When I was a boy, my dad would take me down to the pond near our house to skip rocks. We’d gather a pile of stones, pick a good spot on the bank, and take turns tossing. Each place a smooth rock bounced on the glassy water, it created an explosion of ripples. They started small, but if you watched long enough, you could see the impact of one rock spread all the way across the quiet pond.

Dad and I had no control over the number of ripples our stones produced, but it was up to us to cast them. No stones meant no ripples.

Today there are almost 8 billion people on earth speaking 7,000 distinct languages. About 3.2 billion of them are “unreached” peoples, meaning they are gospel-deprived and have very little or no access to the gospel of Christ.

That’s a huge pond of people. It can be hard to wrap our minds around those kinds of numbers. Trying to know each person would be like trying to count the grains of sand on the seashore or the stars in the sky.

But that’s not our task. God knows the number of sands and stars, and God knows each individual.

Our task is not to know them all or reach them all.

Our task is to make ripples. To make disciples who make disciples — each one launching a new explosion of gospel influence.

Though it’s not up to us to determine the size of our impact, it’s up to us to go. And by God’s grace we may just see the impact spread across the pond of the least-reached to places we’ve never been and people we’ve never met.

The apostle John wrote in Revelation 7:9, “After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all the tribes, peoples, and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”

We can’t count the number of people that will be before the throne of God someday, but we can add to that number daily by being obedient to make disciples of all nations, as Jesus commanded.

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Mark Silvers served with Crossworld in the Philippines for 10 years and joined the home office staff as Director of Mobilization in 2009. Mark’s driving passion is to reach the 3.2 billion people in the world today with no access to the gospel.