Jonah realized it was not his place to choose the audience of his God-given message. We should realize it, too.

In my last post, I pointed out that friendship evangelism actually makes the Great Commission harder, yet that is not all there is to it. Another unfortunate aspect of this approach is that it limits the audience of the gospel to those in one’s immediate sphere of influence, i.e., friends, relatives and coworkers, ignoring an enormous segment of society: strangers. This distorts the Great Commission, whereby Jesus commanded His disciples, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” (Mark 16:15, NASB). He did not say, “Go into your immediate sphere of influence and preach the gospel to your friends, relatives and coworkers.” Those people, though certainly important, make up only a minuscule subset of our society. There are hundreds—thousands, even tens of thousands—of people out there who need to be reached with the gospel, so how can we limit our target audience to a mere few? Jonah, who thought he could choose the audience of his preaching, eventually realized that “Salvation belongs to the LORD” (Jonah 2:9, ESV). Do we believe that?

Let’s stop editing God’s command to bring the gospel to all creation. There are multitudes of lost souls who know so little—so very little—about salvation, and they desperately need us to proclaim the good news to them. I asked a young man once on the street if he knew how sin is eliminated. He did not know that it is by the blood of an innocent sacrifice that God forgives sin. Who knows what other essential truths of salvation he didn’t know? Let’s obey God’s command—His simple command—to bring the gospel to everyone.