Unknown Nations Podcast

 Well, my name is Greg Kelley with Unknown Nations, and we have the honor to serve God by helping reach the most zero access, barrier ridden, spiritually antagonistic, spoken word reliant people groups on the planet, giving birth to the church in impossible places. In today's story, it's very simple.

Three main parts to it: we're going to be talking about the promise, we're going to be talking about the wait, and we're going to be talking about the expectant heart. And how all of those three principles apply to you and I as we're trying to maximize our one life that Jesus has given us, especially as it relates to reaching the nations where Jesus is unknown. 

Well, when I thought about this message and the timing of it, and you think about the promise, all of us have been given promises, haven't we? Different people have shared things with us. People that we respect, people maybe even strangers that have shared promises. And all of them have sort of a different value to it, if you will, depending on the source of the promise.

Can you imagine being the recipient of the greatest promise of all time? And that, of course, is the announcement and the expectancy surrounding the promise of the coming Messiah. And as I was looking at some verses that surrounded that specific promise. You cannot go further than Isaiah. And when you look at Isaiah 9:6, this is what the scripture says: "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." How precious is that? The greatest promise in history. You know, what's so interesting about that is the timing of it, because that came over 600 years before the birth of Christ.

Think 600 years. And I'm thinking to myself, why did it take so long between the time the promise was given and the time of the fulfillment of that. And I even thought about additional things that took place between then and the coming of Christ. And I realized there were 300 prophecies foretelling the birth of Christ.

And when you think about those two things together, I mean that weight, this is what is critical about it is what was the condition of the Israelites at the time? See, they were in a very desperate moment at that time. Of course the Assyrian empire of Isaiah 9:6, they were the authority at the time, and they had overwhelming power over the Israelites at that time.

There was harsh treatment, high taxation, widespread poverty, and overall just great stability. Things were so difficult that many of the Israelites were actually leaving the faith at the time. But that is when the promise came. And I think it's so interesting that God will give you a promise when you are in the valley of life, and it's critical that you and I hang on to that promise. How do we do that? Well, you have to consider the source of it because as I said many people will give promises, but God can be trusted. God is credible. He is a source that will never let you down ever, ever, and when you think about the power of that, in the truth of that.

Here's what I will encourage you with: the credibility of God is found, you don't have to look any further than the prophecies that have come. Over 2,500 prophecies that you can find throughout the Bible, 2,000 of those 2,500 have been fulfilled. And when I first saw that, I thought, "my gosh, that is, I mean, if you want evidence, is there a God who created the universe? Do you want evidence that the word of God can be trusted? You don't have to go any further than that." 

The odds of those 2000 prophecies already being fulfilled would be the equivalent of having a one with 2000 zeros after it. I mean, just think about even just some of the prophecies about Jesus hundreds of years before Jesus was born.

He will be born in Bethlehem of the countless communities and cities where Jesus could have been born, specifically, He will be born in Bethlehem. He will be born of a virgin. Like what? Can you imagine the audacity of that kind of a prophecy? And yes, He was born of a virgin. How about His hands and feet would be pierced? 

Friends, over and over scripture can be trusted. The source of the promise is credible. But then you go to, well, why did we have to wait so long? And I thought about that, and here's the conclusion that I've come to. The reason that God will make us wait on a promise that He gives us is because He loves us. Because there's something of great value that happens during the wait and it is this: dependency upon Him. And friend, we need to be dependent upon God; we have to be dependent for the fulfillment of what He wants to do in and through our lives.

It requires us to be dependent. I remember when I was in Nigeria not long ago, northern Nigeria, now keep in mind that this is a place that is very... you think that Israelites face difficulty, how about being from northern Nigeria as a follower of Jesus today, where more people are killed just for the sake of they say, "I'm a follower of Jesus," more people are killed who are in that situation being Christians than the rest of the world combined.

It is a harsh place. Last Christmas, dozens of people, dozens of people were killed. They were attacked on Christmas day. Imagine that just in 2023 on Christmas day. And then throughout the year, there's incredible stories of communities being attacked. That's all northern Nigeria. And so I was talking to our friend there and I was asking him about that.

And he went on to tell me, he goes, "well, you know, we deal with this every single day. As a matter of fact, in the last five years, there's not been a month that's gone by in that 60 consecutive months that one of our key leaders has not been kidnapped, not persecuted, not taunted, not even lashed, kidnapped."

He said, "there's not been a single month." And he's the leader of this movement. And I'm thinking to myself, “how do you deal with that?” And he said, "well, we're thankful to the Lord that we've been able to see all of these leaders that none of them were killed. And they were all released at some point. But every single month he gets that call where someone is being held ransom, being held hostage."

And this is what he told me, he said, "Greg, what we've realized is that the more dependent we are on the Lord, the easier the Great Commission." I think that's the point for you and I. The more dependent we are on Jesus, the easier the Great Commission. 

And here's the fact of the matter about the promise: the promise doesn't have as much to do with the timing of it. Is it a day? Is it a week? Is it 600 years like the Israelites? It has much less to do with that than it does the condition of our heart as we are the steward of that promise. And I can point to different sort of analogies in scripture where Jesus gives us the metaphors of the farmer: and the farmer, he prepared his soil. He chose the field carefully. As he was readying what seed was going to go in there, he had to prepare that area. And then, then he planted the seed carefully. And then, he watered it and you get this idea that it's taken a long time, but then what ultimately comes is the harvest. So that represents a significant amount of time and there's so many metaphors in the Bible that reference farming, and rightly so. And at the same time, we have the first miracle of Jesus, which was turning water into wine. So, the same God who makes us wait, does things instantly and why is that?

Because God's looking at the condition of your heart and the waiting is really critical. There's a verse in Galatians where Paul really zeros in on this and in Galatians 4:4-5, the bible says: "But when the set time had fully come, God sent his son. Born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those under the law that we might receive adoption to sonship."

What's the moral of that story? Essentially, Paul is saying this, that Jesus was sent by God in the fullness of time, which means when all things we're ready for him to come. That's when the promise came when all things were ready. See our eyes will deceive us because our eyes look at the physical, they look at what I see being done. The fact that you don't see anything with your eyes, doesn't mean that God isn't at work. Because when you think about the Roman empire at the time of Jesus coming, there were things, let's even go a hundred years before when Jesus came, that the infrastructure wasn't even ready. It wasn't prepared to maximize the story of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.

So what was happening prior to Jesus being born is the Roman road system was literally being equipped and prepared. Why, mainly for military purposes, but what did that do? That allowed for efficiency and travel and communication and for the gospel and the message of Christianity to be scattered more efficiently. The linguistic unity you think about at the time Greek was really being established singularly as a language that would go far and wide that was happening at the time political stability there during the Roman empire amongst the imperfections of it.

There was relative political stability during that time, which created an environment for an embracement of new ideas and even new religions. They were embraced and considered, upon the people. They weren't just shut down immediately. And that was all being established in the preparation for the coming of the Messiah.

So God is at work, friend, whether you see it with your eyes or not. In getting your heart and getting you ready to receive that promise. And then the third piece of this story again, we talked about the promise we talked about the wait. But the expectant heart, friend, is you and I getting the soil right here. Yes, it's a heart but you know what that is in the spiritual realm.

That is soil. That is soil. And there's a seed that's being deposited. The question becomes how ready is it? And the expectant heart gives us a lot about what's going to happen when that seed hits the soil. I think of a guy by the name of Simeon, who was a faithful, faithful man that lived just an amazing life.

And he was waiting for that hope of the coming Messiah. And in Luke 2:25, it talks about Simeon and Luke says he was righteous and devout waiting for the consolation of Israel. Simeon's words echoed the prophecies he knew from Isaiah. The Holy Spirit was upon him. He revealed in Luke 2:26, he would not see death before he had seen the Lord. That is an expectant heart. Simeon had that. You know who else had it? A widow named Anna. She awaited the Messiah expectantly. She had devoted herself to God since her husband had passed away. And what it says in that same chapter of Luke is that she was worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.

In the temple, that is an expectant heart. And that is what God wants from you and I. And it's articulated in Psalm 130:5, where this is the precious scripture. If you want to know what an expectant heart looks like? This is where it's at. “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits and in his word, I put my hope.”

That's an expectant heart. You see, you cannot separate the promise. The wait and the expectant heart, those things go together. And when you and I embrace those three things together, the world changes. The world changes. God wants to use you in that way. When I think about examples in the Bible, there's no better example for the package that's compressed and combined than a guy in the tribe of Judah, you'll find him in Joshua, alongside Caleb and this guy named Caleb was the epitome of this package together. He was one of the two spies that went and had the good report the other ten. “Oh my gosh, we're there. We are ants in their midst; their cities are fortified. They're giants. They are going to crush us.”

And the two Joshua and Caleb had a very different approach yet. Caleb had to wait, knowing the promise that you would have the promised land. He had to wait and wait and wait. And 45 years later, can you imagine that waiting because of people who were unrepentant, they didn't have the faith that God required of them.

They were holding on to the same seed Caleb was, yet they refused to believe and have faith. And Caleb, when that moment came, he said, “I am as strong today as the day that Moses sent me out and just as vigorous to go into battle.” That's the expectant heart that's handling and stewarding a promise. Friend, we want to be like caleb.

So that's my prayer for you. That you would have an expectant heart as you steward the promise. And as you're waiting for him, well, that gives us a kind of closure to today's episode. Thanks for joining us for the Unknown Nations Podcast. Please visit our website, unknown nations.com. Learn more about how you can get involved, subscribe, and follow, and join us in this incredible journey of faith and hope and transformation. Join us in making Jesus known to the ends of the earth. The impact you can have is immeasurable and together we can see God's kingdom expand into the darkest corners of the world. God bless you.