“The only way that the gospel will reach the entire world is through the internet, radio and TV!”
The man’s words were earnest as he shook my hand after the sermon. I had just preached on the need for missionaries to go to the billions of people who still do not know Jesus. His comment echoed a question many believers have asked: How can we possibly finish the Great Commission in our lifetime? Many like him have seen how modern media has saturated every aspect of Western society and have concluded that this is the answer. It makes sense from a Western perspective.
As I made my way home after church, though, my thoughts drifted back to a mountain village on the other side of the world. One of my patients had just died. As I crossed the river and approached their hut, I was filled with sadness, as well as a little bit of dread. Would they blame me?
As I climbed the notched pole into the little bamboo hut, though, I was not met with recriminations at my failure. Instead, there was a palpable sense of terror, mixed with hopeless sadness. The family was overwhelmed with fear of the spirits and had no hope of ever seeing their son again.
As I sat with them in their hut, I began speaking to them in their own language, a language that no one else outside of their tribe speaks. I began to retell the ancient legends of the creator God that their people knew in pre-history. It had taken years of living with the tribe before they trusted us enough to tell us these legends.
I explained how the spirits had deceived them, that, unlike the legends taught, God did love them and had not abandoned them to the whims of the demons after that first terrible sin. God Himself had come and had died to free them from death and fear of the spirits. Through faith in Him, they could go back to the heaven that their ancestors had told them about.
It was a joy beyond words to see hope dawn in their eyes. Their terror began to ebb away as they eagerly asked the way back to heaven. As I continued to teach my eager audience, I remembered how, for four hundred years, missionaries had tried to reach these people, but no one had taken the time to live with them and learn their ways before trying to explain the gospel.
Shaking myself, I came back to the present. Yes, the internet, radio and television are wonderful media for sharing the gospel. We must utilize them to their fullest extent. And yet . . . millions of people in the world today still live in fear and hopelessness, trapped behind barriers that have kept the gospel out for centuries.
Illiteracy still prevents large numbers of people from being able to read the good news. Many tribes still live in places where the internet and television do not reach. But even more than these obstacles, millions live behind barriers of fear and mistrust. Media alone will not break down these barriers. There is still a great need for missionaries who will do as Jesus did. He lived with the people who needed Him most. Learning their language and ways, He became one of them. As He did, He was able to share the good news of freedom and life in a way that made sense from within their culture. All the while, He trained His disciples to do the same. Those first disciples trained others, sparking a movement that grew so rapidly that it nearly reached the world more than a thousand years before the invention of modern media.
This was Jesus’ method to reach the entire world.
