The Church in Iran
“The Iranian Revolution of 1979 established a hardline Islamic regime. Over the next two decades, Christians faced increasing opposition and persecution: all missionaries were kicked out, evangelism was outlawed, Bibles in Persian were banned and soon became scarce, and several pastors were killed. The church came under tremendous pressure, and many feared it would soon wither away and die. But the exact opposite has happened.
In the last 20 years, more Iranians have become Christians than in the previous 13 centuries – since Islam came to Iran. In 1979, there were an estimated 500 Christians from a Muslim background in Iran. Today, there are hundreds of thousands – some estimate more than 1 million. According to the research organization Operation World, Iran has the fastest-growing evangelical movement in the world. The second-fastest-growing church is in Afghanistan – where Afghans are being reached in large part by Iranians.”
This report is from a prayer companion booklet that The Gospel Coalition produced called “40 Days of Prayer: Stories of God’s Work Around the World.”
Church Growing the Fastest Where It’s Hardest to Follow Jesus
Open Doors International, a missions organization serving the persecuted church, produces a “World Watch List” each year, listing the top 50 countries where it’s most difficult to follow Jesus. In their most recent list, Iran is number eight and Afghanistan is number two.
The church is growing the fastest in two of the hardest places to follow Jesus in the world. This should help us think about how mounting pressure on the church in America might not be the worst thing to ever happen to us.
Why Should We Care?
Why should we concern ourselves with what’s happening with Christians around the world? Don’t we have enough issues here at home to deal with?
The reason we should care about what God is doing among the nations is threefold: it’s Jesus’ command, Paul’s ambition, and God’s ultimate goal. Let’s take these one at a time, and then close by considering what we can do.
Jesus’ Command
First, reaching the nations was Jesus’ command. After he rose from the dead and right before he ascended to his throne in heaven, Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”
This wasn’t the first time Jesus stated his care and concern for the nations. He cleansed the temple because he said it must be “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Mk. 11:17). In his teaching about his return, he said that the “gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Mt. 24:14).
As we learned last week, all followers of Jesus are commanded to help other people follow Jesus. No matter who you are, what you do, where you live, how old you are, or how much Bible you know, this is the vision that Jesus has for your life: “make disciples.”
But then Jesus follows the command with a qualifier: “of all nations.” The big-picture vision Jesus has for his followers is that they must help all the nations of the world follow him. Yes, we should be discipling our children and other church members and friends. But Jesus says that all the nations must be discipled, not just all the people around us in our nation.
Who Are the Nations?
At this point, we need to stop and define what Jesus means by “nations.” When we see the word “nations” in the Bible, we don’t need to think of countries with clearly defined borders and governments. This isn’t the way the Bible defines a “nation.” The word for “nations” in the New Testament is ethne, which is where we get our word “ethnic.” So when we think “nations” we need to think in terms of ethnic groups, or people groups.
An ethne is a group of people bound together by a common language and a common culture. There are multiple “ethnes” in every country. For example, India has 2,717 people groups and China has 545 people groups, or ethnes.
This understanding of “nation” is extremely important for our understanding of what Jesus told us to do. He told us to “make disciples of all nations,” so if we don’t know what he means by “nation,” then we might think that we’ve completed the task if there are Christians in all 195 countries that exist in the world today.
This would be a mistake because borders and governments don’t define an ethne, and because most of the 195 countries that exist today didn’t exist in Jesus’ day. Not to mention the fact that countries are constantly changing and shifting their borders.
Jesus’ command is that his followers must disciple all the people groups of the world. Every language group must hear and respond to the gospel, be baptized, and be taught how to follow Jesus. This is Jesus’ command.
Paul’s Goal
The apostle Paul knew Jesus’ command well. How do we know? Because he gave his life to obeying it. He was the “apostle to the Gentiles” who kept pushing the gospel out to the frontiers, to places where it was not yet proclaimed. Once he’d preached the gospel and gathered converts into a local church, he’d move on to regions still without the gospel.
This was the stated goal and ambition of his life (Rom. 15:18-21). The goal of Paul’s life was “to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named” (v. 20).
Paul wanted to push out to the places nobody had gone to yet so that he could preach and plant churches. This is why he says in verse 19 that he had “fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ…from Jerusalem all the way around Illyricum.” In verse 23 he says that he “no longer has any room for work in these regions.”
Does that mean that all the people in these regions had heard the gospel and become followers of Jesus? Of course not! It means that the gospel had been preached there and that local churches had been established that could then continue to preach the gospel and make disciples.
But someone had to take the gospel to other places where the gospel had never been, places like Spain (vv. 24, 28). This was Paul’s ambition. Paul knew Jesus’ command and ordered his ambitions accordingly.
What’s Your Ambition?
What’s the ambition of your life? Where do you want to be in five years? What do you want to be doing in ten years, twenty years, forty years? Ambition isn’t necessarily bad. Selfish ambition is, but godly ambition is what drove Paul to do hard things for God.
How do your ambitions line up with Jesus’ command and Paul’s example? Do you have a God-centered vision and ambition for your life?
None of us can do all that needs to be done on the earth for God. But we can all have a God-sized vision and ambition for our lives that reflects his priorities.
“No” to Missions, “Yes” to Pastoring
One of my greatest struggles in Bible college and seminary and early in ministry was figuring out exactly what I was supposed to do. I knew I wanted to serve God, but my problem was that I wanted to do everything: missions, evangelism, church planting, camp ministry, teaching, preaching, and pastoring.
Over time, and with the help of many friends and my beautiful wife, I realized that God wired and gifted and called me to preach, teach, and pastor. And so I started narrowing my focus to those things. I turned down a job with a missions organization right after Suzy and I were married because I knew that it wouldn’t allow me to do the main things God wanted me to do. I kept going to school, started mowing yards, and eventually was able to start serving as a youth pastor, where God prepared me to be a senior pastor. I said “no” to full-time missions work so that I could say “yes” to preaching and pastoring.
Several years later, while on a mission trip in Zambia, I was wrestling with accepting a position to teach at the International Bible College there, or whether I should plant my life in Dallas. The Lord made it clear to me that I needed to say “no” to the Bible College so that I could say “yes” to preaching and pastoring in Dallas.
Knowing what it is that God wants you to do is extremely useful because it allows you to say no to everything else. One of the wisest things you can do is say “no” to good things in order to say “yes” to the best things. Not every opportunity is an obligation.
We all have a role to play in God’s work among the nations, but we all aren’t supposed to be full-time, cross-cultural missionaries. Jesus’ command and Paul’s example, however, challenge us to consider the direction of our lives in light of the unreached peoples of the world.
God’s Ultimate Goal
The third reason why we should care about what God is doing around the world is because God cares about his glory around the world.
After the Fall of man into sin, God set in motion a plan to make his glory known to all the peoples of the world. He started by calling a man named Abram and blessing him and promising to bless the whole world through him (Gen. 12:1-3).
In the middle of the ten plagues that the Lord sent to the Egyptians, he tells Pharaoh why all this is happening. Exodus 9:6, “But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” God raised up Pharaoh in order to show off his power and so that his name might be made known “in all the earth.”
Hundreds of years later, King Solomon asks the Lord to bless the people of Israel so that “all the peoples of the earth” may know that Lord (1 Kgs. 8:59-60). In Israel’s hymnbook, the Psalms, the Lord repeatedly challenges his people to make his glory known to all nations (e.g. Psalm 96).
In the prophets, God promises to send a Savior to his people. But he won’t just come to save Israel, he’ll come to save the nations. Isaiah 49:5-6, “And now the Lord says…‘I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’”
How would God be glorified among all the nations of the world? He would do it by sending his Son Jesus, a son of Abraham and descendant of David, to fulfill the law through his perfect life and purchase a people from all the peoples through his sacrificial death. Jesus’ death was the means by which God gathered together a people for himself from among all the peoples of the world.
There are several places in the New Testament that teach this. In John’s gospel, John tells us something that Caiaphas, the high priest, said that revealed the plan of God in the death of Christ (11:49-52). Caiaphas meant, “It’s better for Jesus to die so that the Romans don’t come kill all of us.” But what he said, according to the inspired apostle John, had a double meaning. In his words, God was revealing that Jesus would die, not only for Jews, “but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.” John is saying that Jesus died in order to create a people from among all the people groups of the world.
In the book of Revelation, the same author, the apostle John, recounts what happens when Jesus takes the scroll from the Father’s hand. He says that all of heaven “sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (5:9).
What these texts tell us is that Jesus’s death secured the salvation of his people who’re scattered all over the world. Jesus’ death “gathered” God’s children to God and “ransomed” God’s children for God. And these “children” are from all the nations, or people groups, of the world.
In order for this gathering to happen, Jesus’ followers would have to take his message to all the nations. So after his death and resurrection, he told his followers, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19). Jesus wanted the word about his work to spread to all peoples of the world.
The amazing thing is that we already know that Jesus’ command will be fulfilled. The book of Revelation tells us that history concludes with a worshipping multitude made up of people from every nation. Revelation 7:9-12, “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”
This is where history is headed. A multitude of worshippers from every nation standing before Jesus singing and rejoicing in the glory and love of their Savior.
God’s ultimate goal in the world is to bring glory to himself by gathering a people to his Son Jesus, a people made up of people from all the people groups of the world.
The Need
These are the reasons why we should care about what God is doing among the nations: Jesus’ command, Paul’s ambition, and God’s ultimate goal. On top of these reasons is the reality of a world dying and going to hell.
According to The Joshua Project, over 40% of the world’s population has still never heard the gospel. They list 17,461 people groups in the world, and 7,432 of them are considered unreached.
An unreached people group is one in which there’s no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize the people group without outside assistance. This usually means that less than 2% of a particular group is evangelical Christian.
3.24 billion people have little to no access to the gospel of Jesus Christ. This means that these men and women, boys and girls, will be born, live, die, and go to hell without ever hearing about a Savior. This reality can’t leave us the same way it finds us.
What Should We Do?
What should we do in light of such overwhelming lostness? How should we respond to Jesus’ command, Paul’s example, and God’s goal?
Here are several ways for us to obey Jesus’ command, emulate Paul’s example, and make God’s goal our goal:
Pray
First, we must pray. Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:37-38). Theologian David Wells says that prayer is “rebelling against the status quo.” If the status quo is billions of people headed to hell without any knowledge of Jesus, then we must rebel for the sake of their souls. If the status quo is that the vast majority of the American church’s mission efforts go to already-reached areas of the world, then we should rebel for the sake of the people groups lying in darkness. We must pray for more workers to be sent, and we must pray “earnestly.” I have several copies of the prayer guide I mentioned earlier if you’d like one.
Give
Second, we should give money to missions. Missions takes money, always has, always will. To reach the unreached peoples of the world is going to require the training and sending and supporting of thousands of missionaries and cost millions of dollars.
If you give faithfully to our church, here are some ways your gifts have been used to this end. Last year, we gave $15,000, or just under 10% of our undesignated receipts, to missions. Most of those monies went to work and workers among the unreached peoples of the world.
Over the last year, we’ve given over $8,500 to the International Mission Board through Lottie Moon. We’ve given several thousand dollars to Erika Selby, one of our members working among unreached refugees right here in Dallas. We’ve given gifts to specific missionaries for specific needs, such as $500 to the Fergusons in South Asia for SD cards full of gospel resources for pastors and $500 to the Stalcups to help them transition to their new home in West Asia, along with monthly support. Over the last couple years, we’ve given several thousand dollars toward Tobin Mattackal’s ministry in India. All the proceeds from today’s chili cook-off will be sent to Tobin for him to distribute to 26 different evangelists and missionaries that he works with and supports in India.
Go
The third thing we can do is go. This is the first word of the Great Commission. Some will send through prayer and giving. But some must go. The unreached places of the world won’t be reached unless someone goes to them with the gospel.
College students, have you considered spending two years after graduation on the mission field? Through the Journeyman Program, you can join a church-planting team in an unreached area of the world. You’ll have an opportunity to talk more about this with Micah Englehart after church next Sunday.
Anyone can go, not just college students! There’s a very good chance that you could do the job you’re doing in another city of the world, all while being on a church-planting team seeking to make disciples where there are few or none.
“Going” doesn’t have to mean getting on a plane and going overseas. The nations have come to us in DFW! Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world are in our backyard, many of whom come from areas of the world that are unreached. This is one reason we love and support Sue Oh’s work through the BSM to reach international students at UTD, and Erika Selby’s work through For the Nations Refugee Outreach. Talk to these ladies if you’d like to know how you can join them and help their ministry.
Desire God’s Heart for the Nations
All of this can be overwhelming and feel like more things we need to do. Remember, none of us are supposed to do everything. But when it comes to the Great Commission, Jesus doesn’t make any exceptions. Following him means helping others follow him, and it means following him to the nations. This is Jesus’ command, Paul’s ambition, and God’s ultimate goal for the world.
The willingness to do this isn’t something we can muster up on our own. We need God to change our hearts. We need him to give us his heart for the nations. Matt Smethurst says, “A passion for missions is not optional, since the chief question is not whether you have a heart for the nations. It’s whether God does.”
God does have a heart for the nations. Therefore, we also must have a heart for the nations. May God give us a desire to do whatever we can to get the gospel to those who need it.