Picking Up Where Sunday's Sermon Left Off...

This past Sunday I preached from II Peter 3:15-16 on the portion of the text that instructs believers to "count the patience of the Lord as salvation." Peter is presenting a "third way" after refuting the claims of the false teachers who had been teaching that either...

A) Christ isn't really coming back...because He just isn't. Essentially claiming that the teaching that Christ would return was mythological in nature.

B) Christ isn't really coming back...because of some moral flaw in God's character...akin to the teaching today that God, if He exists, can't be all-powerful AND all good because if He were He would deal with the problem of evil in the world...so either He can't or He won't...either way He's limited...He's flawed.

Peter then presents a third way...count the patience of the Lord as salvation.

1) As long as He tarries, more will come to faith.
2) As long as He tarries, believers will continue to grow in their faith.
3) As long as He tarries, we have opportunity to go and share with others the message of the Gospel.

The opportunities to go and share the message of the Gospel are vast. There is still much to do. Some of the statistics I shared on Sunday...

There are approximately 16,600 people groups in the world today.
Of those...6,600 have yet to hear the Gospel clearly presented.
The Bible in whole or in part exists today in only 82% of the world's languages. This means that 13% of the world is still essentially closed to the Gospel simply because no portion of Scripture exists in a language they can read and/or understand.
There are 5.5 billion lost people in the world today. If my math is correct (which is highly suspect), this means...if a gallon of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico represented a single lost person in the world right now, and at the rate of a million gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf, it would take somewhere in the ballpark of 15 years for there to be enough oil out there for every lost person represented to have one gallon of oil.

Most of us would go to incredible lengths to extract just one gallon of oil from the Gulf if we could...but what are we doing to reach those who are lost and separated from God? Those animals in the Gulf that are dying - as tragic as the situation is - will not die and spend eternity in hell...but those lost people absolutely will. What are we doing so they will have an opportunity to respond to the Gospel before they die?

This is sobering to consider!

I recommended a lot of resources in the sermon on Sunday, but I want to add one more to that list, a new book from David Platt entitled, Radical. I encourage you to read it and to be challenged by it as you reflect over the message from this past Sunday.

See ya Sunday!