I am very burdened about my country, the United States of America. I love my country. I am concerned about the carelessness of sinners, the coldness of the saints, and the compromise of society. I am concerned about the pathetic pulpits of churches that are filled with hirelings that have mastered the art of almost saying something. The church, as someone said, is quickly becoming a NON-PROPHET organization. I am concerned about the country clubs we have across this country with steeples on them that we call churches. Many of our churches are full of latte sipping, social drinking, compromising, half-hearted members who never weep over sin, much less over souls.  

I never thought I would see the day when we would be more concerned about offending people than we are about offending God. While the homosexuals are coming out of the closet, the church has run into the closet, because we have not cleaned out the closet. We have over one million teenage alcoholics in our country. Out of thirty million teenagers in America, twenty-eight million do not attend church. According to MTV News, over fifteen million teenagers have some type of sexually transmitted disease. I know we need revival in America! I travel across this country every year preaching and praying for revival. I believe that we can have revival. Nothing is impossible with God!  Jonah 3:9 says, “Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?”  But I must ask this question, “What about the highways and hedges?”  

Ninety-five percent of all the preachers in the world are in the United States preaching to five percent of the population. Of course that means that there are only five percent of the preachers going out to preach to ninety-five percent of the world’s population. There is a birth every 2.8 seconds; 350 people born every hour; 247,000 every day; and 90 million every year. Sixty percent of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. There are 150,000 people who die daily without Jesus Christ. If you were to put all the people in a line that are dying without Jesus that line would be 750,000 miles long, reaching around the world 30 times and growing twenty miles every day.  Who will take the Gospel to these people? Paul wrote to Timothy, “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.” (1 Timothy 2:4-6)

Listen to what William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army said,  

“‘Not called!’ did you say? Not heard the call, I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their fathers’ houses and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look at Christ in the face –- whose mercy you have professed to obey -- and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world.”  

I have heard so many people say that we should not go outside of our country to preach while there are so many needs here at home. The Bible does not say to go to Jerusalem then to Judea, then to Samaria, then to the uttermost part of the earth. What it says is “Go to Jerusalem AND Judea AND Samaria AND to the uttermost part of the earth.” We must go here and there!  Oswald J. Smith said, “No one has the right to hear the Gospel twice, while there remains someone who has never even heard it once.” 

Pray that the Lord of the harvest will send forth laborers into the harvest! Will you pray for the millions that do not have the Gospel? Will you give sacrificially, out of your ABUNDANCE for this global harvest?  Will you GO?  Is any sacrifice too great? Listen to the words of the great missionary C. T. Studd, “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”  I close with the words of Oswald J. Smith that once again need to be heeded by our churches here that are so self-centered. “Any church that is not seriously involved in helping fulfill the Great Commission has forfeited its biblical right to exist.”