All You Have to Do to Be Rejected by God Is Nothing

• Now in Matthew 9, Jesus makes a very, I would say, tragic statement. We’ll begin at verse 36 because again it’s a question of vision. Jesus saw people differently from His disciples. When Jesus saw the multitudes He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered like sheep having no shepherd.
• They had rabbis, they had synagogues; but they didn’t have shepherds. Then He said to His disciples, ‘The harvest truly is plentiful but the laborers are few.’ If that was true at that time,I would say it is a hundred times truer today. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are pitifully few. They estimate there’s about one missionary for every one million Moslems.
• And yet, the harvest is plentiful. Ruth and I have been in Indonesia, which is essentially a Moslem nation. But, in the last 20 or 30 years it’s estimated 30 percent of the population have become Christians. And the demand for the truth of God’s Word is such that it cannot be satisfied. We’ve been talking about video.
• There is a brother there, who has a ministry that is placing video Bible teaching cassettes in every village in Indonesia. They don’t have electricity, but they use a car battery or something else to operate them. One of the things that amazed us in Malaysia, which is another mainly Moslem nation, you can drive through villages that don’t have running water, they don’t have any kind of major store, and they’ve all got TV aerials.
• That’s true. There was a major article in Time magazine a few months ago saying there’s a video revolution and it’s upsetting political systems. I think one of the reasons for the recent turmoil in the East Bloc was that people had been exposed to television or video that showed what it was like in the West.
• And the political system couldn’t hold them down. I’m not interested in political issues but I am interested in reaping the harvest. We had a meeting, the last meeting we had, of our branch directors in Singapore last May. And one of its purposes was to discuss video as a means of reaching the world. And while we were meeting there, the pastor of our local congregation in Fort Lauderdale, a young man – by my standards you understand, that doesn’t mean young by the way you think, but not old but youngish