(upbeat music) - Pastor John, you're back home in Knoxville after a lengthy trip to the Middle East, your first trip to the Middle East. Can you give us a summary of your travels and share with us some of the things that you did along the way? - It was a three week trip, Tony.

We went to Ethiopia first and spent a week there, spoke in four churches and did a Bible conference with Jason Meyer, who has replaced me at Bethlehem. It was thrilling to do the tag team preaching with Jason in a conference on 2 Corinthians and to be a part of the churches there and see what God is doing in Ethiopia.

I was so encouraged in several of these churches and how God is at work and saw the importance of the sovereignty of God and saw the cry of the Ethiopian church to help them train pastors because the spread of the gospel is huge in Southern Ethiopia and probably 80% of the pastors there have no theological training and they are very good at evangelism, they were telling me, and yet the need for ongoing training and equipping and deepening of the leadership for the sake of the people is just huge.

So I would just encourage any listeners to give your life away in Bible teaching and pastoral enrichment and world missions in this way. Then we went over to the UAE, which is on the Gulf, the Arab Peninsula, so the peninsula that has Saudi Arabia in the middle of the huge mass and then Kuwait up the top and then come down to the horn, there's Qatar and UAE and then around the corner is Oman and Yemen.

These are the Gulf oil states and all kinds of revelations were happening to me about things I did not realize here that basically these countries are more friendly toward the United States and just across the Persian Gulf to the north and the east is Iran and Iran is the adversary, both of the US and of these states and when you think of the Islamic surveillance on the people in the UAE where I was, I was told they're not worried about Christians, they're worried about radical Islam who could upset the balance of good relationships between them and the United States who provide so much of their help in the oil drilling and in the selling of their oil.

It's a hugely rich land, the UAE is. The country 40 years ago was sand. Today, Dubai is probably the most modern city in the world. It's got the tallest building in the world. There are 450 skyscrapers, meaning over 40 stories tall. It's got huge malls, it's got sophisticated infrastructure and all of that is largely provided by the expertise from the West and therefore, they don't want those relationships messed up by the Muslim Brotherhood coming in here and producing another Arab Spring.

So when the Arab Spring happened in the other countries and the people rose up and started to throw off their leaders, the wealthy leaders in UAE upped the salaries of all their emirates and made everybody happy because they produce about 3,000, I mean, 3 million barrels of oil a day, each of them worth about $100.

And so this country is owned and led by a benevolent dictatorship of about seven sheikhs who are the landed powerful families and one of them is the main one and so they have all this money and they have used it to make their people very happy and they've built these huge cities and it's built on sand in more ways than one.

I mean, a lot of people look at the Burj Khalifa which is the tallest building in the world and they say it's just like the Tower of Babel and it is because they built it to make a name for themselves. The word Khalifa is the name of the sheikh who provided the money to finish it when they ran out of money in Dubai.

And so it's fragile in the sense that it's oil money and the expertise is coming from elsewhere. So that about 85% of the people who live in the UAE are from outside that country and therefore the expertise and the manpower both at the lowest levels of labor that are almost like slaves and the highest level of expertise in the high rises are coming from outside UAE.

So what they have is money but they don't have a lot of expertise. They're trying to rectify that with a lot of education. The upshot of that from mission story was just phenomenal. The Christians are not looked upon disrespectfully there. The sheikhs have provided land in several of the Emirates in order that the Christians might build churches on them.

They know that since they have 85% people coming from outside the country to work there, they need to provide for them and make them happy. So they know lots of them are Christians so let them have churches. Well, that means that there are in Dubai, I talked to several people off this, there are probably a thousand churches in Dubai.

Now there are only half a dozen of those that are landed and provided for by the sheikhs but they all know, the sheikhs know, the authorities know that these churches are there. They know where they meet, when they meet and they are just turning away and letting them be.

What's against the law in UAE is proselytizing and if you ask people, what does that mean? You get a lot of different answers. One Christian will say, it means paying a Muslim to be a Christian. Another will say, it means giving them a Bible if they don't ask for it.

In other words, it's a pretty ambiguous law and the reason I think it's ambiguous is because they're happy to leave it ambiguous so that they can kick out anybody they want and keep anybody they want. And so there's amazing freedom. I preached in Abu Dhabi, which is the capital, in the National Theater.

It was about half full and up at the top were these white-robed authorities making sure I didn't diss Muhammad or something that I shouldn't do and I preached the gospel there as clearly in terms of a propitiation and a substitutionary atonement, the death of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the necessity to believe on Christ and they were listening to all that.

So here you have a whole line of Muslims who heard the gospel because they provide for Christians. We had to advertise that event as for Christians. Well, a guy told me the day before, I'm bringing six of my Muslim friends with me so I know that the gospel is being heard by the local Muslim people.

And one other observation maybe, I was just so thrilled with the kind of vision that some church planters and pastors have, in Dubai in particular, but across the Emirates. I'm thankful for John Fulmer. What an inspiration he was to me. He's the pastor, or one of the pastors, at the UCCD, United Christian Church of Dubai.

And that church has had a reformation, a theological transformation in the last nine years and then he's had a vision for filling the region with gospel preaching churches. So they planted a church across town called Redeemer. They planted a church in Ras Al Khaimah and a fourth church in a nearby Emirates.

So there's a vision for filling the region with gospel preaching churches. And in those churches are the most diverse gatherings of people that I've ever preached to. I preached in two churches there and both of them had between 60 and 70 different nations in the service. And those people then work here for a season.

Many of them go back to their countries and all those people work hand in glove, usually, with local Muslim Emirates. And if you go to joshuaproject.net, there are 28 Muslim peoples that are engaged in that region. And this is at least one remarkable way of reaching them. So the trip, Tony, was just incredibly encouraging to me at what God is doing there and was an education about the Middle East affairs that I hadn't realized.

And it just caused me to assess my own life and wanna throw it out to everyone else. One of the missionaries we've had there for almost 20 years said, "John, if you can just find me people "who would need to be men, in this case, "men who have been in their careers in engineering "for five years and have them send me their CVs, "I can put them to work here teaching engineering "in a school and they would have contact "with Muslim students every day." - That's wonderful.

It sounds like the trip was wonderfully productive and how providential that the cross-conference on missions is right around the corner. - Well, it's interesting that the Lord would ordain that I spend three weeks overseas just a few weeks before the cross-conference because my sense of its strategic importance has skyrocketed.

I mean, in principle, I always know that when you gather students together, historic, you have a tinderbox of potential for explosive world impact because God in the last several centuries at least has done amazing things through students when they've gathered together for mission deliberation and agitation and education and outreach.

And so it's always been high, but having seen what God is doing in just one little pocket, I mean, if you went to different places, you'd have the same thing happen, makes me want to hold out to students a possibility of dreaming a dream in missions. I sat beside the leader of SIM, I believe, in Ethiopia and asked him, "What could I do in my last 10 years, say, if God gives me 10 years, what could I do that would help you?" And he thought for a minute and he said three things.

I'll just mention one. He said, "Send us, if you can, missionaries with lifetime commitment. It's hard to accomplish long-term goals with short-term commitment." So one of my dreams, Tony, for the Cross Conference is to hold up the beauty of a life laid down and poured out in a place for Jesus.

I think the mentality for the past decades has been that in America, everybody will have five different vocations. We're all very mobile. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a good thing. Moving along, and there's nothing, there isn't anything intrinsically wrong with it. But what it does is minimize the beauty and the power and the beauty of staying at something.

And in missions, it takes a long time to learn a language. It takes a long time to be at home in a culture. It takes a long time to win trust. It takes a long time to see things strategically from inside another world. And if you go there with the sense of, "Oh, I'll give a couple of years and then I'll be off to do another thing," it's not the same.

And so that's one of the excitements I have is that maybe God would be pleased in our day to turn that whole mindset around so that young people could start to say, "It is a beautiful thing. It is something I really aspire to, to lay down my life and give myself in one place, to one people for one great, glorious, eternal cause." - Yes, amen.

And speaking of the Cross Conference, it all begins on December 27th in Louisville, Kentucky. And for more information about the conference online, you'll wanna check out the website at crosscon.com, crosscon.com, C-R-O-S-S-C-O-N.com. I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)