Thank you. It's good to be back again this evening because God is going to bless our time together. I'd like to read a verse or two from First Samuel chapter seventeen. First Samuel chapter seventeen. While you're finding it, I might remind you that not only did I write a little book on God's voice in the stars, a book for which I sometimes get slack, by the way. I got a letter last week that just ripped me up one side and down the other. for writing about astrology and claiming that I was making a lot of money by writing this book. And I was just trying to make a showy piece of literature. And to cap it all, he said, you're writing a book about the stars published in Neptune, New Jersey. As if I chose where the Lozzo brothers was located. Well, you suffer like that sometimes, but that's just part of it. I wasn't going to say I have another book which I'd much rather you read. and that's this one, none dares say no. It's an introduction to missions. Now, I'm not really expecting that most of you are going to become overseas missionaries from Park of the Palm, but it may be that you have grandchildren or children or acquaintances that you would like to get introduced to the study of missions, and I think this course, which is basically the text part of an Emmaus correspondence course that I wrote, may be very helpful, just introducing a number of different aspects of world mission itself. First Samuel chapter seventeen and verse twenty nine. And David said, What have I now done? Is there not a cause? That little question interests me. You remember this scenario, don't you? There was the valley of Elah. The Philistines were on one side of the valley and the Israelites were on the other side. Every day for forty days had marched down and challenged the Israelites to choose a man and to fight him as representatives of their two armies. For forty days the Israelites had been quaking in their boots. No one had wanted to go. There was Saul, head and shoulders above everybody else, but he wouldn't go, even though he was a mighty warrior. There were David's older brothers, Eliab, and so on, at least three of his older brothers were there in the army, and they didn't go. Jonathan was there, and he wouldn't go. And then you remember, David's parents sent some cheeses and a little bit of lunch to their boys on the battlefield, and David was a carrier, a young boy coming up to the battle. And when he gets there, he begins to ask questions. What's going on? Why is there no action here? And Goliath appears, and it's explained to him what's wrong, that nobody is willing to fight against this man. And David is incensed by that. He just cannot understand why people of trust in God can't face a heathen, degon-worshipping enemy. And while this interplay of words is going on in chapter seventeen of first Samuel, David's brother rolls up. and sees David, as if I know the naughtiness of your heart. It's in verse twenty-nine. And Eliab, his eldest brother, heard when he spake to the men. And Eliab's anger was kindled against David. And he said, Why cameeth thou down hither, and with whom hath thou left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know thy pride in the naughtiness of thine heart. For thou art come down that thou might see the battle. Good question. What battle? And David said, What have I now done? Is there not a cause? Shouldn't I be upset? Isn't there a reason why I'm asking these kinds of questions? We are those that trust in the living God, and there is an enemy which has held us back for forty days, and no one is willing to go out and fight him. Isn't there a cause? And we live in a world, you know, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in Christ, where there are giants standing up against the forces of God, giants in our land and larger giants in many other lands. Is there not a cause why we shouldn't be concerned? The Lord Jesus said, lift up your eyes and look on the field. That's still true. We were singing about it this evening. Is there not a cause? And the answer is, yes, there is. There are two other questions in that chapter, and I'm not going to take time to any more than mention them just now. But there's this one. Goliath asked it. Is there not a man? And of course there was. David was that man. And he volunteered to go. And the other question is this. And David asked this question as he faced Goliath. He says, is there not a God? And there was. One stone later. Goliath lies on the ground with his head severed from his body. Because there was a God in Israel. Now we live in a world where there are giants and in which there is a cause for us to be concerned. We live in a world where there is a God, however, who is greater than all the problems. And we live in a world where there are people who in God's hands can do valiantly and accomplish great things for His name. And I'd like to say that there is no time in history when more has gone on in the name of the kingdom of God than is going on right now in our day. One of the reasons why I think the coming of the Lord is so near is that there is so much going on in the world. There are more people coming to the Lord Jesus in our day than ever before in history. And we can thank God for that. And I'd like to draw your attention tonight for a few minutes to the continent of Asia and some of the great realities that surround that continent and the world in which we live. I would much prefer if I were next door to my little tool there. I'm wedded to that thing at Emmaus, and I make these transparencies by the dozen regularly, and I use them, and I point to them, and I write on them, and so on. But they've got me separated a little bit, so if I have to go back and forward, you'll just forgive me. But I understand that the mic is important, and the light is important, and they're not together, so we'll have to do a little transporting. You can't move the projector, and you can't move the mic, so you move me. So... That's the way we do it. Here are some realities in our world. Just very briefly, you probably were introduced to some of them when Rob Lindstedt was here. If I know Rob Lindstedt, he gave you all sorts of crisis equations and so on. He's been around a while. There is a population explosion going on in the world. You know that. There is a resource reduction going on in the world. There are less resources because we're using them up. There is the destructive capability, nuclear power, and the increasing armaments on both sides of our world. There's an explosion of knowledge. Our whole total world knowledge is doubling in something like every nine years. There are political tensions in our world that are almost beyond comparison. And because of these things, we ought to be aware of what's going on in our world. We in North America tend to look at a world that for all intents and purposes looks like that, where North America is somewhat out of proportion to the rest of the world. Big, fat United States and Canada and sort of the rest of the world squeezed onto the edges somewhere. Lebanon is a long way away. Afghanistan, who knows about that? Bangladesh, where in the world is it anyway? And Kalamantan, I can't even spell it. So we just leave these places. But the fact is that when God looks at the world, he's looking at a world of people, the people for whom Christ died, the people that God loved when he so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. And when he looks at the world, it would be much more like this, where it is brought into the focus of population and North and South America are squeezed over into one side, and the great sections of the people world is in Asia. And it's about that section of Asia, or at least this continent of Asia, that I want us to consider a few things this evening. Now before we do, I want you to just look at one of my charts. I have an awful lot of charts, and I'm not going to inflict these on you. They tend to confuse people. I know I'm the only one who likes them. but I like to give them anyway. You know, like Ed Harlow loves to give statistics, so I like to give charts. But I'll only give you one tonight, and you probably won't even remember that one, but at least you'll know I gave you a chart. This thing's called a pie chart, and it has to do with different kinds of people in the world in relation to Christ. There are four different colors on the chart. Red, pink mustard and white the red sections of the chart represent those who are called evangelical christians it doesn't mean all of them are born again in the john three sense of the word but at least they claim to be they claim to be active christians they may not be real christians but they claim to be active christians the pink area are those who are inactive Christians. It would cover all of the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, the Russian Orthodox, and other kinds of Christian, so-called Christian people in the world. That's the pink area. The mustard area are those who are culturally near. That is, those who can be reached under all our present system or means of reaching the gospel with all the radio, with all the literature, with all of the preachers of the gospel and other means that are getting the gospel out, these are available to be reached. The white areas of this chart are those areas of the world which will never hear the gospel if we keep on doing everything that we're doing right now. And what I want you to notice, particularly about the chart, is that In the northern half of it, you'll see Europe, Latin America, New Zealand, Australia, and so on. There are large percentages of active and inactive Christians and relatively less unreached people. In the United States and Canada, there are hardly any unreached people, as you can see. But in the bottom half of the chart where Asia is, and that's what I'm talking about tonight. the huge percentage of people are unreached. Now, when we look at the continent of Asia, eight hundred and eighty million Chinese, five hundred and sixty-three million Hindus, five hundred and thirteen million Muslims, and another hundred and seventy-six million Muslims in Africa that are unreached and not yet being reached with the Gospel of Lord Jesus. So when we talk about the job we are trying to do we're talking about a very, very large job indeed. Now, let me just mention a few things about Asia, and I won't suffer with the chart anymore. Just to leave Asia in front of you there, we'll say this, that Asia has about one-third of the total land mass of the whole world. One-third of the land mass of the world. And yet it contains about three-fifths, far more than half of all the people in the world. More than half of the world lives right there in Asia. If you were to draw a circle, twelve hundred miles in radius, from the city of Chongqing in China, you would encompass one half of the world within that circle. Asia is peeming with multitudes of people, teeming with huge cities. The Tokyo-Osaka city area is a cosmopolitan area there, and will have more than fifty million people in it in the next seventeen years, in one great megalopolis of a city. And that's one of the striking examples, but it's the direction in which the world is going. Unfortunately, communism has overshadowed Asia's most populous nation, which is China, and it's overflowed into other parts of the world as well. If I were nearer, I'd point out some of these things, but it certainly overflows down into Southeast Asia in the bottom part of the map. It's certainly overflowed into North Korea, as you know, and over on the right-hand side there. And communism is one of the realities that has to be faced in Asia today. Asia teams with hungry people and some that are dispossessed and some that are homeless. In some areas of Asia there's very little food and few homes and fewer jobs and very little future. Politically and economically there's not a lot of very realistic hope for many of the poor people in Asia itself. And yet Asia is probably the most important part of the world because of the masses of people who live there. Just think of this. All of the world's five major religions have their birthplace in Asia. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. All of them grew up in Asia. Here in this one continent are two and a half billion people, two and a half thousand million people. And many of them. In fact, the great bulk of them are not being reached with the gospel at all. Now, don't turn off immediately and say, well, we can't send missionaries to China, therefore we ought to think about something else, or why not have a gospel meeting and enjoy ourselves here? There are lots of countries in the world that are closed to people with missionary visas, But that doesn't mean they're closed to contact of any kind at all. Somebody once said there's not a country in the world that is closed to missionaries if you're willing to go in and not come out. You see, you don't have to have a missionary visa to be a missionary. God has made us his witnesses. And we are his sent ones, his missionaries. And Asia has a great deal to offer in terms of contact there. In India alone, down in the southern part of the map there, there are at least a half a million villages that have no one living in them that knows the Lord Jesus, His Savior. And India has had the Gospel for two hundred years. And there's still half a million villages in India with no witness for Christ. In Japan, Right now, in nineteen eighty-four, there are sixteen hundred small cities without any kind of evangelical church at all. Sixteen hundred cities in modern technological Japan, in Indonesia, which is the island world in the bottom right-hand corner of your map there. In Indonesia, there are hundreds of islands. where there are people living that have yet to be reached. Now these are tiny islands, they're not big ones, but as a matter of fact they are not yet reached. So that there are great spiritual facts in Asia that are awfully important. Now here are a few things that I'd like you to consider for a few minutes. Some of what I call the great spiritual facts of Asia. There is a growing Christian population. Lest I paint the picture too dark, I'd like you to know that the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is alive and well and growing, and growing faster than it's ever grown before. And while there are many gaps, and while there are huge needs, there is a great deal going on, and some of the great unreached areas are beginning to hear the good news of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. And that's happening in our day. Evangelicals, thankfully, are by far and away the fastest growing, growing much faster than the Roman Catholics, much faster than the dead Protestant churches. And we can thank God for that. The total Christian population of Asia is reckoned to be about eighty-one million. Fifty-seven of those are supposed to be Roman Catholics. Another twenty-four million are Protestants. The percentage of those that are evangelical is growing. The fast-growing evangelical community in some areas is simply phenomenal. Do you know what the most Christian country in Asia is? It'll be South Korea. It'll be South Korea, where from about nineteen hundred and five, to about nineteen, up until the Japanese war, there was a revival there, a continual revival in the Presbyterian and the Methodist mission groups in that land that was quite phenomenal. In fact, one of the great impetus things that gave, pushed me forward in terms of missions was when I went to Korea in nineteen forty-five. They called me into the army the day the war ended. I was very excited about getting into the army. But after basic training, I was sent over to Korea and spent a year there. And in Korea, I had the privilege of meeting in a Presbyterian church in the little town of Chanju in central Korea, central part of southern Korea. And there, even with snow on the ground, Christians were coming in a windowless building, wind howling through, cold, bitterly cold. And yet I have never experienced the warmth of Christian fellowship. or the delight in the things of God that those people had. They didn't have a formal pastor in those days. They didn't have anything except a shell of a building in which they were, and yet there were several hundred people with a glow of Christ on their faces and singing the hymns of Zion. And even though I didn't know any more than just a greeting or two in Korean, I enjoyed their fellowship for weeks on end. Now, God is moving in Korea, and since the war, that growing church has continued to grow. And while there is a great deal of light-hearted Christianity there, there's a great deal of solid evangelical growth. And even today, the churches in Korea are sending out missionaries to other countries in Asia. And there are something like fifteen hundred Korean missionaries serving on other parts of Asia today. I think that's wonderful. You know, we're not the only missionary sending country in the world. And something like ten percent of all of Korea's population claims to be Christian today. Christians are growing in that land. In the country of Taiwan, the church has grown twenty-fold. That is, twenty times as big as it was after the war. about thirty years ago. And I think that's something to be thankful for. In Indonesia, a Muslim land, and the countries from Sumatra and Java down through to Irian Jaya and all the other hundreds of islands like Sulawesi and so on, in between in Indonesia and Kalamantan and so on, all these huge islands Muslim islands, and yet there is a great movement toward Christ among these people. Now, we in Assembly Fellowship don't hear too much about that, because we traditionally have not had many missionaries in some of these countries. We have had some in Taiwan, but not in Indonesia to any extent at all. But God has been working there, and we can be thankful for that. There have been revival in many of the tribal people, some of these. Just look at the rest of these people. Number four, advance among tribal people. Let me remind you of one thing here. In Upper Burma, right about there, on the map, there are people known as Karin, large tribes, millions of them, Karin peoples. They're not Burmese. They don't speak the Burmese language. They speak Karin. some of the first Burmese Christians were Karen people, that Adoniram Judson, the first American missionary, reached back in eighteen hundred and five, and in that particular, that kind of area, era there. But these Karen people, some of them have become rather formal during the day, during the intervening years, and down in Rangoon, the capital of Burma, the biggest city there, is a man by the name of Ronnie Tinman Tong. And Ronnie is the representative for the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company there. Letters are directed to him from there. And he belongs to the assembly, or one of the assemblies in Rangoon, and has made numbers of trips inland. And he came across people up there, some thousands of them among the Karen people, that had been studying their Bibles and they'd become dissatisfied with the the deadness of the local church there. And so they had begun to meet on their own and study the Word of God in the Koran language. And they had discovered that there were ways to meet that were different than the ways they had been meeting without ecclesiastical order. So they began telling Ronnie about this and he was able to share with them the word of God and in fact an Emmaus course called Christ Love the Church by William McDonald. And they couldn't believe that this had been written. They thought they were the first ones in the world who'd ever discovered it. And there are now thousands of believers up in that northern Burma area there. Now God is working among tribal peoples. And that's just one example. There are dozens of other kinds of things going on there. National churches in Asia are maturing very rapidly, and they're independent of the West. When you think of many third world countries, you must not think that these people are looking to the U.S. for all the money. Now, many of them do look for money, and it probably is a strategic mistake. to be completely controlled by the West. But many of them are not looking for U.S. money or U.S. support because they're independent and they seek to carry on their work under God as God gives them opportunity and are growing and seeing much, much blessing. So there are lots of things to encourage. Let me give you one or two other examples of where God is working in remarkable ways. For instance, you know the tragic war when Russia invaded Afghanistan and have caused such havoc there. The population of Afghanistan is now one half of what it was. Many of the people have been killed. There are millions, up to six million refugees, have left Afghanistan altogether. And we read of that. things happening there I remember once when a Russian train or a convoy of trucks blew up in a tunnel and a whole convoy of Russian soldiers was killed and I and somebody was saying well that's good for them that's what they deserve and I said wait a minute do you know that probably one half of the Russians serving in Afghanistan Christian Christian Russian soldiers you see they're discriminated against in Russia, and Russia deliberately sends them to the worst of duties into Afghanistan. Many of them are German-speaking Russians who were Germans living in the eastern or western part of Russia. Then during and after the war, the Germans were shipped to Central Asia, right above Afghanistan there. And from these, many of these soldiers are Christians. Some of them have been able to witness to Afghans. But the other part of the story is that those Afghans that have become refugees and have left have gone to Pakistan for the most part, over the famous Khyber Pass and down into Pakistan. And what's happening there? Well, I'll tell you what's happening. For the first time in two thousand years, Afghans are hearing the gospel. Because refugee organizations, world vision, world relief, world concern, Others are going in there. Evangelicals are in the forefront of all of this. And seeking to witness to Afghan refugees. And Afghans are coming to Christ in not great numbers, but at least respectable numbers for the first time in history. In all of history, there's only ever been one church in Afghanistan. And about ten years ago, that church had been in existence for, I think, about eighteen months. And then along comes a bulldozer. And it was only for expatriates, that is, for foreigners, even then. And they bulldozed that one down. It didn't last. But now, Afghans are hearing the gospel for the first time in history. I think that's wonderful. God, you see, turning what we term tragedy for his own advantage. And God does this over and over and over again. Some of the tribal peoples... in Central Asia, up above Afghanistan, in Tashkent, in Kharkov and so on. People like the Kazakhs and the Uzbeks and other people like that are here in the Gospel because of the Second World War, and God moved German people who were living in Western Russia back into Central Asia, and these German Christian people now, sometimes called Russian Baptists, but in Russia, as you probably know, All Christians who are evangelicals shoved into that camp were called Baptists. And whether they're brethren or Baptists or Pentecostals are all called Baptists. And when you read about the statistics of Russian Baptists, it's one evangelical group rather than a specific denomination. But anyway, these Germans have been witnessing to tribal peoples there, and some of them are coming to know the Lord. We recently had Ron George, who is working, an Englishman, working out of England, but among tribal peoples in Central Asia. And he has some exciting stories to tell about what God is doing among Uzbeks and Kazakhs. I take quite an interest in that myself, because when I went to university, I thought God was going to send me to Central Asia. And I studied Chinese and Russian. thinking I was going to get there. Now, I've never got there yet. I'm all ready to go, and if anybody has a suitcase packed, I'm set to go now, but I haven't yet had the opportunity. God has given me the opportunity to be in a lot of parts of the world, but not that part yet. But it may come. And so we can thank God that there are lots of good things happening in Asia. I'll have something else to say about the Muslim world on another night. I don't think we ought to touch that too much just at this time. But we can be thankful for that. I will mention, though, one country, one Muslim country, and that's Bangladesh. Bangladesh is the little country right at the top or the north end of the Bay of Bengal. Bengal tigers come from the same word, Bangladesh. It used to be called East Pakistan. Then they had a war and the two Pakistan's divided and it's now called Bangladesh. It is probably the most miserable country in the world. It's certainly the most densely populated country in the world. It has almost as many people as Japan, and yet is less than a quarter the size of Japan. Just people per square mile, you can't believe how many people are in that land. On top of that, it has three of the biggest rivers in the world that come down through it. The Brahmaputra and the Ganges. and one of their great tributaries. In fact, most of Bangladesh is nothing more than a big river delta, average height about three feet above sea level. And unfortunately, the monsoon season blows up the Indian Ocean, right into the Bay of Bengal, toward the Himalayan mountains there, and these monsoon tidal waves come up and bury that poor country. So if they're not flooded with the rivers, They are hit with a monsoon. Some parts of Bangladesh get an average rainfall of two hundred and seventy inches. That's a lot of rainfall. Did we complain about our inch or two today? They get that much every day, all year long. And so it goes. Now, it's a Muslim country. There's a very, very tiny church in Bangladesh. There's a book by a doctor called Daktar. In fact, there's a new book, Daktar II, that's come out. I don't know if you have seen it yet or not. But Bangladesh is a country where there were assembly missionaries. There was a man by the name of Phil Game, a Britisher there. He had to leave for his family's sake about two years ago, and no one has taken his place. It is possible to get into Bangladesh, but nobody has gone. A country that needs our prayers a great deal. You get countries like Iran where there is a strong Muslim influence led by Ayatollah Khomeini. There's Shiite Muslims. That's one of the main branches of Islam. They do not get along too well with the other branch, the Sunni Muslims, which are those that look to Mecca. The Shiite Muslims look to the town of Qum. in Iran itself. The Sunni Muslims look to Mecca in Arabia. And there's a tiny church in Iran, perhaps two thousand believers, and that's all. But we need to pray for the land of Asia. I don't have very much time left. I ought to say something about China, I suppose. China which composes about a billion people, one thousand million people in one country. And it was the country that has received more missionaries than any other country on earth. It's a country where more missionaries have died for Christ than any other country on earth. And when the missionaries were finally kicked out in And the last missionaries were gone and there were a few in jail for a while like Jeffrey Bull, but they were eventually all left. We sort of closed the door on China and we thought, well, God is finished with that land. But you know the story. God wasn't finished with China. And while there were probably one million Christians in China in nineteen fifty-one when door to missionary work closed in all hospitals and all Christian schools and and all but three Christian churches were closed. And Mao Zedong controlled China, and the Red Guard rampaged across the country. Something like fifty million people were killed in that next thirty years. Many of them politically motivated, but some of them, in fact a lot of them, were Christian people, because they were reckoned to be not safe for the state. But James Hudson Taylor III, the present director of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, states that there are now in China at least thirty million Christians, and maybe as many as fifty million Christians, living in house churches, that is, informal groups meeting in homes or basements or caves or wherever they can meet. They're called house churches. And they meet around the name of the Lord Jesus. Many of them do not have written Chinese Bibles. And so for that reason, Far East Broadcasting Company in Manila broadcast in Chinese at dictation speed the Word of God, the New Testament and the Old Testament so that Chinese Christians can listen by their radio sets and copy down verse after verse and chapter after chapter of the Bible. And so the Church of Christ has grown in China far faster without missionaries than with missionaries. You see, God isn't dependent on missionaries. God has used missionaries and will continue to use them. We need them. But that isn't the only way God works. God's work goes on. Now, my time is gone and we'll close it off here. But I hope that this little talk has made you more aware, at least, of some of the great facts of country like or a continent like Asia. We have workers working in many of these countries, certainly in India and in Pakistan and in Taiwan and Japan and South Korea and in many of the other countries. There are Christians there though that need our prayers. And the more specifically we pray, the more effective our prayers are going to be. And one of the great ministries that we can have is to really pray. I think it's delightful when I meet people who are knowledgeable about what's going on in the world and concerned and therefore praying about what is happening. Praying for one of the brethren in the men's prayer meeting this morning. Prayed very knowledgeably about the radio work that was going on in the world today. He knew the names of the stations and where they were and what they were doing. I like that. I like that. If we can pray specifically, God is going to bless His Word and His work around the world. Shall we close? Father, we just pause and while we are so inadequate to explain a continent that contains over half the world's population, we do thank you that the Lord Jesus is alive. We thank you that his work is going on. And we thank thee that his people are witnessing. And we pray, Father, that we'll continue to open up some of the many closed areas. We thank thee for tribal people in Central Asia that are coming to Christ and hearing the good news for the first time. We thank thee for millions of Christians in China that are witnessing, even at cost to themselves and under threat of persecution and danger. We thank thee for one another that are coming to Christ in Taiwan and Japan and Indonesia and other countries like that. We think of thousands of villages in India that is still without Christ. And we pray, Lord, that the message might be sent over airways and through literature and by word of mouth and by testimony so that it'll get out even further than it is today. And while we pray for these, we look for the coming of the Lord Jesus. Help us to be faithful until that day arrives. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Thank you. I guess I was. The only thing you'd be able to do is, I guess I was. The only thing you want to change, yep, you just need to build me a pipeline. That's my first life. And I'm just inquiring. Would that help? Thank you. Is that what you want to do? Is that what you want me to do?