Saturday, July 26, 2008

Send Me?


In Acts 1:8, Jesus said "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." I wanted to share some current facts and numbers on how much of the world has been reached as of 2000. These come from the Joshua Project website.

There are currently 16,296 people groups in the world. A people group is defined as people who share a common language, culture, practice. They can cross borders and boundries. Of those 16,296 people groups, 6,747 are unreached. Population wise of the 6.69 Billion people in the world, 2.72 Billion of them are unreached. No Bible in their native language or dialect, no missionaries(less than 2%) have access, usually in an outlying area of another group.

So roughly 40.6% of the people in the world have not heard of Jesus, or do not have enough information available to them to understand about him. People all over the world, on nearly every continent. The other drawbacks are these areas are at times openly hostile to Christians and to God's word. Church and meetings are held in dark rooms with fear of discovery, of evey dollar given to missionary work, less than half of one cent is given.

I don't want to spend hours quoting statistics, but in this generation, with all of the resources, with all of the methods of communication, with the wealth at our disposal, will we make a difference?





Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Six Minutes

We live in a fast paced, high-tech, multi-task world. We have thousands of books, blogs, wikis, podcasts and videos at our fingertips. Sometimes, I find myself so busy, so pulled in many ways, that I forget the simplicity of God. His never in conflict, consistent message of love and never out of style or substance message. That is when people like John Piper remind me of the surety of the gospel. If you can find SIX MINUTES, sit back, relax and drink it in.