Please Announce...
Brethren please announce these facts to the church where you preach next Sunday.
We Christians are the most fortunate people that live on the face of the earth today. This is true because we have had the privilege of hearing the gospel of Christ and obeying it. We take this great blessing too much for granted. I pray that these facts will prove this to you.
There are now 2,400,000,000 people in the world. Every day 230,000 babies are born; there are 170,000 deaths every 24 hours. Thus the population of the earth is increasing by 60,000 souls a day. In forty years the world's population will have doubled.
Over half of the 2.4 billion have never even heard of the name of Jesus. Of those who die daily, over 100,000 die without any knowledge of Christ whatsoever. (From India's Challenge)
As bad as this sounds it is nothing when one examines to see how many people have heard the truth. Today 93% of the population of the world live outside the United States. The overwhelming majority of the 7% that live in the US live in areas that have been barely touched with the gospel of Christ. Giving us every benefit of the doubt not over 5% of the world has ever heard the truth. This means that 95% of the world is going to hell without a chance being provided by Christ's church for them to know the truth. When the one and one half million Christians are compared to the population of the world it means that only .05% of the world would be saved today if everyone of us went to heaven. This means that 99.95% of the world are not saved.
Here is what we are doing to remedy this situation. We are sending around 100 gospel preachers to the 93%
of the world's population outside the US. This means we are sending one man to every 22,250,000 people. If this same ratio were true in America there would only be seven full time gospel preachers in all the forty eight states. Four of these would be in the North East and North Central States. Delaware, Maryland, D. C., Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas would only have two preachers all put together.
The greatest indictment is that there is utterly no need for such a condition. If all of the one and one-half million members were only giving 5c a day per member we could be fully supporting and sending more than 5000 preachers outside the United States. Figuring each man outside the states gets $100 a week support it averages that each member of the body of Christ is spending 1/10c (one tenth of one cent) per day for supporting men outside the United States. If you double this amount to provide transportation, tracts, meeting houses etc. we are averaging about 2/10c per day per member.
I am not saying that people have to leave the states to be saved but I am saying the Lord's church must wake up before we are all lost. The first century church preached the gospel to every creature (Col. 1:23). Christ has commanded us to (Mark 16:15,16). I say we can do it with the Lord's help.
It is my prayer that you brethren will not be able to sleep until you have talked to God about this. If you are a member of a church that has 250 members you can fully support a man in the field for 5c a day per member. Will you be the first to purpose to do this much? Will you be the power that pushes this in your home congregation? Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest (John 4:25). Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest. (Matt. 9:38).