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TL;DR:
Paul’s urgent question in Romans 10:14—“How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?”—underscores the call to world evangelism. Romans 10 lays out a clear progression: Sending enables preaching. Preaching enables hearing, and hearing can lead to believing. With more than three billion people still unreached by the gospel, believers must pray, send, support, and go so that those without access to Christ’s message can hear it.
“How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”
Romans 10:14 could be restated in outline form this way:
As a missionary sent to Gentile areas by the Antioch church, the Apostle Paul spent years telling unreached people about Jesus and gathering the resulting converts into churches. What Paul did is still needed today.
Many people on earth have yet to hear the name of Jesus. They have no inkling of what God did in Christ Jesus to reconcile the world to Himself. According to current estimates from the Joshua Project, more than three billion of Earth’s inhabitants are unreached by the gospel. These include large ethnic and cultural groups in Asia and North Africa as well as small tribal groups in remote areas. Seen in the light of Romans 10:14, that statistical picture cries out for believers to commit themselves to world evangelism.
I know people who think Romans 10:14 mainly calls us to share the Good News with our next-door neighbors, some of whom have only hazy ideas of the gospel. While God wants all His lost children found, the surrounding verses give the passage a clear cross-cultural and global dimension. Romans 10:12 specifically mentions Gentiles, very few of whom at that point had heard about Jesus. Then, the phrase “beautiful feet” in verse 15 comes from Isaiah 52, a chapter that includes the affirmation, “All the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.”
A 1989 film about a baseball field built in a farmer’s cornfield started people saying, “If we build it, they will come.” Isn’t that how some believers think we can fulfill Jesus’ Great Commission? Their idea is that focusing all our efforts and resources on local outreach is enough to fulfill our part of the global mission “to make Christlike disciples in the nations.”
The scenario painted by Romans 10 differs from the movie’s they-will-come-to-us idea of “if we build it, they will come.” The message of Romans 10:14 is that God’s people must intentionally search worldwide for those who have yet to hear. That verse clearly refers to spiritually lost people around the world.
God wants His Story proclaimed to every ethnic and cultural group. Bottom line: Two questions in Romans 10—“How can they believe?” and “How can they hear?”—must be allowed to reverberate loud and long through the Church’s soul. Those questions must be heard again and again until every believer feels compelled to do his or her part in getting the Good News to every unreached people group on earth.
Romans 10:14 is a powerful call to action for Christ-followers. The verse describes a link between hearing the gospel and believing in Jesus. It highlights the need to proclaim the Good News to those who have yet to hear it. While the passage speaks to local outreach, it also challenges us to ensure that the gospel message reaches unreached people groups worldwide.
As we read Romans 10:14, let’s remember that millions of people on earth do not yet know Jesus’ name or understand why He came to earth. We need an all-out collective effort in which every believer participates in some way—by praying, sending, supporting, or going.
—Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
“Unless they are sent”—another meditation on Romans 10
This blog post is one of more than three dozen posts in the “Heart of God” series published in Engage, a monthly online magazine. That series examines what the Bible says about world missions.
Memorable Quotes About Other Bible Verses