Aspiring missionaries are often the kind of Christians who ask questions like “How do I humble myself?” They have read their Bibles, and have sat under faithful preaching, and have noticed that, from beginning to end, God commends humility and condemns pride. For instance,

“Seek humility” (Zephaniah 2:3).
“Put on . . . humility” (Colossians 3:12).
“Have . . . a humble mind” (1 Peter 3:8).
“Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another” (1 Peter 5:5).
“Humble yourselves . . . under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6; James 4:10).

And so the kinds of Christians who tend to make good missionaries genuinely want to be more humble, and they ask questions like, “How do I humble myself?” And when we turn to the places in Scripture that talk about self-humbling, what we find is that the answer itself is humbling.

Let’s look at what may be the two most instructive passages in the Bible about self-humbling. The first is in Exodus; the second, in Philippians.

Will You Refuse to Humble Yourself?

The first mention of humbling in the Bible is in Exodus 10, with Moses standing before Pharoah. Let’s set the scene with Exodus 5:1–2 as Moses first approaches him and speaks on God’s behalf:

Moses says, “Thus says the Lord [Yahweh], the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go. . . .” To which Pharaoh replies, mark this: “Who is [Yahweh], that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know [Yahweh] . . .”

Okay, Pharaoh. You may not yet know Yahweh. But just you wait. You will know him, and perhaps all too well. Note here, as Pharaoh rightly perceives it, this is about obedience: He says, “Who is [Yahweh], that I should obey his voice and let Israel go?”

Then, as you know, ten terrible plagues follow as Yahweh makes himself known as judge to Pharaoh, and as savior to his own people, as he rescues them from Egyptian oppression.

Now, fast forward from Exodus 5 to Exodus 9:17, just before plague number seven. God says to Pharoah, “You are still exalting yourself against my people and will not let them go.” In refusing to obey God’s voice, Pharoah is “exalting self” — which is the opposite of “humbling self.” God then makes that explicit in the next chapter, before the eighth plague. He says again to Pharaoh in Exodus 10:3,

How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?

And this is the first mention of humbling self in the Bible. So, let’s pull together what we’ve seen in Exodus. Though Pharaoh pretends to be divine, the true God and Creator speaks to him as a creature. “Obey my voice. Let my people go.” And God refers to Pharaoh’s refusal as “exalting yourself” and instructs him to “humble yourself” in response to these painful, humbling plagues. That is, obey God. Acknowledge, Pharoah, that you are not God. He is God.

We might say that the basic confession of humility is “You are God, and I am not.” First, God acted; he humbled Pharaoh through plague after plague. Then, the question comes to Pharaoh, Will you humble yourself? Will you pretend that you are God and challenge or ignore Yahweh, or will you admit, “He is God, and I am not,” and obey?

God Acts First

This is the paradigm that then echoes throughout the Scriptures (especially in 2 Chronicles, and in the teaching of Jesus, Matthew 18:4; 23:12; Luke 14:11; 18:14), and is true for us today. God may not confront us with a knock at the door from a prophet like Moses, but God does confront us. He takes the initiative. His humbling hand descends. A family member, or brother or sister in Christ, confronts us. Or sickness in ourselves or in a loved one. Or death. Or the loss of a job. Or a breakup. Or whatever obstacles you will encounter on the mission field, or on your way to the mission field — and you will encounter them.

God takes the initiative in humbling us, and then the question comes: Now, will you humble yourself and receive what God is doing in your discomfort and pain, or will you push back?

Humility says, “He is God, and I am not.” Uncomfortable and painful as my circumstances are, I receive them as his humbling hand. That doesn’t mean I don’t pray for rescue. In fact, praying for rescue can be precisely the kind of self-humbling we’re taking about.

“The kinds of Christians who tend to make good missionaries genuinely want to be more humble.”

So, How do I humble myself? is a good question for aspiring missionaries to ask. And it has a humbling answer. We don’t just up and humble ourselves when we’re good and ready. We don’t take the initiative. Self-humbling is not an achievement. Rather, our self-humbling begins with God’s initiative. He takes the first step and humbles us. Then the question comes, Will you receive his humbling and humble yourself?

Jesus Humbled Himself

Now, let’s go to Philippians 2 and see it play out, in three great steps, in the greatest missionary who ever lived.

He Became Man

First, before he humbled himself as man, he first had to become man. Which is said to be an emptying of himself.

[being] in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2:6–7)

His emptying of himself was not an emptying of divine attributes, as if that were possible. It was an emptying of privilege or comfort — the privilege of not becoming man and not being subjected to the finitude and pain of human life, and the difficulties of living in our fallen world. And Jesus’s emptying here, Paul says, was not a losing but a taking: “taking the form of a servant.”

So, first, God the Son becomes man.

Obedient to Death

Then, second, once human, Jesus fulfilled the human calling before God: “he humbled himself.”

being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:8)

What did Jesus’s self-humbling involve? He humbled himself (1) by becoming obedient. We saw with Pharaoh the issue of human obedience to God’s will. Jesus, as man, obeyed God. As much as his humanity wanted to avoid death, and avoid bearing our sin (having none of his own), and feeling forsaken by his Father, he prayed in the garden, “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). And he was obedient, Paul says, (2) “to the point of death.” He endured. He didn’t hit eject when obedience got hard. He obeyed all the way through. And this self-humbling obedience to death went so far as (3) “even death on a cross.”

Exalted for Humility

Now, third and finally,

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name . . . (Philippians 2:9)

As man, Jesus humbled himself in obedience to the divine will, and went to the cross — and God, in his perfect timing, three days later, raised him, and, forty days later, exalted him at his right hand.

Welcome God’s Humbling Hand

Let me close with two final words to you as 18–25 year olds at the CROSS conference:

First, your process from CROSS, to actually getting there — on the ground, into the cross-cultural ministry you aspire to — likely will take longer and be a more trying and patience-testing process than you imagined. God means to humble you along the way. And he means, as you seek to become a missionary — high a calling as it is! — that you learn obedience and humility, that you do not, in pride, jettison the call of Philippians 2:3–4, which verses 6¬–9 uphold, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

Finally, my prayer for you is that you prepare ahead of time, daily and weekly, for God’s many humblings, for your good, before they come:

Humble yourself daily by sitting under (not over) his word and bowing before him in prayer;
And humble yourself weekly by sitting under faithful preaching and submitting yourself in covenant/committed fellowship in a faithful local church.

“Ask God to work a posture in your soul that is ready to receive, even welcome, God’s humbling hand.”

Ask God to work a posture in your soul — through his word, prayer, and covenant fellowship to his people — that is ready to receive, even welcome God’s humbling hand, painful as it may be when it descends.

Answering his call to invest your life directly in the Great Commission work of crossing oceans and borders and languages and cultures with the gospel won’t mean you avoid his humbling hand. It might mean, in his great mercy, his humbling hand descends in your life all the more. Read missionary biographies. Were they kept from his humbling hand? No, they were not.

Rather, his humbling hand kept them from vanity, from shallowness, from being ineffective, from laboring in vain, from walking away from Jesus, from being choked out by the cares of this life. God’s humbling hand was a painful and merciful means of his grace in sustaining and strengthening the souls of his missionaries, and in working through them to do his humbling and rescuing work in the lives of those they were sent to reach.

Jon Hoglund: My name is Jon Hoglund, and I’m one of the professors here at Bethlehem College and Seminary. Welcome to this book discussion session. Joining me on stage is pastor John Piper, along with current students at Bethlehem College and Seminary — both college and seminary students.

We’re going to be discussing together Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions. Pastor John wrote this book originally in 1993, and it has gone through several editions, including the most recent thirtieth anniversary edition. We look forward to sharing that with you.

All of these students have read the book and are prepared with questions. We’d like to invite you into a conversation about it, and also to give you a taste of why this book continues to shape conversations about missions, even 31 years later.

For our first question, Sang is going to introduce us by asking us a question about his interest in missions.

Sang: Pastor John, in this book — and through the rest of your ministry — you put forward the supremacy of God and his glory, and its relationship to our experience as human beings. You say, “God is most glorified when we are most satisfied with him.” You’ve written that Jonathan Edwards was instrumental in helping you to see these realities, and how this was a life-changing moment for you. My question is, Did your passion for missions grow in connection with that discovery? When did missions first become important to you, and what has that looked like in your life since then?

John Piper: Christian Hedonism emerged in my consciousness in about 1968, but it did not have — to my shame — a dominant or significant impact on my world Christianity until 1983. I had fifteen years of percolating, while I was reading my Bible badly. This is a lesson on how Bible-oriented people like me, who read the Bible all the time, can miss things. And when someone eventually points you to them and hits you with a two-by-four, you say, “How did I miss that?”

The kindling was laid early. My dad loved missions. He prayed about the glory of God and mission every night when he was home. And Wheaton, where I went for college, had a missions focus. I remember it. It was inspiring. At Fuller also, I took courses from Raph Winter, who was the craziest gung-ho missions statesman there ever was in the twentieth century. But it didn’t affect much in my life. Then I came here to be a pastor in 1980, and we had a mission conference here that I inherited. It involved two weekends and the days in between. They didn’t have the pastor preach either of those Sundays, so I didn’t have to preach on missions. Nobody asked me to until 1983.

I was preaching a series on Christian Hedonism, and they said, “Pastor, why don’t you do the first week of missions week?” That was epoch-making. The book Let the Nations Be Glad is an epoch. The sermon I preached that day was titled “[Missions: The Battle Cry of Christian Hedonism.]” And I just had to think, what does a Christian Hedonist say about the nations? That’s something I should have said over and over in fifteen years, but I didn’t. I’ll give you several texts that just exploded.

The sermon text for that sermon was Mark 10:17–31, which is about the rich young ruler. He walked away and Jesus said, “It is hard for the rich to get into the kingdom of heaven.” The disciples threw up their hands and said, “Well then who can be saved?” And Jesus said, “With man it is impossible, but with God nothing is impossible.” I can remember in 1967 Noël and I went to Urbana. There was a man who spoke there who said, “When I first went to the mission field, I thought, ‘If I believed in predestination, why would I ever be a missionary? If God has already decided who is going to be saved, why would I go to the mission field?’ Now, after twenty years in Pakistan, I say that if I didn’t believe in predestination I wouldn’t go to the mission field.” Now I’m a seven-point Calvinist, but at the time that didn’t do it for me. It shows how slow we are to make connections between what we hold dear and things we don’t think much about. So that part of the text about the sovereignty of God was connected to how God can save anybody. So, then, we should get going on it globally.

The other part of the text was about how Peter said, “We’ve left everything and followed you.” I think he was saying, “We’re not like the rich guy. We’ve left everything. We’ve made the appropriate sacrifice.” Jesus didn’t like that. Do you remember what he said? He said,

Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29–30)

In other words, “Get off your self-pity kick, Peter. Nobody can out-sacrifice me. You’re in it for joy, and I mean for you to be.” That was my paraphrase of what he said. So, we have the sovereignty of God, and he can conquer anyone’s heart. And then Jesus is also telling Peter, “This is not about self-pity or sacrifice, ultimately. It’s about finding where your true treasure is and going for broke.”

Here is one more text. And this seals the deal because of the title of the book. Psalm 96:1–3 says,

Oh sing to the Lord a new song;     sing to the Lord, all the earth!Sing to the Lord, bless his name;     tell of his salvation from day to day.Declare his glory among the nations . . .

There you have glory, and then then Psalm 67:1–3 says,

May God be gracious to us and bless us     and make his face to shine upon us,that your way may be known on earth,     your saving power among all nations.Let the peoples praise you, O God;     let all the peoples praise you!Let the nations be glad and sing for joy . . .

So you have, “Go tell them I’m glorious,” and, “Go tell them to be glad.” After that, the battle was over. Then for the next decade, a lot of what I did was conference after conference on missions, in order to make up for lost time on world missions. A Christian Hedonist is a person who believes that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, and there you have the Psalms saying, “Go tell the world to be satisfied,” and “Go tell the world I’m glorious.” That’s Christian Hedonism.

Hoglund: Excellent. Thank you very much. The beginning of the book talks about the purpose, the power, and the price of missions. Selah is going to begin a few questions for us on those topics.

Selah: In reading your book, I wondered if there is a danger in treating people simply as a means to the end of God’s glory. While we see in your book that it is important to be zealous for all people to worship God and also to show compassion, how do we keep that big picture of God’s glory in mind while not thinking of people as projects to complete for the sake of God’s glory? Or is there even a problem with that type of thinking?

Piper: Here’s the nub that I’m hearing in your question. You’re going to head into the world and you’re going to say your dominant motive is, “I want God to be glorious in this world. I want every human being to know he is God. And he is glorious. I’m in the world to get you to do that.” They might feel like, “What about me? Do you care about me at all? Do I matter to you?” That’s the question you’re getting at, and let me state the other half about Christian Hedonism because this has been said to me.

People say, “Are you saying that not only do you want to be motivated by the glory of God but also your own happiness? You want your joy to increase? So, you’re in this business of Christianity to be happier?” That’s exactly right. I am. Christian Hedonism is a life devoted to pleasure. So, people say I’m just selfish. They say, “You don’t care about me; you care about you. You’re going to make me a project for your joy.” So, we have two problems, not just one: Am I making people a project to get glory for God? And am I making people a project to make myself happy? These questions do not intimidate me. I am so excited to answer these kinds of questions. I love that question because Christian Hedonism is the answer to both of those questions.

Let’s take mine first. You have to have an answer to this if you even come close to being a biblical Christian. You’re talking to someone about Jesus, and you want to lead them to Jesus, and they pick up on your hedonism and they say, “So you really are talking to me right now to increase your happiness?” I would say, “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” They say, “Isn’t that selfish?” And I would say, “It’s not selfish because no one would accuse a person of selfishness if they’re willing to lay down their lives to draw another person into the sharing of their joy.” Nobody is accused of selfishness if they say, “I will lay down my life to include you into the joy that I am pursuing. And not only will I lay down my life to include you into it, but it will make my joy bigger if you come. Your joy will be my joy.” That’s a Bible statement from 2 Corinthians 2:3. I think you can persuade unbelievers that it makes sense, even if they don’t like it.

I used to go to the hospital to visit people when I was a pastor. Let’s say I’m going to visit Maybel. We’ll call her Maybel because she’s 85 years old. She just had a heart attack, and her son asked me to visit her. So, I go into Maybel’s room, and she’s all hooked up with tubes. I don’t know if she’s going to make it. Her eyes are closed, and her skin is all shriveled, and there are bruises all over her. And I didn’t feel like going to visit her. I walk up to her and put my hand on her arm, and she says, “Oh pastor, you shouldn’t have.” (Old people always say, “You shouldn’t have.” Young people say, “It’s about time.”) At that moment when she says that, I could say, “I know, and I didn’t want to, but I’m a pastor and I have to. It’s my duty.” I don’t say that. I say, “Maybel, I’m here because it makes me so happy to share the best news in the world with you right now.” Not in a thousand years would she say, “You’re so selfish. You just want to make yourself happy.” She wouldn’t say that because it’s not true. That’s the answer to my question, which you didn’t ask.

It’s the same answer in relation to the glory of God. If they say, “You don’t care about me. You just care about your God. You just want him to look glorious, but you don’t care at all about my happiness.” My first response to that is, “Can I tell you about what the beauty of Christianity is? The beauty of Christianity is that we have the kind of God who gets the most glory in making you most happy in him.” This is not about choosing between a person’s happiness and God’s glory. It just doesn’t work that way in Christianity. It might work that way in other religions. I don’t know. But in Christianity, you dare not choose between your happiness and God’s glory. You look them right in the eye and say, “Do you get that? You may not choose between your happiness and God’s glory. As soon as you decide to nullify your happiness, God will not get the glory he deserves. You must pursue your happiness. Right now. You must pursue your maximum happiness. That’s why I’m here. I’m elevating the glory of God because that’s the only thing that can make you truly happy. You were made for something way bigger than all that stuff you’re living for right now.”

So, I just wouldn’t buy it that I have turned a person into a project because the key to God getting glory is the person getting happy in him. And a person whose happiness is being pursued like that doesn’t feel like a project.

Marc: Staying with the heart issue there but going in a slightly different direction, you allude to Matthew 16:24 and say, “To take up a cross and follow Jesus means to join Jesus on the Calvary road with a resolve to suffer and die with him.” Shortly afterward, you then balance this with a reminder, saying, “Christian martyrs do not pursue death; they pursue love.” As you intentionally aim to stoke the fire of zeal in missions, how would you counsel churches to avoid developing a martyrdom complex, where we might have this burning zeal to die for Jesus but be comparatively cold toward more mundane daily ministry to people?

Piper: If I knew any church like that, I would be happy to work on that problem. Are any of your churches in danger of creating martyr complexes? I’m going to make your question valid anyway, because it is. Seriously, I wish that were a problem. The value in your question is that it is possible to head toward the mission field with idealized, romanticized notions even of suffering. It’s not going to go well if you think that way.

It’s interesting you referred to the Calvary road. The Calvary road ended at Calvary, but it was a road — and all of it was hard. If you think, “My life is going to end gloriously. Somebody will write an article about me, or maybe a biography,” that discounts the mundane. It discounts the Calvary road, like reading for class (which you’re supposed to do). It discounts washing your clothes and paying your bills. I think what I would do to counsel those churches is to say, “You need a robust doctrine of suffering.” By robust, I mean enough to handle martyrdom but also enough to handle setting your alarm early enough to have devotions. That’s a kind of self-denial. And isn’t it interesting that in Luke’s version of self-denial, he says daily. It says, “Take up your cross daily.” So, there is martyrdom, and then there are daily crosses. And most of them are very inglorious. They’re just plain boring, hard, and ordinary. Nobody is praising you for them. They don’t even know you were faithful in that obligation. I think that’s probably the way that I would counsel the church.

Marc: I think so. There’s this saying that everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to help mom with the dishes. And it sounds like you’re saying that underlying it is a misguided zeal, and that having a more robust theology of suffering will help you in those mundane sufferings where you’re not constantly striving for the big suffering.

Piper: That’s a great quote, and I take your question as a warning to me. Because I do — and I will tonight — move toward the ultimate quickly. I think that’s a good test case to see how people respond to the ultimate suffering. But in view of what you just said, probably the other piece of the counsel that I would give to a church is that they shouldn’t send missionaries that they haven’t put to work in a lot of ordinary ways here. Are they just wanting the big glory over there? Or are they willing to walk down 11th Avenue and pick up the trash? Are they willing to walk up to a guy with his lighter under his tin foil, sniffing his smoke, and tell him about Jesus? And if they’re not, don’t send them.

Preston: In chapter 3, you quote from Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Heaven Is a World of Love” in order to show how differing degrees of glory in heaven will not be the cause of envy or pride in glorified saints. However, while on earth, how are those who are not as successful in their missionary efforts — despite months, years, or decades of faithful labor — to keep from becoming envious? In other words, how would you counsel missionaries to think about fruitfulness even if they are not seeing obvious fruit in their labors?

Piper: That’s really important. Let me say a word about envy first, and then we’ll go to the other part. It’s not wrong to want to be fruitful. It’s not wrong to want to be as fruitful as someone else is fruitful. Envy is being resentful that they are more fruitful than you are. It galls you. That’s envy. The desire for more hope, more love, more patience, more kindness, more faith like a hero is not sinful. The Bible holds up examples all the time of people we are supposed to imitate. We should long to be like them. Envy is when we start this niggling sense of, “I’d like to see them stumble.” That’s dangerous. That’s so dangerous. You see somebody, and they’re making it and they don’t stumble, and then you think, “I’d like to see them take a fall.” That is so far from the Spirit of Christ. That’s envy, and it is owing to pride and ego. It says, “I need my ego to be stroked by superiority.” It’s not about fruitfulness but superiority. That’s wicked.

Now, what do you say to help people press on in all the varying degrees of fruitfulness in the world? Just look around this room. Nobody is identical to anybody. It’s amazing. We are so diverse, and some of you are good at some things and not good at other things. If you spend your life comparing yourself, you will die. Mark Noll told this story in my graduating class in Wheaton. He was my RA my senior year. Outside his door, he tacked up a little saying that said, “To love is to stop comparing.” Mark was a 4.0 student. He was operating from the side of being admired. And he knew that as long as people stood in such awe of him, he wouldn’t have very good relationships. So, we must be careful in that regard.

But how do you do it, then, if you’re not going to compare? Maybe you know that their church grew but your church didn’t grow. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). So, you bow before the sovereignty of God and say, “He gave growth there, and he didn’t give growth here. God is God. I’m not God. I love God. He’s good. He’s just. He’s wise.” That’s one answer. It’s the sovereignty and goodness of God disposing his gifts and blessings where he pleases.

The second thing you might take into consideration is this. When Billy Graham used to have his mission in town here, he said one time to his hundred-person staff, “You know, don’t you, that in line for rewards in heaven a lot of you will be ahead of me.” One lady told me this story and she said, “Most of us rolled our eyes at that. That’s inappropriate humility. But he got very stern. And he said, ‘God rewards faithfulness, not fruitfulness. A thousand people may walk to the front of my crusades, but maybe you’re the means of saving one person in your life and your reward will be great because your duties were fulfilled with greater care and you were faithful morning to night in a thousand ways.’” That’s so important, folks.

If you keep going in 1 Corinthians 3, you have the man whose life is passed through the fire and the wood, hay, and stubble are burned up. He doesn’t get rewards for that. Well, what was that? That was not about fruitfulness or a failure at fruitfulness. It was bad teaching. Paul laid the foundation, and other people were building on it with wood, hay, and stubble, and they are going to squeak by. You don’t say, “Oh, my lack of fruitfulness is going to get burned up at the last day.” That’s not what he’s talking about.

Here’s one other thing. I’ve often wondered what success I might have had as a pastor in Brazil or Mississippi — a place where they have emotions. Because I can get into that. I can preach to people like that. My church might grow. Here’s the point: planting a church in New Hampshire and planting a church in Mississippi are radically different challenges — not to mention Afghanistan. Therefore, if you measure yourself in New Hampshire by the guy in Mississippi, that’s not a wise thing to do. So, taking into account factors like gifting, location, culture, and all kinds of things, it might shape the kind of fruitfulness your life has.

Hoglund: Next, we have a couple of questions on missions practice and priorities, which come from the middle section of Let the Nations Be Glad.

Eddie: My question is about unreached people groups and the strategy that churches employ to reach them. It’s about the desire to finish the task. Should we think of missions as a continuous work of reaching unreached people groups as they sprout up, rather than a time-specific snapshot of people-group status collected by a mission organization? In a migration-heavy and constantly changing world, should missions be more about finishing or being faithful to the task?

Piper: Those are not alternatives in my mind. Work on finishing and work on being faithful are like comparing apples and fruit. Here’s what drives me not to write off the finishing mindset — finish the Great Commission; work on it; be part of it. Back in the 1980s, we were saying, “By 2000, come, Lord Jesus.” Date-setting is a bad thing to do, but praying for it is not. “Come, Lord Jesus” is a prayer every saint should pray. The sooner the better.

Finishing the task is still valid because Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Whatever the panta ta ethnē is, go for it. Disciples them, baptize them, teach them, and keep doing it until you have all of them. Another text says, “You were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9–10). He died to ransom people from all of those nations, so we should be about the business of getting all of them from those nations. It’s like Paul in Corinth: “I have many in this city who are my people” (Acts 18:10).

The third text I would go to is Matthew 24:14, which says, “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” There’s a connection between the end and reaching all the nations. I remember George Ladd, a New Testament scholar who was a teacher of mine at Fuller, wrote an article on Peter’s phrase “hasten the day of God” (2 Peter 3:12). What in the world is that? God has a day fixed, so what does he mean by “hasten the day of God”? He said, “There is one way to hasten the day of God: finish the mission.” I thought that was pretty good. So that’s my impulse to not lose the finishing mindset. I hope you don’t. I know from talking to one person already that there are people in this room on their way to the mission field. I was praying with my wife 45 minutes ago that there would be more because of this moment right here. I pray that some of you would come to this, maybe being wobbly about your future, and by the end of it not be wobbly anymore.

On the being faithful side, we don’t know when the end will be. I think one of the things you think about, Eddie, is the fact that “unreached peoples” is an amorphous idea. It’s not clearly defined, even when you say “tribe, people, tongue, nation.” If you take those four, can you draw nice lines between them? No. Can you tell how wide they are? No. But there are a lot of them. It’s probably not taxi drivers in Mumbai. I don’t think that’s the kind of people Jesus had in mind. I think he had ethnolinguistic groups, which is more manageable than every layer of job you could have. But your point is that some of those are going out of existence, and some of them are coming into existence.

So, what did Jesus mean? Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t know how Jesus would answer that question. We should go to all the nations, and Jesus can see thousands of ethnolinguistic people groups, however many there are. He knew that some of those tiny tribes at that point in South America or North America wouldn’t exist by the time missionaries got there. All I can say is that he knew that, and he didn’t intend those things. We shouldn’t press it that hard. But faithfulness means that you do what you should wherever God calls you in the process of finishing. And we all fit into different places.

I’ve never been a missionary. It should be a lesson for a lot of you that I wrote a book on missions that is used in classes and has made a difference, and I’ve never been a missionary. That’s weird. How can that be? That should tell you there are all kinds of ways God is going to use you. You can’t even imagine. So, yes to faithfulness and yes to finishing — both-and.

Jorge: There are lots of churches that send church-planting missionaries and evangelists to already reached places, such as countries in South America, Africa, and Asia. You talk about how the center of gravity in world Christianity is shifting toward the south and east. For instance, in my hometown in Mexico, there were lots of missionaries who came to preach the gospel though the gospel had already been preached there decades ago. Typically, a missionary would come, plant a church, leave, and an untrained or unqualified leader would rise up to the pulpit, eventually resulting in scandal, heresy, and a broken church. So, what should the emphasis of missions look like in countries like these? More specifically, should education and training — that is, theological education and pastoral training — replace the more traditional evangelism route as the primary focus?

Piper: My reaction to the last part of the question is no, but it’s not a quick no because the word “traditional” may carry a freight in your vocabulary that I’m not fully aware of. Let me see if I can put myself in your head and answer what you really mean. In 1985, I went to Cameroon for the first time, and I said, “I thought Wycliffe was a frontline mission organization, but Wycliffe is a church renewal project.” There were churches that had been there for 150 years. What is going on there? Why is there such dependence on the West after 150 years? I’ve thought a lot about those things.

And just to be fair, you didn’t come into being in 150 years. You came into being in two thousand years. This country is shot through with churches, publishing houses, seminaries, Bible colleges, and there is Christian influence at every level. And it’s not because of 150 years, but because of a long four hundred years of battling through the truth. And there was a long time of seasoning during the Middle Ages, and then there were hundreds of years of Reformation and a couple Great Awakenings. And there were new starts on this land, and here you are. You know a lot. You are more biblically informed than almost all Christians prior to three hundred or four hundred years ago. So here we are, and we look at a country that’s had the gospel for forty or fifty years and we say, “What’s wrong?” Are you kidding me? Who are we to be talking? We bear the fruit of thousands of years of labor and refinement. So we really need to be patient.

Now, your question is, Should we alter the strategies in such a way that we would keep what you just described from happening? And when I think of who is doing that, I think of Dieudonné in Cameroon, because Dieudonné loves his country, sees the doctrinal chaos and the weakness of the church, and he wants there to be evangelism — and I would have no problem saying “traditional evangelism.” He wants that to happen. Go tell people about Jesus. Have a strong church where they send them out as salt, tell people about Jesus, people get saved, and then they bring them in and disciple them. That’s what they should be doing, but he knows that he has to train pastors.

We know from recent news that you can be as trained as possible and still make shipwreck of your ministry, right? But what we need all over the world is both-and. Every question here is probably a both-and question. We need people with a vision for deep training, strengthening leaders, and growing up indigenous pastors who stand on their own two theological feet. Here’s a little anecdote to overstate the case, but I love Ralph Winter. He almost overstated everything. When I asked him, “What does it mean to be a reached people group?” he said, “When the local people have Greek and Hebrew and they are writing their own books for their own seminaries and colleges.” I said, “That’s a long time.” If you stay with a people group that long, you won’t reach all of them.

But another qualification is that some are called to stay there with them, and some aren’t. There are Paul-type missionaries and Timothy-type missionaries. Paul said, “I’m going to the unreached peoples,” and Timothy said, “I’m staying in Ephesus.” Timothy and Titus types are growing up elders and trying to reach the lost there. So, I think the answer to your question is that if in your judgment the traditional approach has been “get people saved and don’t do much theological preparation for fifty years from now,” that should change.

Piper B.: Since we believe that God will work in the hearts of those we interact with among the nations, and since we trust his sovereignty in each conversation we have with the unreached, how should we go about pursuing relationships with those who aren’t open to the gospel immediately? Should we consider this a closed door? Or should we continue to pursue relationships, trusting that the Lord will work through our faithfulness to the Great Commission?

Piper: You asked earlier which question I found most interesting, and I said, “I know which one I found most difficult.” It was that one. I have seen these questions before. Jesus sent out his disciples two by two and he said, “If you enter a town and they do not receive you, shake the dust off your sandals and go to another city” (Matthew 10:14). And Paul in Acts 13 goes on the first Sabbath to a synagogue and blows them away with this long sermon. Some say, “Come back next week.” And he comes back, and the opposition is enormous. I can picture Paul putting up his hands and saying, “If you judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, I’m turning to the Gentiles.” He leaves the synagogue and leaves the people in their lostness, unless they want to come to the meeting.

So, I have these texts in my mind that are discouraging me at one level from lingering too long with resistant people. And you love people like that. And you would lay down your life for them right now. You don’t want people to forsake them. You’re praying right now that people would go into their lives and ask them for the thousandth time if they believe. You don’t want to go this route of shaking the dust off your sandals, and I don’t think the Bible had that as its only message on how to do evangelism. It’s one message, and it’s true. Jesus said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). I think that means something like, “If the resistance is so ugly, so bitter, so skeptical, so cynical, then you just say, ‘Okay, I’m going to talk to some other people right now. Excuse me.’” So, there is a place for saying, “I’m done with you.”

There are a couple reasons why I don’t think that’s the only message of the New Testament. First, it has to do with what I said earlier about there being two types of missionaries: Paul-type and Timothy-type. Paul was a frontier missionary, a pioneer missionary. When he had reached northern Greece (Illyricum) — starting in Jerusalem, going up through Syria, moving across Asia Minor, going over into Greece, coming down into Corinth, and then going up the coast to Illyricum and northern Italy — he said, “I have no more room for work in these regions” (Romans 15:23). Are you kidding me? There were tens of thousands of unbelievers in that region. What did he mean that he has no more room for work? He meant, “I’m a frontier missionary. The church exists here. I’m going to Spain.” Now, that kind of person will not spend too long with recalcitrant people.

But do you know what he did in Ephesus and Crete? He left Timothy and Titus. And he wrote letters to them to tell them how to do their work, and he said, “Do the work of an evangelist” (2 Timothy 4:5). What did that mean? It meant that they had a region they were responsible for, and they were supposed to stay right there. They should send their people out to be as loving and creative as they could be. They will figure out how long they can talk to a person, just like you’re trying to figure out how many emails you should write to your loved one.

Here’s the other biblical impulse that makes me think that knocking the dust off our sandals is not the only message. Do you remember the parable Jesus told where he said that a man owned a fig tree (Luke 13:6–9)? He says that the fig tree didn’t bear any fruit for three years, so cut it down because it shouldn’t even waste the ground. And this unknown spokesman — whoever it is — says, “Sir, could we wait just one more year and put some fertilizer around it? And then if it doesn’t bear fruit, you can cut it down.” Now, what’s the point of that parable? I think it’s a double point. I think the first point is that Israel is close to being cut down, so they shouldn’t toy with him. He came offering them the gospel, and they should repent and bear the fruits of repentance, or else they are coming down. And the point of the parable is that there is an impulse of patience. Give them another year. Give them another visit. I don’t know the right time, but your heart will make it plain, won’t it?

That’s what we do every day. We plead with the Holy Spirit. We say, “Make me know when to talk and make me know when not to talk — what to say and what not to say.” The Bible simply does not give us all the specifics on how frequently to talk to an unbeliever or what we should say. It’s a both-and again.

Hoglund: We have time for two more questions. Julia is going to ask one about chapter 7 in the book, which talks about the difference between inward and outward worship as a New Testament concept.

Julia: I’ve spent two years at the Getty’s Sing! Conference. I’ve always come away greatly enriched by their vision of the church, corporate worship, global missions, and most definitely eternity. At the conference this year, you pressed into the doctrine of God as the foundation of our delight in him, which should flow forth in praise. In chapter 7 of Let the Nations Be Glad, you place a similar emphasis on passion for God and his glory in Christ as the foundation for inward affection that leads to outward worship. But you also make clear that in the New Testament, Jesus presents a new model for worship that does not necessarily imply corporate gathering; rather, Jesus emphasizes a posture of heart over form and outward expression. In light of these things, is it problematic that we refer to worship as “corporate worship” if worship is in fact a primarily inward action?

Piper: It can be problematic. If I’m in a conversation, I will listen to discern how people use the word “worship” — whether they mean a set of forms or whether they mean something in the heart. So yes, it can be a problem.

Here’s a little anecdote about the book. The only sentence anyone ever remembers in this book is the first sentence, which is, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” I had these worship leaders coming up to me saying, “I love this sentence. This is so great.” And it really did serve a lot of people who did international worship ministries. But I could tell they were taking my meaning to be worship service: “Missions exists because worship services don’t.” I thought, That’s not what I mean! The key that preserves the error from happening is Matthew 15:8, which says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me.” That’s the text that drives me in the essence of worship being in the heart. Forms and extensions and expressions of worship are external — singing, praying, kneeling, conversing, preaching. All those are forms, and they can be totally empty with zero worship happening in worship services. The Lord is holding his nose in the Old Testament during the solemn assemblies (Isaiah 1:13; Amos 5:21). Why is he holding their nose? They’re worshiping him. Listen to the language. They’re praising Yahweh. And he says, “They’re not paying their laborers.” So, I don’t like emphases on form.

What I mean by the New Testament being so different from the Old is that there are almost endless instructions about how to worship in the Old Testament outwardly. There are endless instructions on how to do it right. And there is almost nothing in the New Testament like that — almost. I don’t want you to say that Piper thinks there shouldn’t be corporate worship services. I make a case in my preaching book for that. I had a missionary write to me and say, “We have a lot of missionaries who don’t believe in preaching. Do you have anything to defend the normativity of preaching in worship services?” I said, “Yeah, I wrote a book about it. It’s called Expository Exultation. The first quarter of the book is about that.” I believe that you can read the New Testament carefully and know that you ought not to forsake the assembling of yourselves together, and there is enough evidence that you ought to sing and preach in those services.

So, let it be said. Sunday morning, I sit right over there, and I love it. My marriage has been saved by corporate-worship services. I’ve told Noël that. You have a squabble with your wife on Saturday, and you’re not talking. You’re emotionally ticked and you’re self-pitying. And then you come into a service and suddenly lift up — with four hundred or five hundred people — the bigness of God, the mercies of God, the kindness of God, and you feel like an idiot. You think, “Why am I wrecking this relationship with my piqued, emotional, self-pitying selfishness?” God has appointed corporate worship services to save marriages and other things. I love corporate worship, but I love real worship in the heart more.

James: I have a little bit of a hypothetical question for you. Suppose there is a young couple who is interested in missions and has been praying for a door to be opened for several years. Then suddenly a door opens before them. However, as they investigate this opportunity, they suddenly realize that being overseas would look quite different from what they had expected. Therefore, the couple is then split over what action to take. One desires to continue ahead, while the other is unsure that this is truly what they’re being called to do. What encouragement or advice do you have for this couple?

Piper: Someone said, “What was the most interesting question?” I say, “Let’s talk about complementarianism.” We have one minute. That’s not going to happen.

Some of you don’t even know what that word means. We’re complementarians — I am, and Bethlehem College and Seminary is happy to use that word. It simply means that when we read Ephesians 5, it says, “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22), and, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church” (Ephesians 5:25). Husbands are called the “head” of their wives (Ephesians 5:23). So, we have the husband taking his cues from Christ, and we have the wife taking her cues from a glad, obedient, maturing church. And that’s what marriage is. The world doesn’t know that’s what marriage is. They don’t have any idea what marriage is. In the Bible, marriage is a parable, a drama, of Christ and the church. That’s what it’s for. It was conceived that way from the beginning in Genesis 2. That’s complementarianism. Husbands lead, provide, and protect, and wives are glad to have it so. They think, “Give me a man like that, a mature man that I can respect. He’s biblical. He’s Christlike through and through. I’ll go anywhere with him.” That brings us to your question.

I’ll bet everyone is assuming that the guy wants to go, and the woman is dragging her feet. In my forty years at this church, that’s not been the case mostly. It’s the woman who says, “Honey, let’s go,” and he’s saying, “I’m not sure. Maybe we didn’t have it right.” So let me just deal with both. What do you do? You have a wife who wants to go, and the man doesn’t — or maybe you have a husband who wants to go, and the wife doesn’t. Those are the two different scenarios, and I don’t think they are solved in exactly the same way. It’s the non-parallelism that makes you complementarian.

Let’s think about the guy first. He wants to go. He believes it’s God’s will for them to go to the mission field, and now she has seen enough that she’s saying, “I’m not sure about this.” What does a head do? This is where you have to be so careful and biblical. He remembers that he is like Christ, but he’s not Christ. He’s not infallible like Christ. He’s not sinless like Christ. And that’s enough to make him slow to take Christ’s place in her life. This woman has a direct line to Christ. That’s the priesthood of the believer. And she’s claiming that her sense of this is not so sure. And his sense is different. He knows that he’s not God. And therefore, he doesn’t preempt conversation. He doesn’t assume that he doesn’t need counsel and wisdom. He doesn’t assume that he shouldn’t pay attention to her. That’s crazy, not only because it is unprincipled biblically, but also because you have to have her on board. You can’t have her dragging her feet. You have to be together. It’s not going to work if she isn’t in this. And not everybody did that in history.

That’s the first scenario. It means that he’s going to say, “Tell me the problems,” and he’s going to take the time to listen, discuss, argue, read the Bible with her, and pray with her. And over time, he’s going to hope that they go together. And here’s the difference between this and the other situation. There may come a point where he discerns that she is strong enough and that even though she has these misgivings, it’s time. They’re going to go. He says to her, “You can do this.” And I think she should say, “You’re the man. I’m going.”

Now, what if she wants to go and he is saying, “I don’t know”? She’s not the head, and she wants to persuade him, and she ought to want to persuade him. That’s the way it is in 1 Peter 3. The wife is desperately trying to win him to Christ — or in this case, she is trying to win him to the missionary calling they once had and she thinks they still have. She’s going to do similar things. She’s going to pray. She’s going to talk. She’s going to give her reasons. She’s going to be patient and wait. But she will not, like him, come to the point where she says, “We’re going. Pack your bags, hubby.” That’s not going to happen in a complementarian marriage. But she can win him. And she needs to. They have to do this together. That’s the bottom line.

Maybe I’ll close with this. I stood at the front there for about thirty years, and people would come to me with the most intractable questions. I would think, “I don’t have any idea what the answer is to your question.” It seemed like a situation of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” It would seem like there was no way forward in a relationship with their dad, or their wife, or their employer. I would generally say, “I don’t know. But I do know there is a third way. God has a third way. He has a way that will be obedient and right. Right now, you can’t see it and I can’t see it. But God can see it. Let’s ask him.” I would say that. So maybe the woman would think, “This is deadlocked. This is going to be miserable for the next ten years.” Or maybe the man might say that. But I would say, “No, there’s a way. There is a way. God will show you a way. You’re going to have a happy, fruitful marriage of ministry together. He’s going to make that happen.”

Hoglund: Thank you, Pastor John. Would you join me in showing appreciation for Pastor John and for these students?

A dear and discouraged friend lamented to me recently, “How do we minister in this climate?” He wasn’t talking about the humid subtropical weather pattern of the Carolinas (which is generally quite pleasant). He was referring to the ministry environment of the younger generation in the early 2020s.

A few conflicting responses arose within me.

Feeling the Pain

My first response was, essentially, I feel your pain.

The ministry I work with, Campus Outreach, focuses on life-on-life evangelism and discipleship. In my two-plus decades in campus ministry, I have not encountered a moment quite as challenging as this one. I believe that a conflation of cultural factors (COVID, technology, and modern philosophies, to name a few) has brought us to this place. While every individual and subculture is distinct, I have an educated hunch that most ministers in the Western world are experiencing many (if not all) of the following challenges on some level.

1. Fear of the Social Unknown

For the past two years, I haven’t witnessed much direct fear of COVID from young people. I have witnessed, however, their sheer terror in the face of new social situations. The trend was alarming in the years immediately preceding COVID (though I think it may have been more akin to FOMO in the 2010s), but it’s off the charts now.

The fear of being seen and known, of connecting with and building close relationships with others, while not remotely a new fear, has been given fresh license in the sanctioned isolation of the last two years. So, an invitation to any organic, communal platform for relationship — a retreat, a conference, even an ultimate frisbee game — is met with more reluctance than I have ever previously encountered.

2. Isolation in Public

To quote Tony Reinke, “The smartphone is causing a social reversal: the desire to be alone in public and never alone in private” (12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, 124). There have been venues where this reversal was already coming to fruition, even as far back as twenty years ago: the gym and the airplane, for example. But the social acceptability of a screen in hand (and eyes on it) means that gaining access to a person’s eyes implies interruption. The screen (and headphones!) is a social stiff-arm, a means of saying, “Don’t talk to me!” without having to be rude.

The wide world, therefore, becomes an extension of the living room, where risks have been minimized and the channels of communication are tightly controlled. Few truly experience what Bilbo spoke to Frodo about in The Fellowship of the Ring: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” It’s a wonderful quote, but it may have been rendered moot. If we can find a way to bring our recliners with us, the transformation will be complete. And the living room has always felt too personal to invade.

3. Loss of the Moral High Ground

Historically, my evangelistic interactions, whether with strangers or friends, have elicited a “should” factor from the recipients of the gospel. Their resistance to Jesus was often met with a counterbalancing sense that Christianity was nevertheless the right way. The moral way. But the current zeitgeist associates Christianity with ignorance, bigotry, and oppression. So now, we aren’t simply trying to convince people that life surrendered to Jesus is better than whatever the world of sex and money and power offers; we are trying to convince them that Christians aren’t inherently racist, sexist, and abusive.

4. Loss of the ‘Villain’ Category

In recent years, you may have noticed the preponderance of films, especially in the Disney canon, that tell the backstory of a classical villain (Maleficent, Cruella, Joker, to name a few). In each of the stories, the villain is portrayed as misunderstood and deeply wounded. To be fair, generational sin in a broken world is complex. But the contrast between the portrayal of Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty and in the more recent film where she is the titular character is striking.

Therapeutic language, with all of its benefits and drawbacks, has won over our society in a comprehensive way (I heartily recommend Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self for a thorough treatment of this trend). Twenty years ago, some pastors and theologians were vigorously countering the gospel of self-esteem. Today, many are rightly acknowledging and resisting previously overlooked abuses, but I am afraid that, in the process, the old self-esteem has entered through the back door.

A pastor I admire once presented the alliteration “Villain, Victim, Victor” to capture the categories in which all followers of Christ simultaneously find themselves. We are perpetrators of sin against God and others (villains), recipients of the sins of others (victims), and overcomers of sin through the finished work of Christ on the cross and the daily work of the Holy Spirit within (victors).

“The only doorway to the kingdom of Christ is through acknowledgment of personal villainy.”

In my experience, the personal category of villain has been largely erased. The category of victim is assumed, and affirmation of victory, even in the context of failure, is a given (“We’re all winners!”). But the only doorway to the kingdom of Christ is through acknowledgment of personal villainy. When there are widely accepted philosophical defenses to keep us from darkening that doorway, ministry is significantly more challenging.

5. Endless Buffet of Distractions

Life-on-life discipleship takes hours, days, months, and even years of commitment. It requires sustained scriptural focus. It takes single-mindedness and intentional relationships — qualities more easily attained without a constant barrage of stimuli, whether for entertainment (Netflix, YouTube, TikTok), human connection (Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook), or information (podcasts, TED talks, articles — yes, I see the irony). Those distractions have drastically diminished the felt need for true community, for the discipline of silence and solitude, and for a true Paul to one’s Timothy.

Spoiled to Inflated Expectations

So, my first response was, I feel your pain. But then my second response was this: we have been spoiled.

American gospel ministry in the last half-century, especially on the college campus, has been nearly unparalleled in its fruitfulness. I sat in a room of more than seven hundred Campus Outreach staff in 2013, and the meeting host asked all who had come to faith in college through the ministry to stand. Some three-fourths of the room left their seats.

These staff had mostly attended college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when ministry numbers were booming. As a student, I was part of a ministry that comprised nearly 10 percent of the entire enrollment of a “secular” college. The harvest of millennials was ripe on America’s campuses. Meanwhile, across the world, faithful missionaries were battling to translate the Scriptures, learn cultures, and hopefully see a convert or a few over years of ministry. They still are.

“We need to recapture the wonder of a single heart made new.”

With a background in such manifest fruitfulness, I have found, at least for myself, that I need to recapture a healthy theology of the cross, whereby we are poured out, sometimes agonizingly, for the formation of disciples (Galatians 4:19). We need to recapture the wonder of a single heart made new (Ezekiel 36:26). We need to recall the counterintuitive contentment that comes from seemingly fruitless ministry (1 Corinthians 15:58), and even the strange joy of suffering shame for the name of Christ (Acts 5:41). Which leads to my third and final response.

Hasn’t It Always Been Tough?

From feeling the pain, to needing to recalibrate assumptions, I also asked, Hasn’t it always been this way in some form or another?

In other words, is it possible that hitting the panic button during any given cultural moment is a bit reactionary? Our commitment to biblical Christianity requires us to believe that the Scriptures are sufficient to equip us to address the challenges of modern life and ministry (2 Timothy 3:16–17). It can only follow that they are timeless, implying that both the human condition in the twenty-first century and the cultural challenges of our day have not strayed too far from those in biblical times. I find it incredibly helpful to recall timeless spiritual realities when ministry moments seem bleak.

All still have the hardwired inclination to exchange the truth of God for a lie in order to worship and serve the creature (or the self) rather than the Creator (Romans 1:24–25). Christ crucified is still the stench of death to those who don’t have the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 2:15–16). And the ministers themselves still flag at times, struggling to continue to speak the aromatic gospel of Christ, always needing renewed faith, hope, and love.

People back then had a God-shaped void in their hearts. They were made for intimacy with God and with their fellow man, even as they suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. They longed to know and be known and were simultaneously terrified of that intimacy.

So, to quote Ellis in No Country for Old Men, “What you got ain’t nothing new.” In a foundational sense, in the ways that matter most, the resistance was exactly the same in AD 50 as it is in 2022. Daunting indeed.

But if the resistance is fundamentally the same, so too is the Spirit who indwells us with divine power. The word of the cross has never ceased being folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it has never stopped being the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18). He has never stopped using foolish things to shame the wise, jars of clay to carry treasure (1 Corinthians 1:27; 2 Corinthians 4:7). And if that is true, then there will be a multitude that no one can count from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation who surround the throne of the Lamb (Revelation 7:9).

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). So, no matter the spiritual climate, we offer him to the world with hope.