God's Glory to the Ends of the Earth

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0:15Friends, it's my joy to be with you today. I was here five years ago when Radius held its conference at this church, and I am encouraged at what the Lord has done among you in the past five years. I'm doubly encouraged that you have a San Diego guy at your helm. I am from San Diego. I think highly of many men who have come out of that, and you have gotten one of our best, so I'm very thankful for what has transpired here by the grace of God. If you have your Bibles, turn over to the passage we just read, Romans chapter 10, verses 13 through 15. We're going to look at this this morning. Before we get to that, I'm just going to give you a brief overview of where I'm coming from on this. This passage, if you know anything about the global impact and the strategy for reaching to the ends of the Earth, this passage gives Paul's formula, if you will, for how the gospel is to go, not just to those places that have little gospel impact, but particularly those places that have no gospel. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the eminent Welshman, would say of this passage, "These verses are the great charter for the foreign missions enterprise.

1:32They are the argument for the necessity and the urgency of taking the gospel to all countries under the sun." This is the great charter. This is the roadmap, if you will, that Paul would lay out. Later on, he would lay out his own ambition in Romans, chapter 15 for why he's going beyond where the gospel has already gone. But this is kind of the formula. My wife and I are, as I said, from San Diego, California. We went to a small liberal arts college there, and we had no intention of going into missions. And God, in his mysterious providence, through the word of God and through our church, the church elders confirming that on our hearts, we walked away from our jobs. I was a CFO for a Dutch multinational, was working over in the Netherlands quite a bit, and we were impressed with the verse that we're going to look at today, and others in the Book of Romans, Matthew 28, Acts 1, Ezekiel 67:12, a lot of different passages bore in on our lives.

2:34And we ended up leaving behind those occupations, and we went to the country of Papua New Guinea, and we learned the national language of Papua New Guinea. And then I'll never forget, the leadership of the organization gave us seven choices, seven language groups who had been asking for missionaries for five years or more. They don't make the list unless they've been asking for five consecutive years for someone to come learn their language, to bring in medical aid, to do what they have seen done in another location. And they were asking, and we had set our hearts on going to a place called Tuwadi.

3:15And the day came for me and the men of the team to load up in a small airplane, and we were going to fly to the airfield that was closest to Tuwadi, and we were going to land among that people, and we were going to see if this was the place where we were going to go, and God closed that airfield. It rained six inches in the night, and it was completely underwater. And we took out our piece of paper, and there was this second choice on there called the YembiYembi people. And that day on the tarmac, we changed, and we flew over YembiYembi. We had an empty water bottle, and we had a little rolled-up note that says, "We're coming to see your village." And we flew over, and I was in the co-pilot seat, opened the window, threw the water bottle out, and there's this little kid that's running, and I'm thinking, "We're going to kill the first YembiYembi we meet." It's going to drill him in the head.

4:03And he missed it, and we could see him waving the little note, and then a bunch of people came out of the jungle. And we flew to the closest airfield, and then we motor canoed. A motor canoe is a canoe about as long as this room, and it's got an outboard motor on the back. We motor canoed for seven hours, and we made it into YembiYembi. If you ever go to YembiYembi, which none of you probably will, but if you do, be prepared when they greet you for the first time. They take a huge hunk of mud, and they shove it into your face. And then they take diced-up flower petals, they throw those at your face, and it sticks to the mud, and now you're beautiful.

4:36Now you're ready to come into the village. And this is how they welcome us every time we go back to YembiYembi by God's good pleasure. We lived among them. We became, in many ways, like them. They renamed us. They gave us new families. We had to learn what it was like to be YembiYembi. They didn't believe our marriage was real, so they had me and my wife get remarried again. I've been married twice, both times to the same woman. There was just a litany of things as we became like them, mostly linguistically, so that the gospel would be unencumbered when it came to them. And finally, in January 2008, we started teaching, and we started in Genesis, and we started laying out this God who was so different than their gods.

5:24And we had about 1,000 people a day that were coming out for the teaching as we were talking through this God. We had developed an alphabet for them. They had no written alphabet. We had put through nearly 300 readers that could read the scriptures. I was in charge of translating all of the New Testaments and eventually the Pentateuch. And so as they're keeping up with us at night and reading these passages and the lessons that we're teaching, and this is starting to draw greater and greater interest, and as we work our way towards the linchpin of all humanity, Genesis chapter 3, the fall of mankind, you have this incredible group that is tracking with you.

6:04And the Yembis are not like North American audiences, not like you guys. If the Yembis like what you're saying while you're teaching at any time, they often put their hands to their mouth, and they'll yell, "Keep talking. This talk is good to my belly." And the reason is because the belly is the seat of their emotions. In North America, we talk about our heart being broken or our heart is full. We know your heart's not really broken, but this is a euphemism for our emotions. Theirs is the belly. If they don't like what you're saying while you're teaching, they will put their hands to their mouth and yell, "Shut your mouth.

6:36I'm about to vomit this talk up," because it's coming from their belly. So we're getting instantaneous feedback from 1,000 people while we're teaching, and this is all going on, and we get to the fall of mankind, and we teach on what it means when Adam and Eve broke out from God. To bury people in that part of the world and to see the effect that it has in the tropics on the human body. From dust you came, to dust you will return. But there's a promise buried in Genesis 3:15 that someday someone's coming who is going to make things right between God and man again. We had a fig tree that was growing right outside of the teaching house, and we went out, and we ripped off one of the branches, and we hung it from the lectern that I was teaching from. And that fig branch went down, and the leaves turned from green to yellow to brown to black, and eventually they fell off during the three and a half months that we were teaching the promise of God.

7:35That when our ancestors broke out from God, that would trickle all the way down to us today. But someday, someone's coming who has the power to put the branch back in the tree, to make things right again. And as we kept on going through the teaching, the next lesson as we're teaching, and we're teaching about the sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, one of the Yembi stands up and yells from the back, "Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. This one that you speak of, Cain, is he the guy?" I said, "What do you mean?" And he says, "Is he the guy who is going to put the branch back in the tree?" "No, he's not the guy." He sits down, and the Yembis are raining insults down on him. They are sarcastic people like you would not believe.

8:22It's just a great love language of many. And every Old Testament character that we would introduce in some way, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, maybe it's Solomon, all of the nations are coming in. Maybe the promise is fulfilled through him, and then Solomon falls. Someone gets up and asks the question, "Is he the one?" Friend, if you don't know this, your Old Testaments, the overarching umbrella of the Old Testament is who's the one? And we finally introduced Christ through the Book of John, and if you read the Book of John chapter one, and John the Baptist sees Jesus walking alongside the River Jordan, and John the Baptist says, "Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." And we had about seven to 10 YembiYembis, when they read this for the first time in their language, stand up in the teaching and yell, "Stop, stop, stop."

9:14"This one that Jono is speaking of, is he the one, or are we waiting for another?" Friend, one of the greatest privileges of my life was to say, "No, he's the one." He's the one that all of this talk circles around. Everything has to do with this one. This is the one who will put the branch back in the tree. And the Yembi started yelling and throwing things and saying all sorts of things that unsaved people say, and telling us, "Stop the talk of John who dunks in water. Who cares about him? Tell us about this one." And we had to gently tell them, "No, remember, we're building the house. We're building up the post, then the floor, then the walls." "Forget the walls, tell us about this one."

10:00Then we taught for two more months, and as we worked our way through the life of Jesus Christ, and finally on April 21st, 2008, we taught on the death, burial, and resurrection, and the miracle that God did on that day to save 40 to 50 from their sins. For the first time in the history of the Bisas language, men and women understood how they could be made right with the God of heaven and earth. And that whole community, over the next eight years, we stayed eight more years as the church grew to about 400 strong today. And it has its own elders, its own deacons, and just in the last year and a half, we've been very encouraged as we've heard about their first missionaries going out to another language group. And that's the story in brief, the background, if you will, as we look at this passage. So look at this with me again.

10:49I'm going to read this, and I'm going to make three main points with some sub-points underneath them. Romans 10, verse 13 through 15. "For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him in whom they've never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.'" Main point number one, if you're taking notes today, is God saves sinners. God saves sinners. I had the privilege of translating the Book of Romans.

11:29If you want to put a big heading over the Book of Romans, it's this exact same title, God saves sinners. Regardless of income, race, citizenship, jail record, number of divorces, number of ugly sins, God saves sinners. But it's God who does the saving, not man who aids in the process or contributes it in any possible way. The problem that the scriptures teach doesn't come from outside of you, the problem is you. You need to be reconciled to a holy God. When we were teaching the YembiYembis, as we were working through and getting closer, we had no good term for savior. They have no word for captain, hero, rescuer.

12:15They just don't have that in their language. But we ended up finding something that we could use in the teaching that we felt was much better. The Yembis will hike for days to get to better hunting grounds, and will go in these large parties, and will run up against rivers. Rivers maybe as wide as this auditorium, sometimes wider. And what we'll do is we'll take a huge tree. I say we. I don't do this, but they'll take a huge tree, and they will chop it down over a number of hours, and they'll fall that tree across the river. And if you're healthy, and if you're young enough, and if you're strong enough, you can walk across the tree to the other side.

12:51Everybody can walk across the base of it, the fat part of it. But as you get further towards the end of it, you have the branches that are poking that will knock you off, and it gets skinnier and skinnier. And in that part of the world, if you fall into the river, you'll likely get rolled across the rocks and you'll die. And so what do we do about the sick people among us, the younger ones, the older ones that are in the group? For that day, they name one young man, and for that day, he's called the bridgeman. And he puts people on his back, and he carries them from one side to the other, the one who takes us from Satan's side to God's side, from darkness to light. And the only rule if you ride on the bridgeman is this, don't try and help. Don't give him advice. Don't whisper. Don't lean.

13:40Don't do it, because if you do these things, we likely both go in the water, and we die. The picture of salvation. When you ride on the back of the bridgeman, you're not even allowed to hold onto him. He holds onto you, and he takes you from one side to the other. God saves sinners. But Paul's going to press in here, and he's going to talk about the means of this salvation. God can save anyone at any time from any language group in any manner that He chooses. But ordinarily, He uses His people. In the Old Testament, He spoke through donkeys. He spoke through angels. There are means that we see that God has utilized outside of His people, but ordinarily, it's through those that call themselves followers of His Son that He uses. And so Paul's going to press in on these means.

14:31Yes, God saves sinners. Praise God. All who call on Him will be saved. But then he gets into the means, verse 14. "How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him in whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" These are a series of rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions are questions we all know the answer to. Well, they can't. Unless someone goes to them, unless someone preaches, they do go to hell. Sometimes we call that a Christless existence or a separation from God. We need to be clear that there is enough through general revelation, through the seasons, through the way that fruit crops up at different times, through the order of the events, through the stars, that there is a God.

15:19There's enough evidence for unsaved man, but there's not enough to know how to be reconciled to Him through general revelation. It's only going to come through preaching and preachers that go to these people, and this is what Paul is saying. They cannot be reconciled to God unless someone goes to them. So what are the marks, if you will, and I agree with my brother John Piper, who categorizes this under goers and senders. Your major heading for the second one is goers in missions. Those who go. What are the characteristics of those who go, particularly to these peoples who have yet to hear? Well, let me suggest three.

15:59Number one, the goers need to be well-trained. The goers need to be well-trained. They need to know their Bibles. Your first missionaries that are sent out from the New Testament, Paul and Barnabas coming out of the Antioch church. Think with me for a second. If the best of your preachers in the Antioch church are set apart by the Holy Spirit to be the ones to go, the ones who knew their Bibles the best, the encourager among them, set those two apart. They're going to be my mouthpieces to take the gospel to those places that have yet to hear. They need to know their Bibles, and particularly if they're going to places, to languages that have never heard, they need to know how to break down a language that has never been written down before.

16:46They need to know how to teach people how to read and write, how to translate the Bible, how to raise missionary kids in difficult contexts, and they can come back and segue into their passport country without hiccups. That's a series of skills. That's not intuitive. They need to know and be well-trained, particularly in their Bibles and for the lane of missions in which they're going. And then the clearest injunction we can see from this in the goers is they need to preach. They need to preach. They need to count the cost, know their Bibles, get well-trained, but once they get over there, they learn the language.

17:23They need to preach the word of God. How then will they hear unless someone preaches to them? It's through the preached word of God, and the implication for us today is if you're going past the English language, you got to know the language in which you're preaching in, and you have to be a good communicator in that language, lest they stumble at the messenger and not at the message. Our preachers need to preach. 1 Corinthians 1:21, "For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe." It's through the word of God preached in a way that doesn't allow them to stumble at accent, tone, verbs misconjugated. No, no, no, he's speaking my language. He knows my culture.

18:14He's using illustrations from my world, banana trees, canoes, crocodiles. I'm in San Diego, the United States Marine Corps. What's happening with the San Diego Padres? I'm clear on my own culture as I preach, and I'm clear in my language, and I'm preaching in a way That they can understand the gospel clearly. And then finally, for the preachers, they must see past this world. The goers who go must see past this world. One of my great heroes in the faith, his name is John Gibson Paton. I understand on Wednesday you had John Gibson Paton in an acting form among you. There is just an incredible lineage that has come out of Scotland in the way of pioneer missionaries, particularly in the 19th century.

19:03But John Gibson Paton, one of their bright lights who's leading a Bible study, a Green Street mission is what they called it. Hundreds are coming out and John Paton says, "No, I'm going to Vanuatu. I'm going to the New Hebrides where no gospel has gone before. I'm leaving behind fruitful ministry." Beware of success in ministry dictating calling. Praise God Judson didn't do that. Praise God Hudson Taylor didn't do that. We go where no gospel has gone before. Not all of us, we're going to get to the senders in just a little bit here, but we look to those quarters where the gospel has yet to go, particularly by language.

19:43We see a clear pattern in Genesis chapter 11 that when God separates the nations, he doesn't separate them by skin color. He doesn't separate them by culture. He doesn't separate them by geography, just moving them out. He separates them by the tongue, and the tongue is your first order divider among the peoples. Down from that are other dividers, but Gibson Paton realizes, "I've got to go to those languages over there." And 10 years prior, there was one of their saints from their numbers in Scotland who had gone there, and he had made it to the shore, and while the ship that dropped him off was watching, he had been summarily killed, executed, boiled, and eaten in front of the ship that dropped him off.

20:28And John Paton says, "I'm going there." And so they sit down with him as a church, and I'm an elder at Claremont Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Diego, California. I would have sat down with him too. And they try and talk him out of going to the New Hebrides. And in his autobiography, it records what happens here. It says this, "One dear Christian saint cried, 'The cannibals. You will be eaten by cannibals.' To which John Paton responded, 'Mr. Dixon, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in a grave there to be eaten by worms. I confess to you that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus Christ, it will make no difference to me whether I'm eaten by cannibals or by worms. And in that great day, my resurrection body will arise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.'" Where were his eyes? His eyes were not on this world. His eyes were not on this.

21:31His eyes were on heaven. That's where I'm going. Someday my body will arise, whether I'm eaten by cannibals or by worms. I'm praying that someday there will be a missions organization that will come out with a shirt or hat that just says, "By cannibals or by worms." And if you know, you know. We're going. Everyone in here, if the King tarries, it's by worms or by cannibals, likely much more by worms in this context. But we're all going. Do you have a vision for something beyond this world? The goers that will come out from you, the 18 to 25-year-olds, the 35-year-olds that will be coming out, do they have a vision for something beyond Minneapolis, something beyond the English-speaking world? No, there's a world to come.

22:20I have a homeland. I have another king. There's a city waiting for me. I'm a pilgrim passing through this world. My land is waiting. That's how we can bury our loved ones, graduates from BCS. I heard of what happened in the last few days here at this congregation, and we can bury them with hope. We'll see him again. In our homeland, we will see our brothers and sisters again, and so by cannibals or by worms, I go. This is what goers who have a correct vision of heaven will place centrally in their minds. But then by God's grace, there's this other category that Paul puts into this passage, and he mentioned this together.

23:09And so there's this two-part equation to the Great Commission. There's the goers, of which there's probably maybe 5% in this room. Let's be honest. You're an average North American congregation, so there's about 5%, maybe less, that will be goers, particularly where they cross linguistic, cultural, or geographic barriers. That's your definition for missionaries. Sent by churches to strengthen or plant churches as they cross linguistic or geographic barriers. What of the ones who stay behind? What of the 95% of us? I used to be a goer, and now I'm a sender in San Diego, California. What are the marks of good senders?

23:50Major category number three, senders in missions. What do they look like? How are they to preach unless they are sent? Number one, good senders raise their sons and daughters to be goers. Good senders raise their sons and daughters, their grandsons, their granddaughters to be goers. Gibson Paton makes it to the island of Tanna. His wife is killed by malaria within nine months, and then his son dies a few days later. He has to sleep on their graves for a few weeks. I got to see this grave. It had been over 10 years since somebody had been to his wife and son's grave. They're buried in the same grave.

24:36We had to clean off the leaves, the little bit of mud that was there. There's this plaque that's on it. No one had been there in over 10 years. It's way out in the boonies. It's right by a swamp. You can understand how she contracted malaria. And he sleeps on her grave because they were going to dig her up and eat her if he didn't. And the tears that he wept there, he says it in his autobiography, tears of bitterness, tears of lostness. Fretting, he starts to go down that deep, dark rabbit hole that often missionaries go when things go sideways. He goes back to Scotland, then he goes to Australia, and he remarries.

25:12And while he's in Scotland, they're singing a hymn, and the hymn, the chorus of the hymn goes like this, "Send our sons and daughters glorious to the nations abroad." And John Gibson Paton gets up and he says, "Everybody likes to sing that hymn as long as we're talking about somebody else's sons and daughters." We love the idea of the nations being reached, just don't send my kids. Just don't call my grandchildren. Friends, there's this passage in Matthew 4:21 that points to the sons of Zebedee and how when they heard the Master's call, James and John, his two right and left hand in the family business, left their boats.

25:53In the scriptures, Matthew explicitly puts it in there, left the boats and left their father and followed Jesus. Are we raising sons and daughters that when they hear the Master's call, there's no hesitation because of the way they've been raised? They were raised with the stories of Amy Carmichael, of Betty Green, of Gladys Aylward, of Adoniram Judson, Hudson Taylor. They know these stories because you raised your kids in such a way that if someday they say, "Mom and Dad, I think the Lord's calling me to go to the Gadomamu people," who still to this day have no gospel witness, no church among them in the entire language. It's not a surprise to you.

26:34You'll take them to the Minneapolis Airport. You'll have tears in your eyes because you're a human being, but you'll say some version of, "We're proud of you. We raised you in this way." Good senders raise their sons and daughters to be goers. Number two, under the senders, good senders live in such a way that the Great Commission affects their life here. There's this famous missionary by the name of William Carey, and we've prayed some version of this in the prayer room, which I enjoyed so deeply. William Carey, before he leaves, and he would leave for India. He'd stay 42 years in India. He'd see six Bible translations completed.

27:12He would be the tip of the spear, the wedge, if you will, that behind him would come so many good missionaries. Judson would follow in his steps, and from India would be the springboard to get to Burma. But Carey, before he goes, describes, and him and his church elders sit around and they describe what's about to happen, and he says, "I'm about to go down a deep, dark mine shaft." And he makes this famous statement, "I'll go down the mine as long as you hold the ropes." We remember our missionaries. We hold the ropes. And I believe that someday when the King returns, he's going to ask everybody who went down the mine shafts, "Show me your hands. Show me what it cost you.

27:51Show me ... the scars you have for taking the glory of my name to the ends of the earth." But he's also going to ask everybody at the top of the rope who held the ropes, "Show me your hands." Friends, on that great day, will you have any scars? Or will it just be for the North Church budget, the missions committee? Are you on some sort of a support team here? Do we drive older cars? Do we live in smaller houses? Do we have skinnier 401Ks for the sake of the young men and young women that are coming up through U of M, who are coming up through BCS, who are coming up through Bethel, who are members of this church and want to go to the nations, and we don't want them to go to Washington and Hawaii and San Diego to gather support.

28:45They belong to this church. So we're going to have great, beautiful scars on our hands as we build up the funding to send these ones out because they belong to us. We have scars on our hands. It's not just for the goers to have scars. It's for the senders, particularly the senders who have the means to see these ones on. And it may not be through financial means for some of us, but it may be through our time, maybe even more valuable than our money. We're on these groups. We're praying faithfully. We're understanding what's happening. We're reading prayer letters. We're part of the support structure of this, but we have great, beautiful scars on that day.

29:26Not our Sunday school groups, not our church. We have scars because we're behind this, because we want to be a good sender. And then finally, good senders are faithful church members. Good senders are faithful church members. The Bible knows nothing of lone ranger Christians that go out apart from the local church. It also knows nothing of missions that does not see its terminus, its endpoint, its goal as churches established. Just read the book of Acts. Those who heard the Great Commission from Jesus' very lips, it's a wonderful thing to lead people to Christ, but we're teaching them all that Christ commanded. That's the church.

30:11They went out, they evangelized, they discipled, and then they gathered those disciples into churches. And from here, as the senders are saying, "Keep going, keep going. We want to see that church strong. We want to see that church. We want to see that language with a thriving church among it so that it can be the light to all the rest of those who speak that language." We, in turn, are faithful here. One of the great blessings, and I would not recommend this, it was about two Sundays before I left for Papua New Guinea, my church asked me, "Would you preach the Sunday sermon?" That's a horrible idea.

30:45You're going to hear all sorts of heresy and bad thoughts because your mind is just scattered. And so I got up and preached. I'm sure it was of very, very limited value. But one of the great treats was in the second row, right there, were two who were in our, we call them partnership groups at Claremont Emmanuel Baptist Church, and there were Marv and Shirley sitting there in the second row. Marv and Shirley would pray faithfully for us. And while we were overseas, they would send us Tapatio hot sauce, and my wife loves York Peppermint Patties, and we couldn't get double A and triple A batteries, and they were just praying for us. We knew that Marv and Shirley were there for us.

31:22And then we come back 13 years later and tell of the glory of God among the Bisa-speaking peoples and how the church is starting to move out among that language, and there's Marv and Shirley. Same chairs. They might as well put a plaque there. "Don't sit there. This belongs to the Friedmans." Faithful, faithful. Friends, I lead a school called Radius International. We train people to go to the last language groups of the world to see churches planted in those places. And we train the students down in Tijuana, Mexico, because we don't want them influenced by their home confines where English is so widely spoken. But we train them that this is going to take 10, 20, 30 years. This is going to take the best years of your life.

32:12This is going to take a long time. The easy places, by God's grace, have been reached. They haven't been reached in totality. We need more churches in some of these places where we know their languages, and there's already churches there, but the places that have no church, the languages that have no church, it's going to take a long time. You be faithful. You stay the course. What of the senders? "Well, the sermons are getting a little bit long at North. Well, we're singing different songs. Eh, the childcare program is a little bit better." Hmm. If the gospel stops being preached from this pulpit, you find another church.

32:48But if the gospel is faithfully preached here, you stay. We're faithful. We are faithful as senders. We are faithful as goers until the King returns, and we hold the course to the very end. When we were wrapping up in YembiYembi-- Or excuse me, when we were two weeks after we presented the gospel in YembiYembi, the Yembis helped me build my house, and they knew that I slept in a certain place. And so our houses were built like theirs. They were eight feet off the ground. And so when they wanted to get me, they would take this long pole, and they'd hit the bottom of the floor, and your head would pop up off the floor, and you'd be jarred out of a sleep. It was a horrible way to wake up.

33:29But that's how they would wake me up. Yembis are night owls. They stay up till 2:00, 3:00 in the morning nearly every night. Men's Bible study starts at midnight, goes to about 3:00 in the morning. It's just the way it is. I'm not a night person, but I became a night person for 13 years. And one night, two weeks after we presented the gospel, wat, wat, wat, bottom of the floor, and head bounces off, and I go out to the window, and I yell out there, "Who is it?" And it's a typical Yembi response, "It's me, it's me." "I know it's you. Who are you?" And in YembiYembi, it's rude to call somebody by their name. That's what strangers do. That's what outsiders do.

34:06That's why we were adopted into families and clans in YembiYembi. And so he yells back at me, "It's me, your tribal father." Oh, my goodness, this is one of the chiefs of the village. And so I go outside, and there are seven men who are out there. And in the YembiYembi, you don't shine your flashlight on somebody's face. It ruins their night vision. It's really rude. You shine it on their feet, and they can recognize all 1,500, 2,000 of them, depending on the time of year. They can recognize everybody based off their feet. Well, of course, they can recognize my feet, but I can't recognize anybody.

34:37So I'm working my flashlight up to the kneecaps, up to the belly buttons and the shorts, and okay, I'm recognizing that knee, I'm recognizing those shorts. And there's seven guys in front of us that we believe had understood the gospel. And later on through follow-up interviews, we would confirm that these are seven believers, converts to Christianity. And my tribal father, and I asked him, "Has somebody been bit by a snake? Has somebody caught malaria?" And that's what they would come get me for if there was some emergency. And he said, "No, no, no, it's nothing like that. We want to know when we're going." And I said, "What do you mean?" And he says, "Well, if what the book says is true, that our sister village across the mountain, the people of Chungmin, who speak our same language and don't know this talk, if what the book says is true, they're going to the place of fire, right?" "Yeah, the book is true.

35:28Yeah, they are going to the place of fire." "So when are we going? Will it be tomorrow or the next day?" Two weeks old in the faith. When are we going? Friends, there's an emphasis at this conference, and I love the emphasis, God's glory spread to the nations as we press these things out. You have this motto here, for the joy of all peoples. But the question remains, don't rest on your laurels. Don't rest on your history. When are we going? Not just to the English-speaking world, not just to the Spanish-speaking world, not just to those languages. When are we going to those places, those peoples, those languages that still know nothing of this great God?

36:16We continue to press out. We continue to move out. We continue to go beyond to the very ends of the earth until the glory of our God covers the earth as the waters cover the seas. This is why we exist as a people. This isn't a motto. This isn't a slogan. This isn't a fad. This isn't a one time a year thing. This is part of our DNA. And as that DNA spreads to our young people, it spreads to our grandchildren, we continue to see the name of our God made great in languages where he is not known. Let me pray. Father, thank you for your kindness to us in Jesus Christ. Thank you that there are men who shed their blood so that we could have these scriptures that we read this morning in our own language.

37:07We have faithful preachers that herald the Word, preach the Word, understand our culture, apply it to us. The Word is powerful. The Word is a double-edged sword. It divides. But Lord, pity the nations, pity those peoples that do not have the Word, and do not have preachers, and stand without hope, and are going to hell if no one goes to them. May guilt not motivate us, Lord. May your glory and your name not being known, spirits, stones, rivers, false idols that are nothing are being given glory where you should be standing in their place. Lord, may you send out your ambassadors. May you raise up this church to where it is a powerful sending church.

38:02And as the senders and the goers work together, we will see your glory spread to those last corners, those last peoples that still do not know. In Jesus' name, we pray these things. Amen. Amen.

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Jump to live

God's Glory to the Ends of the Earth

Where Christ Has Not Been Named

The Greater Gain of Godliness

God's Glory to the Ends of the Earth

Prepare Him Room

The Sermon on the Mount

Follow Jesus

The Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

The Pattern for Gospel Advance

From the Church, For the Church

Jesus Does Not Deviate from His Mission When Satan Tempts Him

This Is My Beloved Son

Prepare the Way

Jesus Fulfills What the Prophets Said about Israel’s Exodus, Exile, and Despised Messiah

The Wise Worship Jesus

The Birth of Jesus

Behold, the King Has Come!

Better Together

Oaks of Righteousness

God’s Word in 3D

The End of Genesis

Jacob's Final Blessings

God With Us

Sovereignty Saves

What Has God Done

Joseph Exalted

Behind a Frowning Providence

Sordid Sin and Stunning Grace

Betrayal: The Bitter Sting of Joseph's Painful Providence

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