Pastors Pen 14September2008

ICCJ is a household of believers united by a vision to have a hand in Indonesia becoming a nation of Great Commission Disciples. I believe that God will hold us as a Church, accountable not only for individuals but also for this great nation which all believers here have been called to transform.

Psalms 9:17 (NLT) “The wicked will go down to the grave. This is the fate of all the nations who ignore God.”

God holds all people accountable individually… but during the time that He will judge the earth, there will be an accounting regarding which nations acknowledged the one and true living God and which nations did not. Even if a nation is judged to go down to the grave, individuals can be saved from that judgment because God will save some from every tribe, tongue, people and nation. (Revelation 5:9) The reverse is also true. One could be a part of a nation which serves God but not accompany their countrymen into eternity united with God unless they had forged a personal saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

So if it is an individual decision and our fate is ultimately an individual one, then why is this idea of saving a nation so important? There are two answers… the scriptural and the practical. The spiritual is simply because Jesus said to go and make disciples not only of all men, but of all nations. I believe he did not imply to go and just make a few disciples out of every nation, but to actually pursue the majority of every nation. (Matthew 28:19 “of” and not “from”) Jesus always spoke of evangelism in terms of the Kingdom of God being here on earth, inside of us, and more... The practical answer is simply that to affect society to the point that a nation becomes predominantly made up of Christ followers, is to ensure that more people will enter into eternity knowing Jesus then otherwise. It is both a matter of practical mathematics and the command of the Great Commission.

For a Church to believe that evangelism is merely something that we reserve for touching individual lives is to fall into a trap of very small thinking and action.