Peeking Through the 10/40 Window Book Review by Jeff Bush

By Johnny J. Esposito

Many of the countries in this window (10/40) are either officially closed or informally opposed to Christian ministry within their borders. Citizens have limited knowledge of the Gospel, minimal access to Bibles, and Christian materials, and extremely restricted opportunities to respond to and follow the Christian faith.

Of course, the people who are lost in the 10/40 Window are not “more lost” than your neighbor or family member who does not know Christ. But, they are unreached in the sense that they have not had an opportunity to hear the Gospel. “The issue is not their lostness, but their access to the Gospel.” People can be unevangelized without being unreached. There are people in the United States who have not heard the Gospel by their choice. Most people living in the 10/40 Window could not learn about Jesus even if they wanted to! These are unreached people who do not have access to the Gospel!

One-third of the planet’s population, over two billion people, has never heard the gospel. And of that number, over 50,000 die daily, separated from God forever. As has been said, one definition of a missionary is someone who never gets used to the sound of pagan footsteps on their way to a Christless eternity. The sounds of those footsteps echo in their minds and haunt their waking dreams. One should not go driven by the need alone, but God often uses the need as a starting place to awaken us to Hs call. — The Missionary Call by David Sills

Jesus has not given us a commission to consider; He has given us a command to obey. That command involves sacrifice on all our parts. If we have this much access to the Gospel in our culture, and there is this much absence of the Gospel in other cultures, then surely God is leading many more of us (maybe the majority of us) to go to those cultures. If God calls us to stay in this culture, then surely He is leading us to live simply and give sacrificially so that as many people as possible can go. — Counter Culture by David Platt

The United States, with its 600,000 congregations or groups, is blessed with 1.5 million full-time Christian workers, or one full-time religious leader for every 182 people in the nation. What a difference this is from the rest of the world, where more than 2 billion people are still unreached with the Gospel. The unreached or “hidden peoples” have only one missionary working for every 78,000 people and there are still 1,240 distinct cultural groups in the world world without a single church among them to preach the Gospel. These are the masses for whom Christ wept and died. — Revolution in World Missions by K.P. Yohannan

It has been said that in India alone there are 500,000 villages without a Gospel witness. None! Not one. In China, Southeast Asia, and the many islands in the great Pacific we are unsure how many there are. In the country of Cambodia, where my wife and I are presently serving, it is said there are nearly 14,000 villages without a Gospel witness. A statement has been made that it would take a million workers to finish the task at hand in the 10/40 Window.

If the church in America isn’t giving and our church members aren’t going, the task will remain undone!

God has always used people to get His work done. Therefore, if this area (10/40 Window) of the world will be reached with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it is going to be because men and women choose to leave the comforts and conveniences of home to deliver the message of Christ’s love.

There’s only one thing worse than being lost, and that is being lost and having no one trying to find you. – David Platt

Today, more than a billion people in the world live and die in desperate poverty. They attempt to survive on less than a dollar per day. Close to two billion others live on less than $2.00 per day. In other words, almost half of the world lives on less than two dollars per day. That is nearly half of the world struggling to find food, water, and shelter with the same amount of money that I spend on fries for lunch. — Radical by David Platt.

We are told that the average Cristian gives only 1.8 percent of his income to the church and the cause of Christ. Study after study has revealed that the richer we are the smaller the percentage of our income we give to the church, the mission of the church and to the poor.

- - - - If your income is $25,000 per year, you are wealthier than approximately 90 percent of the world’s population!

- - - - If you make $50,000 per year, you are wealthier than 99 percent of the world!

Does this shock you? Remember, of the 7 billion people on earth, almost half of them live on less than two dollars a day. If you don’t feel rich, it’s because you are comparing yourself to people who have more than you do – those living above even the 99th percentile of global wealth.