know, you talked about Fallujah and Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan. I hear a lot of talk. Oh, that's too dangerous. Too dangerous to go to those places. Those are closed countries. Well, there's no such thing as a closed country.

Jesus said to go into all the world. Where's a closed country? Closed country to me means just finding another way to get the job done. It's closed maybe to one way of working, but it's open somehow, some way, because Jesus told us to go.

And I'm just real tired of people putting at the top of their priority list, well, it's too dangerous. Well, this is what Christ has called us to. And you know, Paul, when he says, I count not my life as being dear unto myself, I think that he's saying that my life is important.

It's a precious gift from God. But if I can give my life for that, if I can exchange it for this, preaching the Gospel in places where it's never gone before, that's okay. Because the Gospel's worth it.

Jesus is worth it. And so are a handful of Indians in Ecuador. Or Papua New Guinea or Mexico or some other places that I'm going to tell you about. And so now when young people contact me as they frequently do, even this week, I got some emails from several young people.

And they're telling me about their excitement about they want to go to Mozambique or they want to go to Timbuktu or wherever it is they want to go. I write them back now and I say, do you really? Are you willing to die there?

That's one of the questions I now ask. And I'm not being, I don't think, overly dramatic when I ask that question. Because the world is a dangerous place these days. And missionaries are being killed by the tens of thousands annually.

You don't hear that from Dan Rather. Because they're not largely Americans that are being killed. But tens of thousands of missionaries, Koreans and others from all around the world, they're being killed every year.

So it's not unreasonable to ask, are you willing to die there? Well, that's the kind of disciple I want to be. Willing to be. I'm not saying I'm always that. But I want to be willing to be that. And that's the kind of young men and women we want to recruit and train and launch to the nations.

And we want to do it by the hundreds. We're going to talk about that too in just a moment. So much to talk about. I'm going to have to really talk fast. Let me see, what do I want to do here? I don't want to go there.

Missions as Taking Light Into Darkness

Here's a quick definition for you. Because I want to tell you a couple of stories about New Guinea this morning and then in the later session as well. But first, let me give you just a little definition for missions.

Because missions can get pretty complicated and complex sometimes. And I'm a simple guy. I like to cut through the complexity and get it right down to the most basic thing. To me, here's missions. Taking light into darkness.

That's missions. When you boil it right down to the most basic thing, missions is not difficult to understand. It's simply this, that those of us who have received the light of the Gospel, that living water, we are now to take that light and living water into the deepest darkness that we can find.

That's missions. And you can start doing that within blocks of where this church building sits. And then it's going to extend to the nations, but you can start right here. That's what missions is when you get right down to the nut of it.

That's what the church is called to do. The issue for me in missions really can be summed up in one word. Access. Access. And what I mean by that is that right now today in our world, there are something like six billion people on the face of the earth.

Now, I don't know how you are with numbers, but a million. Even trying to grapple with the enormity of a million just kind of short circuits my brain. But you start talking about a billion of anything.

And then you start talking about six billion individuals that inhabit our planet. And these six billion people are living within like 12 ,000 unreached people groups all over the face of the earth. It becomes a staggering situation that we find in the world today.

But there's six billion people alive and 2 .4 billion of them, roughly a third of the world's population, they live in cultures that have no access to the Gospel at all. Like I told the kids earlier in the earlier session, the name of Jesus doesn't even exist in the vocabularies of a lot of the world's languages.

He's unknown. He doesn't exist. You can't even stumble accidentally upon the message of Christ because it doesn't exist within their culture. That's the situation with one third of the world's population.

And so, often I talk about taking light into this kind of darkness. And invariably though, someone will come to me and they'll say, well, what about America? Do we have any darkness in America? How about it?

Any darkness in America? Any darkness on Commerce Street? Yeah, there is. There's a lot of darkness in America. America's dark and getting darker in a lot of ways. But yet, however, one big difference between America and Mozambique.

One big difference between America and Timbuktu or the interior tribes of New Guinea or the interior tribes of Oaxaca, Mexico or hundreds of other places that I could let you know about. One big difference between America and all of these places is in its access.

Because here in America, we have churches on every corner really. Bibles in every home. I read somewhere recently that there are now more than 100 translations of the Bible in English. Easy access to Christian books.

Easy access to Christian music and videos and DVDs. And what about now with the Internet? What do we have? 24 -7, right? And the point is that anyone here in America that wants to hear about Christ, they can do so.

Because He's a part of the culture. They can find the message of Christ in America. Not so in one-third of the rest of the world. And so all of that to make this point that I believe that the priority of new missionaries and new missionary giving, it should be directed to those places where the Gospel has never gone.

The text that I was going to read that I didn't feel like I had time to read was from Romans 15 -20. And it's the theme passage of our whole ministry. Where Paul said, it has always been my ambition to preach the Gospel, not where Christ is already gone.

Because I don't want to be building on someone else's foundation. I want to take His name and His message to places where it has never gone. And so the priority of new missionaries should be directed to those places, I believe, where the Gospel and where the church has never, ever penetrated.

So that's sort of my theme. And we'll kind of work that out as we go through this message and the next. And hopefully you guys can stay for the session after lunch as well. Let me just tell you a couple of quick stories about New Guinea.

The Geographic Barriers to Reaching Unreached Peoples

Pretty exciting stuff about what God is doing. And this is representative now of what we also want to do in Mexico and other places as God opens doors for us. I already showed you where New Guinea is.

It's a big island just north of Australia. But I'll tell you, New Guinea is one rough place. Still, I went for the first time one week after my 20th birthday in 1977, I went to New Guinea for two years.

And it was a rough place then, and it's a rough place still today. Cannibals and headhunters were very prevalent in the 70s. They're less prevalent now, but they're still there. And even apart from that, just geographically, the country is a difficult place.

In many areas, to get to the unreached places, you'll have to walk four or five days. Maybe we'll charter a little airplane that will land us on a grass airstrip in the middle of the jungle. And then from there, we'll walk for four days.

And we'll have one of our national brothers in front of us with a machete, and we pay him good money. And he's cutting a path, and we're bent over double, and we're making our way through the jungle. And you'll go 12 ,000 feet up over a mountain and down across a river, up and down, four or five days.

That's the kind of difficulty that we face in getting the Gospel to the people. There's a lot of reasons for people groups to be unreached 2 ,000 years after the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

And one of the reasons is just geographical remoteness. They're hard to get to. If they were easy to get to, they would have been reached by now. They're hard to get to. And by the way, even in the last three months, we're discovering new tribes in New Guinea.

New tribes that previously were unknown to the world in Indonesia and other places. And if you ever had opportunity to get into some of those mountains and swamps and jungles, you could see how tribes could go undetected because it's quite thick, that jungle.

The Kuka Kuka Tribe and Contextualized Evangelism

Well, let me tell you a story that illustrates our tribal evangelistic ministry. I consider myself to be a pioneer missionary. I want to go boldly where no missionary has gone before. In fact, people, nationalists, New Guineans, and Mexicans will come to me and they'll say, well, come to my village and come bring the Gospel to my place, to my town, or my village.

And the first question I always ask, well, who's already there? You know, because if some Baptist group is there, if assemblies of God are there, some Pentecostal group is there, some Evangelical group.

I'm not going. I'm not going to. When one-third of the world, fully one-third of the world has never heard the name of Christ, and with workers so few, as Jesus said, you think I'm going to go and duplicate efforts in places where some other brother is already working and go compete with souls in some limited, small geographical...

No, I'm not going there. I want to go where His name has never gone. Well, in 1977, when I arrived in New Guinea, I was 20 years old. I was learning the Polynesian language. I had an older missionary that was helping me out in these early days.

But it just so happens by God's grace that we had learned about a tribe called the Kuka Kuka tribe. They were a cannibalistic tribe. They were a very well-known tribe. If you go even, I think, probably to a good-sized library here in San Antonio, if you pick up a book on Papua New Guinea, you probably would read something about the Kuka Kukas because they were well-known and much feared because they would go through their mountain range.

They would kill men, women, and children. They would rape women, burn villages. Usually, they would bring one or two warriors back and they would put them on rotisseries and they would cook them like pigs and they would eat them and it would be a part of a great tribal victory, but also a celebration and worship of the gods and spirits, particularly ancestral spirits.

This is the way they were living in 1977. The very first person that ever went into this tribe was back in the 1940s. He was a government official. He was trying to take a population census. Very unwise.

He escaped with one arrow in this leg, two arrows in the other, and barely got out with his life. As far as we know, we are the very next people to enter this tribe 30-something years later after that incident.

And it was quite a story of what happened. The only way to get to the Kooka Kookas is, as I said, you would charter an airplane, you'd land on a grass airstrip, and in this situation, we had to walk three days to the Kooka Kookas.

Now, the Kooka Kookas were cannibals. And you need to know something about what this means and what they believed about it so you'll understand their story. They believed that if they ate a warrior from another tribe, that they would receive that person's strength and courage and wisdom and all of the positive attributes of that person.

You could get them from eating that person. That's what they believed about cannibalism. Now, how do you share the Gospel? People ask me this all the time. How do you start? Where do you begin to share the Gospel with a cannibalistic tribe?

Well, I'll tell you where we don't start. We do not begin by asking them, do you believe in God? We say, oh no, there is a God. There is a true God, a supreme God. And they go, oh yeah, we know that there's gods.

All kinds of gods and spirits. And you know something that's really interesting just as a sidebar? Because I've written a book on tribal people all over the world, not just limited to New Guinea. And one of the things that I've found in my research is that every single tribe that has ever been studied or analyzed, they have within their mythologies a story.

First of all, they all believe in a supreme God. All tribes know that there's a supreme God out there somewhere. And there's also within their mythologies a story of how people became alienated or separated from this God.

And they've got all these weird and crazy mythological stories of how it happened. But never in any tribal situation that I've come across, and I've studied it extensively, there is no mythological story or tale or anything that would indicate how to get back into contact with that supreme God.

And so they have within their stories how they were alienated from this one true supreme God, but there's no story about reconciliation. No story about how to get back in touch with this God. Very interesting.

You think God might have been a part of this whole thing? Well, and so I'm standing on a hillside with the kooka-kookas, and I'm saying, there is a God. You know that there's a God. And they go, oh yeah, we know.

There's all kinds of gods and spirits. But then we begin to give them little snippets of Old Testament stories. And the reason we do that is because we've found that as you tell Old Testament stories, you're going to find that they have some of these stories also within their mythological stories.

I was in one tribe, and I've never heard of this anywhere else, but they had within their tribal mythological creation story, their own creation story, the story of the Tower of Babel. And I said, oh, some missionaries have been here.

And they said, we don't know. We don't know anything about missionaries. This is our story. And it was incredibly close to the text of Genesis 6. They don't have books. How was this story preserved? How many years has it been since the Tower of Babel?

We're talking 7 ,000 years. Something like that, give or take 1 ,000. And yet, through oral tradition, generation after generation, these tribes sitting around their campfires have passed all of their other mythological stories as well as this story of a tower.

It has come through, and God has preserved it. And their first ancestor in this one tribe was Kayapon. You know, we called him Adam. They called him Kayapon. And they told me this crazy mythological story.

It was just really interesting, but that Tower of Babel story was interwoven. And so I was able to ask them, well, do you know why your people built the tower? Do you know why originally we all spoke one language and we all lived in one location and we all had one color of skin?

Why is it now that we have red, black, yellow, all different colors of skin, all different kinds of languages and we live all over the world? They said, we don't know, but these are three of the most important questions that we've had as a people.

And so this is the reason we tell those stories because we find an entrance point, a place of agreement, something that they already know that is biblically accurate, and then we can start right there.

And so I was able to jump on Acts 17 with this other tribe and say, from one man, this is a sermon of Paul. Remember that? He said, from one man, Adam, God created all of the nations of men. And it just goes on from there where God commanded all men everywhere to repent.

I was able to take their own story, they thought it was their own story, and start preaching Christ from that place rather than take my little preconceived sermon from America and translate. No, you go and you learn where they're at, what they believe, what they already know about God, and you search for ways to begin.

Well, with the Kuka Kuka tribe, as I was kind of telling some of these stories, I was telling the story of Noah and the flood. And they began clicking their tongues. Big show of emotion among the Kuka Kukas and they're looking back and forth to each other and they said, this man is from God.

They said, you are from God. They had the story of the worldwide flood, which is pretty common among tribes all around the world. They had the story of the worldwide flood. But as I was able to give them the story, they're thinking, how can this outsider, this white man, how can he know our stories?

He's from God. He's a prophet. Sort of like the text you read this morning when Jesus was able to do... And the woman said, I perceive you're a prophet. They looked at me and they said, you are from God.

And God just said, you are from God. And God used that to give us credibility then. They were very eager to hear everything else that we had to say. Well, it's a long story, but let me just shorten it and just tell you how they came to Christ.

Repentance and Conversion Among the Kuka Kuka

Just an incredible story of God's grace. I was sitting in a hut. And in this area of New Guinea, their huts are round. They're built right on the dirt and there's a fire in the middle and the men sit around the fire and that's where we do all of the talking and teaching and all that.

And so I'm teaching them and talking to them and trying to explain to them what it would mean for them in their culture to repent and turn to Christ. What would that look like? What does that involve as a cannibal chief out in the mountains of New Guinea?

What does repentance mean in that kind of a context? And as I was speaking, one of the chiefs, and it was his hut that we were in, he reached around behind him and he got his bow and his arrows and he began breaking them.

He didn't say a word, didn't wait until the message was over or anything. I didn't even know what he was doing, to be honest with you. But he started breaking his implements of war and he laid them in the fire.

He got his tommy hawk and he pulled the stone out of it and he laid it in the fire and all of his other implements of war and spears and all of that. The other two chiefs knew what he was doing. They got up and walked out and went to their huts, got their implements of war and brought them back.

They did the same thing. There were a lot of people that were listening in and looking and trying to hear what was the white man saying to their leaders. And when they saw what their leaders were doing and they understood the implications of it, they took off running.

And I can still hear these bare feet hitting the mud paths, going off in every direction. They came back with their implements of war and we had a bonfire. It was like in the book of Acts. Do you remember that?

When they burned the witchcraft books? It was an open show of repentance from the old way. I was teaching them about repentance, but I didn't say, you know, sign a card, walk an aisle. But like Lydia in the New Testament, God granted to her repentance.

God opened her heart and she believed and repented. And that repentance had to come out in some way. And I didn't really tell them how. And so, this old chief just thought, well, I've got to do something.

And he started breaking his bows and arrows and spears and throwing them in the fire. Open demonstration of repentance from the old way to the new. We had in a village of 350 people in about 10 days, we had 300 people who had come to Christ.

Now people in America, when they hear that story, and they say, yeah, well, was it really? You know, we don't hear about mass conversions like that very often in America. How do we know it's really real?

Well, their testimony continues. I'll tell you a couple of things. A few weeks after this big conversion experience, two of their young men were down at a river. These are teenagers, 18, 19, 20 year olds.