Today

Today, the Church of Christ is growing faster and in more numbers than ever before in history. What started out as a small, timid band of twelve common men has now grown to global proportions. There are now a total number of over 800 million active believers in the world today, with around 100 million living in America. Every day, an average of seventy thousand people are born again, and the worldwide number of Christians doubled during the years 1990 to 2000. There are approximately three and a half thousand churches opened every twenty-four hours. We are indeed living in amazing and exciting times!

But there is a problem.

Even though there are millions of Christians in the world today, an incredible 2.7 billion people have not heard the Gospel one time in their life. The job that Christ gave us to do is not done. Please read the following facts about our world today and let them speak to your heart.

In the last twenty-four hours…. eighty thousand people perished without having ever heard of Jesus Christ…. thirty-nine thousand children were forced to live on the streets, many of them in Central Asia…. forty thousand children died of malnutrition or diseases…. half of the seven billion people in the world had to live on less than two dollars…. Christians were persecuted and killed for there faith, mostly inside the ten/forty window…. thirty thousand died of starvation…. two and a half thousand languages continued to wait for the first page of Scripture to be translated…. six thousand, four hundred people groups remained unreached, waiting for the Gospel to finally be brought to them the first time….

These are not simple statistics or numbers. These are individual human beings, with hopes and dreams, families and friends, each known and loved by God. Yet they go about their lives in hopelessness, sitting in the shadow of death, unaware of the light of the glorious Gospel. So who will go? Who will give them the best news of not only this life, but the next?

Right now, please, pray for the lost in Asia. Get involved and use your life on things that will really matter. It has been said that when you leave this life, the only thing you can take with you is other people. Use your life to save someone to Heaven. You have only a few decades of time on this planet; how will you use them? I beg you, use it for God alone. You will never regret it.

As we bring this article to a close, let me share with you a story I found about the front-lines mission work in China. One worker said this:

“I remember one incident that took place in a village in China. After entering a village, we began to call the people to come and listen. It was clear that nobody in the village had ever heard of Jesus before. Our Chinese co-worker said in a loud voice, ‘Friends, please come, we have a very important message for you to hear. It is the most important message you will ever hear in your life!’ After a few minutes, a small crowd gathered around and he started to share about Jesus and God’s offer of salvation. In the course of his message, he said, ‘God sent Jesus Christ into the world two thousand years ago…’ An old Yao lady, who had been listening intently, suddenly interrupted. She said, ‘Young man, you told us this is the most important message we will ever hear in our lives. If that is true, how come it has taken two thousand years for someone to come and tell us?’”

-Reagan Schrock, blog manager. Special thanks to Joshua Project (www.joshuaproject.net) and History Makers (www.historymakers.info) for providing the data used in this article.

“God I pray, light these idle sticks of my life that I may burn for thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is thine. I seek not a long life but a full one, like you Lord Jesus.”

-Jim Elliot, missionary to the Auca Indians.