The Dangerous Christian

I can still see the look on his face.  ”Why would you go all the way to Africa to bring them something they don’t want or need?  Are you on some sort of crusade or something?”  I heard in his voice and saw on his face….contempt.

I had been talking to a non-Christian about my upcoming trip to Guinea Bissau. I was not going to Western Africa to dig a well or bring shoes to children. I was going to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a village that had never heard it.


For someone who had been raised in the church, I had never looked at it from an unbeliever’s point of view.  The logic goes something like this; good people minding their business in Africa, living a good life believing in something that their ancestors have believed in for generations, content to live out their days in peace and harmony and eventually arriving at their own afterlife only to have some pious Christian come 3,500 miles to divide people because he thinks he knows everything and wants to “save the world”.  My answer to my unbelieving friend was simple, “There is no darkness darker than the absence of Jesus Christ.  See for yourself the kind of evil man invents when left to his own devices and desires.”

I can not imagine a life lived in complete ignorance of the saving grace of God.  It is one thing to live a life in complete separation from God….that is what millions of people in the West choose to do.  CHOOSE to do.  My heart breaks for the 2 billion (with a “B”) people who do not have this choice because they have never even heard the name of Jesus.  This is why I went to Guinea Bissau.  Because there are still people who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ.

The people of Western Africa, and untold millions of others like them, are filling the void of the Gospel with the most evil acts and practices imaginable.  The lost are not living in a utopia of peace and brotherly understanding, like my misguided friend had pictured.  They are sacrificing infants to demons, grinding them up and stuffing them into cow horns.  They are burying boys and girls, and every type of animal, as offerings to the spirits.  Oh, I forgot to mention that the boys and girls were buried alive.  Evil is real.  And in some places it is so real it becomes tangible.  This is what happens when man decides for himself what is right and what is wrong.  Man becomes god and power becomes his religion.

The funny thing about evil is it holds no authority over the precious blood of Christ that was shed on the cross for everyone who would profess the name of Jesus.  For every story of evil, I heard a story of God’s might.  Stories like witch-doctors seeing two bright white figures on either side of a pastor everywhere he goes.  They know they have no power over this Christian man (or his two friends!).  Stories like people dying if they walk on a certain path that leads to the ceremonial site of human sacrifice.  But a Christian will walk on this same path unharmed.  God desires for all of mankind to experience His grace and receive His salvation.  Even in, what seems like, a total absence of God in so many places, His name is being glorified and people are being brought into His kingdom.  People in these dark places are seeing that the powers they have worshipped for centuries are proving to be false idols in the presence of the one true God.  God is moving in these places in mighty ways.

What I found in Guinea Bissau is that people are so hungry for truth.  When they finally hear the story of Jesus and what God has done for us by sending His son to die for our sins, they recognize this as the truth.  They just needed someone to bring it to them.  Romans 10:13-17 says “whoever will call on the Name of the Lord will be saved.  How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?  How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard?  And how will they hear without a preacher?  How will they preach unless they are sent?  How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!”  God’s good news is being sent.  And it is being received as truth.  We told one man about Jesus and what He had done for us.  He sat with his infant daughter in his lap crying, “I want Jesus in my heart so bad”.  This man is now one of 58 Christians in his village.  Another village we preached at now has two Christians.  This village is 1,000 years old.  These are the first two Christians in the thousand year history of the village.

I think back about the conversation with my unbelieving friend.  Perhaps what he was used to experiencing was safe, ineffective Christians.  He easily looked down his nose at these “silly Christians” who keep to their Christian circles and do their little Christian things at church with their other little Christian friends.  These Christians are harmless.  But what he wasn’t used to seeing was a Christian who believed in his God so much that it was intolerable to think that there are people today who have never heard the name Jesus Christ.  This type of Christian is dangerous.  After all, no one gets hurt as long as the bulls are kept in the fences.  I think he looked at me like a bull on the loose.

What matters, though, is how does Jesus look at the situation.  Matthew 9:37 tells us that Jesus looked out across a large crowd of people.  What he saw was distress and hopelessness on their faces….”like sheep with no shepherd”.  Jesus then said, “the harvest is plenty but the workers are few”.  I know that Jesus is standing in small villages across the globe saying the same thing today.  His people are hungry for truth, but who will take it to them?  We need more bulls to break through the fences.