The Song of Heaven and the Sound of All Nations

Revelation 7:9–17 gives us a picture of a great multitude from every tribe, people, and language gathered around God’s throne to sing his praise for his salvation. Sadly, though, over 3 billion people in the world today have never even heard the only message—the gospel—by which they can be saved and join in such a song.  In response, David Platt forces us to ask the question, “Does this reality even bother us?” We put a lot of time and resources into our worship music, even dividing over it at times, but we don’t seem to be that committed to getting the gospel to the billions who are unreached. Each of us should ask the Lord how he would have us and our church be a part of this great mission. This message was given at the Sing! Conference 2023. (This and other resources from Radical can be found at radical.net)

Explore more content from Radical.

Chapters

• 0:00 Heaven's Song and Global Sound
• 15:12 The Urgency of Spreading the Gospel
• 26:41 Commitment to Prayer for Ministry Expansion

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:32

You are listening to Radical with David Platt, a weekly podcast with sermons and messages from pastor, author and teacher David Platt. The topic I've been given for these few minutes is the Song of Heaven and the Sound of All Nations, and the text is Revelation 7, 9-17. So I'll start where we should with text. This is the Word of God. After this, I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, closed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb and all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God as saying Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen. Then one of the elders addressed me, saying who are these clothed in white robes and from where have they come? I said to him, sir, you know, and he said to me these are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore, they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple, and he who sits on the throne will shelter them. With his presence they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more. The sun shall not strike them nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. So I used to be in a praise band back in high school. The name of our band was New Jerusalem and I played the keys. This side of the way. The only problem was I was really bad at piano, but nobody else was better, so I was on the keys. My mom is an amazing pianist. Actually, for years growing up she taught in my house piano lessons to all kinds of other kids. I was too busy playing sports and took for a couple of months at one point. It's one of the biggest regrets of my life, but the good thing is at least back in that day all you really needed to know was G, c and D, and you were pretty much covered with most praise choruses, with an occasional I think it was A yeah, that sounds right. So that was like when things really got extreme. I can still remember one of the crowd favorites, complete with motions, in our youth group, and it really wasn't, it's really a praise chorus, but we sang it anyway. It was Lean on Me. So for old times could I bring back a little New Jerusalem and you join me. So Lean on. So see how loud, see how that was the highlight of many years for me. I've never played on a Steinway with. We're now one of those in New Jerusalem. So here's the deal. As limited as my repertoire was, imagine how frustrating it would be to try to lead musical worship if I couldn't even do that. Just look at the screen with me. Imagine, instead of all these notes C through B on that picture to play. Imagine the keyboard was missing, say, 40% of those notes, including flats and sharps. Imagine not just if these keys were missing, but imagine if these notes didn't exist. Songs wouldn't just be incomplete, they would be impossible. I don't think any song we sung at this conference and we sung a lot would be possible if those notes didn't exist. And this is the picture I want to give you tonight. I trust that we love this passage. I trust that in this arena we love this picture of the song of heaven. But we do realize, don't we? That, as best as we know, this song cannot be sung. Yet there's over 40% of the world's population, specifically 40% of the world's people groups, can't sing it. They're like missing notes on a keyboard. 40% of the people groups in the world cannot sing of God's salvation. Why? Because they haven't even heard about God's salvation. No one has told them. It's not that they've heard about the Lamb of God, who was slain for the sins of the world and rejected Him. Nobody's even told them the truths about Him. And the question I want to ask tonight in this gospel rich room, is how much does that bother us? Because, quite frankly, it doesn't seem like it bothers us very much at all. We spend millions upon millions of dollars on buildings and equipment for middle to upper-class, predominantly white Americans to worship in one language, while we give relative pennies to translate the Word of God into thousands of languages that don't have it. We spend innumerable hours planning and practicing and perfecting the mechanics of a worship service, yet we spend relative minutes on how we're going to help thousands of people who can't gather for a worship service because they don't know the Savior who's worthy of worship? Isn't something off when we have figured out how to turn worship music into a multi-million dollar industry for us, but for 3.2 billion people we haven't figured out how to get the gospel to them? Isn't something off when we endlessly discuss, debate, even divide, over worship in the church, while three billion people plunge into an eternal hell? Who haven't ever heard about the way to heaven? Maybe another way to put this question we need to answer how much do we really want the song of heaven to be sung and the sound of all nations to be heard? What are we willing to do? How much are we willing to transform our lives, our family, our churches and, specifically, our worship and music ministries so that the song of heaven can actually be sung? Let's hear Revelation 7, 9-17. If I had to summarize this passage in one sentence, here's how I would do it. What is the one thing truth that God is declaring to us in this text? God is declaring to us here's my summation that the song of heaven will include voices from every nation, tribe, people and language praising God for his final salvation from sin, complete shelter from suffering and everlasting satisfaction of our souls. What a text and what a truth. Just imagine this scene a multitude that no one can count. This is not a stadium full of people gathered for a football game 80, 90, 100,000 strong. This is a great multitude that no one can measure From. Just imagine the scene. Every nation which we know is not the same as country or geopolitical entity like we might think of nations today. Two hundred or so United Nations. This is every ethnic group in the world. Then we have this elaboration on terms, just to make sure we don't miss the point All the tribes, all the peoples, all the languages. That Joshua Project tells us there are over 17,000 distinct people groups in the world, over 7,000 distinct languages in the world. Can you imagine every single one of them singing with one loud voice? What does that sound like? The Tukulor of West Africa, the Lampung of Indonesia, the Chechens of the North Caucasus, the Mon of Myanmar, the Azur of Brazil, the Hutus and the Tutsis, north Koreans and South Koreans, russians and Ukrainians, saudis and Somalis, the Baloch of Pakistan and the Pashtun of Afghanistan, all joined together with one voice. And what will be our song selection? Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb. We will all praise God for his final salvation from sin. Notice, we're wearing white choir robes, for this one that check out this imagery have been washed in blood, in the blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who has taken away our sin. How do you wash a robe in blood and it comes out white? All of all miracles. Our sins totally wiped away and we're holding palm branches a picture of victory over sin and death, praising God for final salvation from sin, complete shelter from suffering. Tribulation will be a thing of the past. Verse 14 says Verse 15,. He who sits on the throne will shelter us. With his presence, the resounding theme of heaven and revelation. We will be with him. In February 2019, as my wife and I were joyfully content with the children in our home, god put on our hearts on a date night dinner to begin another adoption process. Fast forward to January 2020,. We were three days away from going to pick up our son, jd Jeremiah Daniel, precious little boy, when we got word that his adoption would be postponed for a couple of weeks due to a strange virus that was spreading. Little did we know that couple of weeks would turn into months and eventually years, until almost exactly a month ago, we got the call that we had been praying every single day to get, saying we could go and bring him home, and just last week we came home with our son, who's now with us in our family. Here are a couple pictures of JD Face to face with my son. Ladies and gentlemen, I have good news for you. The wait may be long and the days may be hard, but we have a father in heaven who will bring us home soon, one day soon. We're gonna be with him, him with us. Revelation 21 tells us we will see his face and he will shelter us once and for all From all suffering. The sun shall not strike us, nor any scorching heat. No more sickness, no more disease, no more car accidents, no more cancer diagnoses, no more anxiety, no more depression, no more conflict, no more war, no more pain, no more death. We will be face to face with God himself and he will wipe every tear from our Final salvation from sin. Complete shelter from suffering and everlasting satisfaction for our souls. No more hunger, no more thirst. Jesus, our shepherd, will guide us to springs of a living water and our souls will never, ever, ever tire of tasting more and more and more of his beauty and grandeur and glory. Just picture it God is infinite in all of his attributes, which means that a trillion years from now, there will still be more beauty, more love, more grandeur, more mercy to be discovered and enjoyed in our God. In the words of Stephen Sharnock and his discourse on the eternity of God, after many ages, the joys will be as savory and satisfying as if they had been, at that moment, first tasted by our hungry appetites. The glory of the Lord will be so far from ceasing to flow, always vigorous and flourishing, sparkling new and fresh rays of life and light, with a perpetual spring contenting the most competious desire. This will be the fruit of the enjoyment of an infinite and eternal God. Yeah, and this is not a maybe, this is a guarantee God is declaring to us in his word. The song of heaven will include voices from every nation, tribe, people and language, phrasing God for final salvation from sin, total shelter from suffering and everlasting satisfaction of our souls. Which leads to two observations in this world and light of this song to come in heaven One. Over 3.2 billion people in over 7,000 people groups cannot join this song today because no one has told them about God's salvation. They are unreached by the gospel. I'll put a map up here on the screen that contains three colors and I hope this map is familiar to you. It should be very familiar to every follower of Jesus. The green on this map represents areas where the gospel has gone. Churches have been planted and people have been reached with the gospel. Obviously it doesn't mean that everybody in the green is a follower of Jesus far from it. But it does mean everybody in the green has access to the gospel. The yellow areas on this map represent regions that are less reached by the gospel, usually in one of two directions either the gospel has recently come to those places that's still very small in its influence, or there are some of these yellow places where the gospel used to be very prevalent and it's waned in its influence in such a way that people have less access to the gospel. But then the red areas on this map are classified as unreached or people don't have access to the gospel. It doesn't just mean lost. People are just as lost in Nashville as they are in Somalia. The difference is there's a few churches. In Nashville. There's access to the gospel in Nashville. There's hardly any churches, hardly any Christians who know the gospel in Somalia. This is why we don't say I don't know why we talk about unreached people around the world. There's unreached people in my office or there's unreached people in my neighborhood. Those people are not unreached. You say how do you know? Cause they're in your office, your neighborhood, have access to the gospel. You're it. And people might think well, yeah, but I mean, I live in a green area, it doesn't seem like there's a lot. Well, just imagine what it's like in the red. Then, practically, people in the red are born and live and die, and the likely of it is they will never hear the good news of Jesus Christ and they number about 3.2. To paraphrase Romans 10, 14, how then can they sing to the one in whom they have not believed and how can they believe in the one they have not heard? So, to use this illustration from earlier, I first heard this from a good friend of mine who spent decades of his life among unreached people, a brother who I would call without hesitation a modern day Hudson Taylor. He said to me David, picture people groups like notes on a heavenly keyboard, each note or people group uniquely designed to sound its distinct tone of worship to God, and one day every note will join in a cosmic symphony of redeemed praise, giving God all the glory that's due to his name. Yet at present there are approximately 7,000 notes, unreached people, groups that are making no sound of worship to God. Surely we are not content with that. Surely we want this to change and, brothers and sisters in Christ, open your eyes tonight. This can change. This is the second observation. God has given you and me today more opportunities to spread his salvation to all the peoples of the world than ever before in history. Do we realize this? Think about the world that God has placed us in the church in the first century could have only dreamed about the opportunities we have to reach the nations. It took all months to sail from one city to the next. It didn't always work out very well. He never could have fathomed a machine that could pick you up and fly you through the air anywhere in the world in a day. It took him months to have a letter written, sealed, delivered somewhere else, months to get communication back. You and I can communicate with anyone in the world in real time in multiple languages through a device in our pocket Travel, technology, globalization, urbanization we have more opportunities to spread the gospel in the world than ever before in history, on top of the fact that we're some of the wealthiest people to ever walk planet Earth, with a wealth of opportunities nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, fitness specialists, musicians who have opportunity for work around the world. I see students have talked with some of you in this arena who are able to spend summers, semesters, years during this time of your life spreading the gospel among unreached people, with opportunities to get degrees that will open doors to to unreach people all around the world. Then I see retirees in this room. An uncle Sam's money can go toward playing golf in South Florida or spreading the gospel in South Asia, which is the better way to spend your last days before you see your saviors fade All in addition to the millions of dollars in church budgets represented in just this arena tonight that can support the spread of the gospel in the red. Just look at what's happening in Bible translation today. We have an opportunity over the next 10 years to translate at least some portion of scripture and every language of the world. Something that has never happened before in history could happen in our day. What a time to be alive, if we will take it. Which all leads to one exhortation for us all, in light of the song of heaven and the state of the world today. One exhortation Let us pray and give and go and send and sing Like we are living and dying to experience Revelation 7, 9 through 70. Let's pray for this In our lives. How prevalent are the unreached people of the groups of the world in your prayer life, in your family's prayer life? In your church? How often do you pray for the spread of God's glory among all the peoples of the world, among specific people, groups in the world, in your worship service? Certainly, this should be a staple in our worship services if we actually want the song of heaven to be sung. Let's give where our treasure is. There our hearts will be. Let's put our treasure where God's heart is For our lives, our families, our churches, our budgets. Let's put our treasure in the spread of Jesus' worship where Jesus isn't known. And let's go and send as the Spirit leads out of the thousands of people in this room, others online, all filled well for those who have trusted in Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit of God, if there are three billion people unreached by the gospel. Surely God is leading hundreds from this gathering tonight to go, and in all of our churches, without exception, he's calling us to send. Think Acts 13,. They're worshiping the Lord and fasting and the Holy Spirit sets apart Barnabas and Saul. The church sends them out. Worship in the church produces missionaries for the world, which begs the question if we're not sending missionaries into the world from our churches, are we truly worshiping in our churches? Let's pray, let's give, let's go, let's send and let's sing Like we want Revelation 7, 9-17 to be a reality, like it's worth our lives to hear the song of heaven sung. So, as I close, as part of this exhortation, I want to ask each of you to commit to something. Here it is whoever, wherever you are, including those online, I want to ask you to commit to get down on your knees if you're physically able. If not, do whatever posture works best Beside your bed tonight, before you lay down in that bed and pray. Two things First, I want to ask you to pray and ask God if he wants you to go to the Red. Just ask Him. We're singing about how Jesus is Lord. So ask your Lord. God, are you calling me to go, and I'm believing that thousands of people bow on their knees beside beds and national and other places tonight, that God will call hundreds of us to go. And then, second, while you're on your knees, I want to ask you to pray. Lord, please send out multitudes who go. This is what Jesus commanded us to pray. The harvest is plentiful, the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest field. So I'm asking you to do tonight what he has told us to do To ask Him to send out more laborers and specifically, to ask Him to send out laborers from your local church and to use your ministry in that local church toward that end.