How Great Is Our God?

By Jonathan Helmuth

March 1, 2012

Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable.

Have you ever thought about how great our God is and just how much he actually loves us? We tend to imagine that he is a certain way and does things the way we are. We know it is wrong to create an idol and bow ourselves down to it, but how many times do we do that in our minds by imagining God to be a certain way? Too many times we tend to put God in a box or draw a line in the sand and say that God is inside these parameters. The next thing we know God is over there somewhere using a person that does not fit inside our box. And what do we do? Many times we write it off as from the Devil because, by the way, the Devil is powerful too.

We have to be careful that we don't make the same mistake the Pharisees and Scribes and the religious leaders of Jesus' day did. They had it all figured out how the Messiah was going to be, and when he was standing right in front of them doing great signs and wonders, they still rejected him and ended up being the ones responsible for crucifying him. How many times do we do the same thing by rejecting a person and writing them off as being deceived or just plain lost?

When Jesus came to Saul on the road to Damascus as a blinding light, he did not ask, "Why are you persecuting the church?" He asked, "Why are you persecuting ME?"

Jesus said, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

When we reject a person that does not fit our description of what a Christian is supposed to look like, act like, or believe in, then we have just rejected God if he lives inside of them.

For example, today it is estimated that over 250,000 people accept Jesus as their savior every day. That is equal to the entire population of the Amish worldwide! Most of these people live in Africa or Asia. Only fifty years ago, there were twice as many white or Western Christians as the non-western Christians, but today there are seven non-western Christians for every western Christian.

My question is, "Would these people be accepted in our churches if they happened to walk in?" Many of them become Christians under the threat of heavy persecution, not much differently than our Anabaptist forefathers.

To establish this fact further, in Rev.5:9 it says, "And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation."

Now, if there are people there from every nation, tongue and people group that ever existed, it makes you wonder why the only people in our churches are from our background and have to speak our language to be able to belong.

I'm afraid we are going to be in for the surprise of a lifetime when we get to heaven, and we discover that there are just as many Chinese speaking people in heaven as there are German or English speaking people, or Spanish speaking peoples.

It is estimated that 6% of humanity lives in all of North America, but over 60% live in two of Asia's countries; China and India. In China, the fastest growing church in the world is the persecuted underground church that gathers in forests and caves and secret places where they gather and worship God for hours and days on end. It is estimated that there are twelve to eighteen thousand new converts come to Christ every day. Ninety percent of them become Christians because of seeing miracles happen either to themselves or a direct family member. Very few have Bibles, and when a person with a Bible comes to town they will come together and listen to the Bible being read for days on end.

Let's take the conservative number of twelve thousand per day; that would mean every three weeks there would be 252,000 new Chinese believers. The estimated population of Amish people is between 250,000- 260,000 people worldwide.

I am not saying we have to become like them but just want us to realize there are other people out there who are also Christians that do not look, act or speak our language, and I, for one, do not want to be found guilty of rejecting God's people who have been redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus.

One departing thought that I would like to leave us with is; "If Jesus himself walked into our churches, would we accept him?"

Keywords: amish, amish voice, christian living, god, jonathan helmuth, map ministry, mission to amish people