Discouraged – Encouraged?

I was really encouraged the other day about how the word of God is spreading and how many people are coming to the Lord. Then I got some other statistics from a reader only to be discouraged. Consider this bright news from a message I heard the other day from Dr. James Merritt in a sermon:

“It is incredible to see where feet have gone over the last one-hundred years. Did you know that more Muslims have come to Christ in Iran during the last fifteen years than in the previous one-thousand years? Conservative estimates put the number of Christians in China at sixty-million which is a sixty fold increase over the number of Christians in China in 1950.

In 1900, Korea had no protestant church whatsoever. Today, over thirty percent of Korea is Christian and there are 7000 churches in Seoul alone. The nation with the highest number of Muslims in the world, Indonesia, has also witnessed the greatest number of Muslims converting to Jesus Christ. In Africa, there were ten million Christians in 1900. Today, there are over three-hundred million”.

Now check this reader submission out:
There are currently 6.5 billion people in the world
3.6 billion have never heard the gospel (57% of the population)
There are 6,900 different languages spoken in the world and over 2,500 have no translation to any scripture. Only 422 languages have the entire Bible translated for them.


Is the glass half full or half empty? Should we be discouraged or encouraged? Both! It appears to me that we have a lot of work to do no matter what your interpretation might be. The Bible states that the fields are ripe for harvest but the workers are few. Support missionaries financially and/or consider actually going on one. If you just cannot find a way to do anything more, then at the very least pray every day for those missionaries who in many cases actually risk their lives in order to get the word out. Where the word is getting out, remarkable results are coming to fruition. Don’t you want to be a part of it? I do! I have vowed to renew my efforts towards supporting the missionary field and I hope you will join me.

Just in case the figures above scare you, you should know that they do not scare God. Listen to what Jesus has to say..

Matt. 19:26
With men this is impossible, but with
God all things are possible.