Well dear friends, it’s a joy to be here with you this morning. My name is Jonathan, and when my wife, Maggie, and yes, you hear Jamie right, my six daughters, were first went out, we went to South Asia as church planters with Mission to the World. After serving a season there and having to leave, not of our own choosing, we have since relocated to around Chiba, Japan. I serve now as the international director for MTW for all of our work in the Asia-Pacific region of the world. And I just want to say how grateful I am for you. I am so thankful for your church, for your prayers for us, for the ways that First Pres has supported us over these years, cared for us, loved us, and loved the people that we serve. I am incredibly grateful. And it’s a great joy to open God’s Word with you this morning. Would you bow your heads and pray with me as we ask for our Father to guide us as we look at His Word.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we come before You this morning, worshiping You and declaring the excellencies of Christ, that You have loved us with an everlasting love and You have sent Your Son, Jesus, to die on the cross to give us salvation, rise again, and ascended to heaven, and sent Your Spirit to fill us to be Your people and to bear this message to the world and to the nations. We pray this morning by the help of Your Spirit that we would see the glories of Christ, that we would magnify Him, that we would make much of Jesus and that we would decrease as He increases. Help us now, we pray. We need You, in Christ’s name, amen.
If you have a copy of God’s Word, would you please turn to Romans chapter 15. It will be our text for this morning. Romans chapter 15. I’ll be reading verses 14 to 29. Romans 15:14-29. This is God’s Word:
“I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. But on some points I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to be proud of my work for God. For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written,
‘Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.’
This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you. But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.”
Friends, the grass withers, the flowers fade, but the Word of God is forever, and this is His Word.
Jim Elliot was a 20th century Christian missionary. He was compelled by this missionary impulse of Paul to proclaim the Gospel among a people where Christ had never been preached. He had a focused, an unwavering ambition to do this. He learned the native language, he gathered a team of likeminded people, and he carefully planned to visit and Ecuadorian tribe. And you know the story. In 1956, January 8, Elliot and four Christian missionaries were killed by the people that they were trying to reach. The martyrdom of Elliot and his friends, it sparked a surge in world missions. Lifemagazine did a ten-page article with pictures and a spread, celebrating Elliot and his friends’ mission and even their deaths. And this inspired many to go and to give and to reach those Ecuadorian tribes.
A lesser known story, in 2018, a young American man by the name of John Chow, inspired by Jim Elliot, and likewise with a burning passion to preach Christ where He has not been named, rode a small boat up to the shores of an isolated island in the Indian Ocean, an island by the name of North Sentinel. It’s inhabited by the North Sentinelize, of whom there are probably only 150 left. These people have been isolated from the surrounding world for thousands of years. Their language is indiscernible to linguists and even to the neighboring islands. They are totally untouched by the rest of the world. And even if the outside world wanted to study their language, their culture to get to know them, they’d be unable to because the North Sentinelize are an incredibly inhospitable group. They attacked and even killed anyone who tries to visit them.
John Chow, his intent was to live among them. He studied language, not their language, but he studied language to try to learn how to learn languages. He wanted to go attend to their physical needs. He wanted to live among them and to share his faith with them. And so he prepared the best that he could. He raised support for a number of years. He joined a missions sending agency. And he went boldly, knowing full well what could come. On his first attempt rowing up to the little island of North Sentinel to make contact with the islanders, they shot arrows at him. He rode away. On his second attempt, he came back, the same thing happened, and he tried several times until finally, the last time, he landed at the shore and they brutally killed him on the beach. So this was 2018.
As media and commentators were in an uproar following this event, Ed Stetzer, a missiologist, he was asked to write for The Washington Post a comment on Chow’s failed mission. And to their surprise, Ed Stetzer supported what he did. And he said this in his article. “Either Jesus meant all nations or He didn’t.” And what he noted was that John Chow wasn’t changing the program. Rather, the culture has turned on Christian missions. But the culture critiquing Christian missions, that’s somewhat to be expected. What really surprised Ed Stetzer was that the church had also turned on John Chow. Leaders in the church condemned what he did. They looked down their noses at him. “What if he got them all sick? He didn’t know their language. How is he expected to make any progress? He didn’t have a team with him? That was foolish!”
John Chow’s life and death asks us a very important question. Whatever you think of the story, how he did what he did, we need to answer the question, “Why? Why did he do that?” And, “Does this ‘every nation’ of Jesus’ commission remain binding for Christians everywhere? Is reaching the unreached, is proclaiming the Gospel where Christ has not been named, still something that the church is called to do?” And in our passage this morning, Paul answers this question with a resounding, “Yes!” And we’ll look at three reasons why reaching the unreached should be at the top of our agenda, and two promises as we engage in this challenging task.
So the first reason that Paul gives us is for the worship and the glory of Christ among the nations. Look at verse 15 with me. Paul says, “ have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” The imagery that Paul is evoking here, that he is using, is imagery of temple worship. In fact, it’s no small thing that the word that he uses for “minister” is the word that we get “liturgical” from. And he’s using this very intentionally because he sees his missionary service as that of a priest, offering sacrifices to God.
And what are those sacrifices? It’s the blood-bought elect from every nation. And Paul is immersed in the Hebrew bible, and Psalm 2 probably provides some backdrop to this but it makes it perfectly clear that the Son of God will indeed receive an inheritance of nations. “Ask of me,” it says, “and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.” You see, Paul’s high priestly offering to God, his holy ministry of worship, is the souls of the unreached. And friends, this is profound – how he sees his calling, how he sees his work. The supreme goal of missions is the worship of God and bringing more and more worshipers to the kingdom of heaven is itself sacrificial and an act of worship to God. The mundane, the ordinary ministry of evangelism and church planting, the challenges of pastoral ministry, of shepherding Gentiles, of navigating challenges and ministry conflict, getting stoned and shipwrecked, it’s nothing short of glorious and sweet-smelling sacrifice to God.
You see how remarkable this is? How that changes our perspective even on our ministries. Whether it’s caring for your neighbor’s kids, hospitality, taking in a homeless person, supporting a missionary, moving to East Asia and spending four years learning a very difficult language only to barely be able to explain the Gospel. Paul’s self-perception here can really help us see that none of the mundane, none of it is lost on God.
So what fuels His passion for the salvation of the Gentiles? And the answer is, the glory of Christ. Look at verse 17. He says this, “In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to be proud of my work for God.” Then he goes on, “For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God.” What an amazing perspective. Has there ever been any individual who has shaped more of the known world by their life’s work? This Jewish man, weak as he was, armed with nothing more than the Word and the Spirit, took on the known powers of the world and the devil and changed history. And then he says with confidence, “It wasn’t me. It was Christ.”
You see, in all of this, Paul’s burning passion in the salvation of the Gentiles is that Christ Jesus would be glorified, that He would be worshiped, that He would receive all praise and honor and glory because this is His work, this is His Church, these are His nations. That the Lamb would receive the inheritance for which He died. But this should also change our posture in missions, shouldn’t it? When we come to understand the depth of what Paul is saying, it should give us a humility, but also a boldness. “In Christ Jesus, I have reason to be proud of my work for God,” he says. If anyone had reason, it was Paul, but he gave all glory to Christ. So when you realize that you have been saved by grace, that it’s nothing that you’ve done to earn it, that God loves you for Christ’s sake and not anything that you bring to the equation, that’s incredibly humbling for us. God doesn’t need you to fulfill His mission in the world. God doesn’t need me. He is completely sovereign. But what boldness we have to go in His name, in the name of Christ, with the power of His Spirit, preaching a message of hope and life to a dying world, desperate for this.
I recently had the privilege of hearing Dr. Patrick Fung, an OMF missionary, spoke at the Lausanne Congress in South Korea a few years ago. He spoke about the progress of the Gospel in China, and he shared how he was invited to the archive room at the University of London where there’s a massive archive room with thousands of files, each file representing a missionary life dedicated to the Chinese, given for the sake of the Gospel, thousands of files – Hudson Taylor and a few other famous missionaries you would recognize. But there were thousands of names that you would never know – forgotten by history, given for Christ, to bring the Gentiles to obedience by the power of the Spirit of God. Many of you have heard about the progress of the Gospel in China. Today, among the Han, the largest people group in China, conservative estimates say that maybe 8% are Christian. That’s 100 million Christians, more than there might even be in this country. Look what Christ has accomplished. Look what He’s done. And one day, we will all be together in glory because some, many were willing to go, die and be forgotten.
The second reason Paul gives is because Christ is not named. In verse 19, go there with me, Paul starts to let us in on his missionary agenda, his strategic focus. And the first thing that you’ll notice is that he quite audaciously declares that, “From Jerusalem to Illyricum, I have fulfilled the ministry of the Gospel of Christ.” Now what does he mean by that? First of all, he’s not saying that he has preached the Gospel to every single person in that area. That’s 1,400 mile stretch. But what he is doing is he is letting us in on his strategic intent, the geographic expansion of the kingdom of Christ. His objective in church planting is setting up Gospel outposts, stretching out, pressing out the kingdom borders a little farther into areas where there is no presence of the Gospel. And it’s frontier work that he is doing. He is converting the unreached. He is training them in ministry. He is ordaining elders to shepherd the flock. And then he moves on and he does it again in the next outpost.
And this idea of unreached nations, it was an obsession for Paul. Look at verse 20. He says, “Thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation.” He says in another place, in 2 Corinthians 10:16, “So that we may preach the Gospel in lands beyond you without boasting the work already done in another’s area of influence.” Where did Paul get this? Why did he have this impulse to preach Christ where Christ has not been named? Certainly he could have justified staying back in Antioch and pastoring a church there. Lots of people need Jesus in that city.
But as you may know, Paul was immersed in the Old Testament scriptures and he understood that God’s plan of redemption was nothing less than filling the earth with His image – not just one city, not just one country; the whole earth. And we see this in verse 21 where he quotes from Isaiah 52:15, “Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.” The salvation of the unreached nations is Paul’s agenda because it is God’s agenda. And Paul says as much in Galatians 1. It’s the mission to the unreached peoples of the world that’s the very reason why God saved him. In 2 Timothy 4, he says it’s the reason that God sustains him and gets him through his trials. Paul’s holy ambition, his vision, his divine mission and everything in his life is ordered and optimized for the sole purpose of his proclaiming the Gospel of Christ where He has not been named and to plant Gospel-proclaiming churches that will testify to the good news of Jesus and then move on and do it again.
In 1990, the MTW team in Tokyo, Japan was asked by the Presbyterian Church in Japan to plant a church in a part of the metro-Tokyo area where there had never been a church. In fact, in our partner denomination at the time – this is 1990 – there were only three churches with a total of about 60 worshipers combined on any given Sunday, in Tokyo, the largest city in the world. Today, thirty years later, by God’s grace, there are now 22 churches in that presbytery and over 1,000 combined worshipers on any given Sunday.
Now who did that? To be sure, it was Christ. It’s His work. It’s His Church. All glory to Christ! But He used hundreds of men and women – Japanese, American missionaries, foreign missionaries, churches like First Pres, people with ridiculous ambitions to reach the Japanese. Friends, this has to become our ambition as well. This has to be on our agenda because it’s God’s agenda. And by God’s strength, let’s stretch out the geographical borders a little farther. What would God be pleased to do in the next thirty years if First Pres Jackson but Japan or Thailand or Honduras on the top of your agenda?
A third reason that Paul gives is that this is the church’s vocation. What Paul makes explicitly clear in this next section is that this mission is not just his, it’s not just the missionaries, but it is the church’s, the whole church’s mission. We are all called to be part of this worldwide project of reaching the unreached with the Gospel of Christ. And He is inviting the whole church to be involved in taking the whole Gospel to the whole world. The book of Romans, perhaps Paul’s magnum opus, it might surprise you to know that the purpose of him writing this letter is to raise missionary support for his ministry to the unreached, to mobilize prayer for the unreached, to invite the church into this great mission of God on earth. In the context of his mission, what we see in verse 22 and following really begins to help us understand this. The Lord is calling Paul to Spain to continue to extend the boundaries of Jesus’ kingdom to what was then the extent, the far reaches, the unreached parts of the world. And he is inviting the Roman church to support this, to be a part of this mission in giving and in receiving and in prayer.
But Paul has been unable to visit the Roman church. Look at verse 22. He says, “This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you.” Now what’s the reason? It wasn’t illness. It wasn’t logistics. It wasn’t that he was providentially hindered. His missions ambitions took precedence over his obligations to encourage an existing church. Now let me say that again. His mission to proclaim Christ where He has not been named was simply more important to him, more urgent to him than fellowship with his brothers and sisters in Rome who already knew Jesus. Go back to verse 14. He says, ““I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another.” What’s he saying? “You don’t need me. You don’t need me. You have the Word of God. You have the sacraments. You have the power of the Spirit in your midst. You know what to do. Do the work of the church! But woe is me, however, if I don’t name Christ where He is not named.” Paul loved the Roman church, he does, but His purpose in visiting them is not an end in itself. Verse 24, he says, “I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain.” He’s got this crazy ambition to see Christ proclaimed among these unreached people and he can’t shake it. And he’s on his way to Spain and he’ll visit Rome, but only to invite them into this ministry of preaching Christ among the unreached.
Did you know that out of the 5 billion non-Christians alive today, 3 billion of them will likely live and die and spend eternity in hell and never meet a Christian, never hear the Gospel in their own language? Ninety percent of all Muslims and Hindus in the world do not personally know a Christian. Should this concern us? Should this worry us? Should any part of this reality influence our missionary agenda? The question is then asked, friends, and with good measure, “This is all well and good for MTW, it’s good for Paul, but I’m just trying to make it in life. I’m trying not to ruin my kids, trying to hold down a job, and you’re telling me I need to be concerned about the Uyghurs in western China?” And of course Paul uses the analogy of a body in other places to show how the church works as a body. Some send, some go, but the whole body is called to participate in extending the boundary markers of Christ’s kingdom. Make no mistake, we all can and need to pray, and Paul dedicates the last part of this chapter, verses 30-33, to inviting prayer for this work. But many, many more do need to go.
And as we go, Paul gives us these two promises to hold onto as we engage in this challenging task. First promise – You will see this as God’s grace to you. God’s design to invite you and to use you to be part of His great missionary endeavor is in fact a grace. Look at verse 15 – “because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles.” Paul sees this grace as a favor from God that he gets to be involved in frontier missions. Paul’s ministry wasn’t easy. The guy was stoned several times, beaten, whipped, shipwrecked, jailed, and here he calls it all grace. He gets to do that. What a perspective!
When MTW first sent my wife and I out in 2010, one of the questions they asked us was, “Have you counted the cost?” and that question has always stuck with me. We said, “Yes,” but sixteen years of missionary service and trials and challenges have made us question that. Like Paul said somewhere else, “We experienced great affliction in Asia. We felt utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.” But friends, don’t you know that it’s actually these things, these trials and these tribulations that drive us deeper into dependence on Christ and experience His grace. It is a grace to serve in this way. And my prayer this morning is that some of you hearing this message right now would be compelled by this grace to count your life not as your own but to be willing to go to the nations to name Christ where He has not been named, to make this your singular ambition, not out of duty or coercion but because of the grace of God to you.
The second promise that Paul gives us is that it will be worth it. After his death, when the dust settled and the world moved on from John Chow, many of us missionaries and missiologists, we were left wondering about this strange case. How should we view it? What do we think about it? Was it worth it? And here’s his last journal entry before he died, and I’ll let him answer that question for you. He writes this to his family:
“You guys might think I’m crazy in all this, but I think it is worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed. Rather, please live your lives in obedience to whatever He has called you to do, and I’ll see you again when you pass through the veil. But this is not a pointless thing. The eternal lives of this tribe is at hand, and I cannot wait to see them around the throne of God, worshiping in their language, as Revelation 9 and 10 states. I love you all, and I pray none of you love anything in this world more than Jesus Christ.
Soli deo gloria,
John Chow.”
Does this mission cost us? Yes. Some of you will need to do as the hymn we just sang, “Give of your sons to bear the message glorious. Give of your wealth to speed them on their way.” Some of you will need to do that. Some of you might even die proclaiming Christ among the unreached. And some of you will suffer greatly. But all of us need to pray and support them. But is it really worth it? John Chow says it is. Paul says it is. “For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us -” What? “ – an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” And I know what Jim Elliot would say. “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” And the countless, nameless believers who came before us, of whom the world is not worthy, who preached the Gospel, died and were forgotten so that you could be brought into the kingdom of Christ here in Jackson, they say it’s worth it. But more importantly, Jesus says it’s worth it. “Who for the joy, the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame.” For you and for the elect among the North Sentinelize, among the Kurds and among the Thai and among the Japanese and the many peoples of this world. And friends, when we begin to see that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ left the safety of heaven and to go on mission for you, and He knew the suffering and the persecution that would come, and He counted the cost and He paid it with His own blood, and He did it for you, and for that great throng of His elect from every nation, tribe and tongue. Dear friends, Jesus is our great reward, and it’s worth it because Jesus is worth it.
Amen. Let’s pray.
Christ, would You strengthen our hearts? Would You encourage our spirits? Would You humble our pride? We pray that Christ would be magnified in all the nations and You would give us, even this day, this holy ambition to see the good news of Christ proclaimed throughout all the world. We thank You, Lord Jesus Christ, for Your love for us and Your grace to us. It’s in Your name we pray, amen.