By People With Foreign Tongues

Does a scripture passage ever grab your attention and make you think about something that never occurred to you before? One passage of scripture that recently did this for me is Isaiah 28:11-12: "For by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue the LORD will speak to this people, to whom he has said, This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose; yet they would not hear."

The context of this scripture is that God had been calling His people back to Himself, but the Jews had not been listening. Therefore, God said He would send a foreign people to the Jews to tell them of the peace and rest they could find in Him. This scripture is being lived out today as Messianic Jews and their evangelical Christian partners reach out to Jewish people around the world.

But I think the reason this scripture caught my attention so much is because it also happens to be one of those scriptures that can be applied to the church.

When I look at the state of the church in North America, we are far from God. God has been calling us back to Him for decades, but few have listened. Now God is bringing Christians from other nations to our shores. Many of them have a robust faith that is challenging the status quo that grips most of the North American church. While some educated upper middle class white people might be intimidated by these people who speak a foreign tongue, I am thankful for them. I see them as missionaries who have come to our lands to help us remember who God is. Instead of looking down on them, or despising them, I look forward to partnering them to share the Gospel with those around me.