Paul’s concepts of a “reached area” and the primacy of the taught Word of God can be a help to every church and pastor who are wrestling with how to effectively be about reaching every tribe, language, people, and nation. Is every sent one from the church to go to an unreached location, and is every missions’ dollar to go towards a Romans 15 type ministry? Surely not. But the framework and implications serve us well in teaching, stewarding, and giving some level of priority to “those who have not heard.”

In the 15th chapter of the book of Romans, we have Paul laying out his rationale for why he must press on to new places that have yet to hear the gospel.
He says this; “So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ.  It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.  Rather, as it is written: “Those who were not told about him will see, and those who have not heard will understand.  This is why I have often been hindered from coming to you.  But now that there is no more place for me to work in these regions, and since I have been longing for many years to visit you, I plan to do so when I go to Spain. I hope to see you while passing through and to have you assist me on my journey there, after I have enjoyed your company for a while.” Romans 19b-24.
There are two key observations about this passage. The first being that Paul says there are actual places where “there is no more place for me to work.” There was some metric by which Paul, the pioneer missionary, measured completion. Apparently, that metric had been fulfilled from Jerusalem to Illyricum, so Paul pressed on to places that still did not have what Jerusalem through Illyricum had.
This is no small point. Paul saw that there are limits to the missionary task. Every location did not count as a mission field to Paul. At some point, the task Paul was committed to was complete for a particular people group or location. Yes, churches need to be revitalized, least reached and poorly reached areas need help….but those were separate jobs from what Paul was called to do. His job was complete.
The second takeaway is that Paul saw the proclamation of the gospel as central to the missionary task. He is clear on this in Romans 10:13,14; “For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.  How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”
The missionary is then to go to places that have no foundation and preach the gospel. Those who have never been taught cannot come to saving faith apart from someone preaching to them. The ambition of missionaries is to preach where Christ has not been known, to build that foundation.
Three implications that come out of those two observations are as follows.
Every Christian is Not a Missionary
This logical outworking from Paul’s statement in Romans 15 is probably the hardest for Christians in our day to accept.
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God expects every truly righteous person to care about the poor and to do what is in his power to help them. But it begs the question to maintain that this concern can only be expressed in an endorsement of coercive and redistributory statism that is so essential to contemporary collectivist approaches to justice. 

Much of the confusion present in evangelical attempts to find a theory of distributive justice in the Bible result from inattention to the classical distinction between a universal and particular sense of justice. Because evangelical social liberals are inattentive to important distinctions within the notion of justice, many of their appeals to biblical uses of “justice” are compromised since they simply assume that biblical endorsements of justice are divine commands to support economic redistribution. This kind of error is illustrated in Robert Johnston’s book, Evangelicals at an Impasse. Johnston writes:

Although it is not the Bible’s purpose to give a careful scientific definition of what our “needs” are, Scripture does repeatedly identify justice with assistance to the poor, the sick, and the powerless. Job states, for example:
“I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the poor, and I searched out the cause of him whom I did not know. I broke the fangs of the unrighteous, and made him drop his prey from his teeth.”

Johnston goes on to cite several other texts where the notion of justice is conjoined with helping the poor. (Jer. 22:15-16; Deut.10:12-22; Ps. 103:6; Ps. 146:7-8). Such verses prove, in Johnston’s judgement, that biblical justice is closely related to an economic redistribution that will meet the needs of the poor and the helpless.
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When properly understood, election teaches us not just about how great God is, but how good he is: “God’s love is the fountainhead of the gospel. God’s Son did not come into the world to persuade the Father to love or to win His love for us; He came as the gift of the Father’s love to us.”[3]  He is a sovereign God, and yet also a saving God. Some people might tend to pit John’s “God is love” (1 John 4:16) against Paul’s predestination. But they go hand in hand. If God were not love, we would be lost. Yet while we were still sinners, God loved us—God chose us.

A hurdle many Christians cannot seem to get over is accepting and embracing the doctrine of election, or predestination. By nature, we don’t like the fact that God is the one who does the choosing. We want to be the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul. Yet Paul seems to make the case very clearly in Ephesians 1:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,even as he chose us in himbefore the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In lovehe predestined usfor adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.” (Eph. 1:3–5; emphasis added)

What brings Paul to doxology is distasteful to many. R.C. Sproul accurately describes the feeling of most people towards the concept:

The very word predestination has an ominous ring to it. It is linked to the despairing notion of fatalism and somehow suggests that within its pale we are reduced to meaningless puppets. The word conjures up visions of a diabolical deity who plays capricious games with our lives.[1]

Yes, this is a hard truth to come to terms with, but such a fatalistic view tragically eclipses the beauty of God’s work for undeserving and incapable sinners like you and me. To help us grapple with and grow to love this essential aspect of the gospel, consider the following three points about election.
1. Election is a biblical doctrine.
First, the doctrine is biblical. This should seem evident enough, as it is clearly spelled out in the section of Ephesians 1 quoted earlier. Nor is this the only place we run up against the concept in Scripture. Just a few verses later on Paul will say—even more bluntly—that we have been “predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). In Romans 8:29-30 we read,

For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he predestined, these he also called; whom he called, these he also justified; and whom he justified, these he also glorified.”

These are places in which these theological terms are used explicitly, but if we broaden our radar to also pick up allusions to and themes of choosing, predetermining, and electing, the list gets longer.
There are some out there who have a false notion of predestination and election, namely, that it was the invention of some ancient French madman named John Calvin. No doubt, Calvin would mourn the fact that history has dubbed this doctrine “Calvinism,” as though it somehow belonged more to him than to God.
Others who are more informed would recognize that the idea of election is not strictly Calvinist and is in fact a scriptural concept. Indeed, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and so-called Calvinists all hold to different nuances of predestination.
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