This sermon challenges believers to risk it all for the glory of Christ among those who have not heard His name, emphasizing the urgency of sharing the Gospel with the lost. It highlights the need to go outside our comfort zones, following Jesus to the dirty, despised, and dangerous places where He is found. The message urges a shift from self-centered worship to true devotion by actively engaging with the marginalized and lost, just as Jesus did.

For the glory of Christ among a billion people who have not even heard his name, let's risk it all. For the countless millions in your city, in my city, who do not know Christ and are headed to a crisis eternity, let's risk it all. For those who are lost in each of our communities and headed to an eternal hell, let's risk it all. For our lives, for our families, for our churches, for our children's lives, let's risk it all because don't miss this. If we retreat from the mission, God will forgive us. He is gracious. Our salvation is not at stake here. He will forgive us, but brothers and sisters, he may just leave us to wander in the wilderness until we die. He has done it with thousands of churches in the United States, and we are fools to think that he could not do it with any one of ours. Are we going to die in our religion or are we going to die in our devotion? Dave, don't you mean live in our devotion? Wouldn't that make a better sermon at the pastors conference? Are we going to die in our religion or live in our devotion? That will get people coming down the aisles. Live in our devotion. Yes, but it's not what Hebrews 13 is saying. Let us go with him outside the camp. We've got to put ourselves in the shoes of the original readers here. We've got to realize the images that come to their mind when they hear this phrase outside the camp. Immediately they go to the dirty places. Leviticus chapter 16 verse 27 and 28 tell us that the bodies of the bull and the goat on the day of atonement were sacrificed and then burned outside the camp. It was a representation of the sinfulness of God's people outside the camp. Leviticus chapter 13 verse 45 and 46 tells us that if you had an infectious skin disease, that's when you go outside the camp. Lepers go outside the camp. Dirty place, the despised place, and the dangerous place. Leviticus chapter 23 verse 13 and 14. This is where blasphemers are stoned. They go outside the camp. You don't want to go outside the camp in Judaism. The dirty, the despised, the dangerous places, and that's the imagery that we have in verse 11 and 12 and it leads to that profound exhortation in verse 13. Let us then go to him, him being Jesus, because Jesus is outside the camp. Jesus went to the dirty and to the despised and to the dangerous. He went outside the city gates where he was cursed on a tree, where he endured shame and bore disgrace. That's where Jesus is. He is with the dirty, the despised, and the dangerous, and if we're not careful, we will lead our churches and not go there. Instead of seeing Jesus among the dirty and the despised and the dangerous, we will craft Jesus to look a little different, a little cleaner, a little more comfortable, a Jesus who does not call us to go to the hard places, a Jesus who calls us to comfort and safety. The danger is we have a tendency to craft Jesus into our own image so that he looks like us, a nice middle-class American Jesus. And if we do this, then we need to realize that every Sunday morning when we gather together and we sing our songs and do our worship, the reality is we are no longer worshiping Jesus. We are worshiping ourselves because Jesus is among the abandoned and the poor and the destitute and the hurting and the places in the world that are most filled with disease and the places in the world that are most known for terror. Do we want to be with Jesus? He's there. I remember having my eyes opened when I moved down to seminary in New Orleans. The first semester was in a class where we were supposed to be paired up with with a church in the city there. We would do partnership and evangelism together. The only church that was left when my team got to sign up was Eucharist Baptist Church in the middle of the French Quarter. And so we go down in the French Quarter in New Orleans and we meet with the pastor there and he looks at us and he says, if you can learn to do ministry here, you can do ministry anywhere in the world. And he put us out on the streets and said, have a great semester. And so we walked down, eyes wide open, to Jackson Square, saw a lot of things that we'll not mention tonight, but then saw other things, fortune tellers, tarot card readers, voodoo queen and king, set up tables all around. We decided we wanted to get in a little bit of the action. So we decided one day to set up a table of our own right next to the voodoo queen of New Orleans. We set our table out, put our tablecloth over it, chairs behind, some candles on the table, and put up a sign that said, we'll tell your future for free. And people would come and they would sit down and they would say, tell my future for free? Yes. Let me ask you a couple of questions. They would say, okay. We would ask them a couple of questions, would establish the fact that they had sin in their lives and we would look at them and tell them that their future looked really bad. And then we would share the gospel and it was in those days and the days to come that we began to get to know homeless men and women and some of the most pagan people that I've ever met. Sitting there on the streets with them and talking with them and getting involved in their lives and it was not easy and it was messy. And it took a long time, but after months of doing that, one by one people started coming to faith in Christ and started getting baptized. And before Katrina hit, there was a worship gathering every single Sunday morning in the middle of the French Quarter with about 40 or 50 homeless men and women, former pagans. I went down to New Orleans not long after Katrina and was walking along the street and a man comes up to me, tattoos all over his body. He had come to Christ in that ministry. He'd been baptized. He comes up to me. He gives me the big bear hug and he looks at me with tears in his eyes and says, David, I just want you to know that now I am leading the French Quarter ministry at the church. Jesus is at work among the dirty places. He is at work among the dangerous places. Had the privilege, by the grace of God, to teach in a seminary in Indonesia, world's largest Muslim-dominated nation, Indonesia. This seminary, in order to graduate from this seminary, every student has to plant a church in a Muslim community with at least 30 new baptized believers. Spoke at their graduation. Everyone sitting in front of me had planted a church in a Muslim community with 30 new baptized believers. Two of their classmates had been murdered in the process. It's our brothers and sisters in underground house churches in Asia. You know about them, gathering together in secret late at night to worship. First time I was in one particular country, by the sovereignty of God, met up with two house church leaders. They asked me if I would be willing to do some training with them in God's Word the next day. I said, sure, and so I met them the next day. I was thinking maybe a little hour Bible study. I walk in and these leaders are sitting around in this underground closed location on the floor with their Bibles open, ready to study. I don't remember where we started, but eight hours later we were still going strong. They're choking in the Word and we get late into the evening. They say, we want to do this again tomorrow. I said, maybe tomorrow night? They said, no, early tomorrow morning. I said, how long will we go? Late tomorrow night. So the next day we began studying. I remember walking them through the book of Nehemiah. I was showing them the background of the book of Nehemiah and the history of the book of Nehemiah, showing them the importance of God's Word in the middle of God's people there in Nehemiah 8. And afterwards we took a break and I could tell they were talking about something and they sent someone over to talk to me. And they said, we have a question. I said, okay. They said, we have never heard all of that about the book of Nehemiah. We didn't know any of that. We want to know if you would be willing to teach us all the books of the Old Testament like that.