Have you ever noticed the group of people called “they,” referred to five times in Romans 10:14?

“How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?” (NKJV)

How does God bring the Gospel to the “they” in Romans 10:14 who have never heard of Him?

The Book of Acts, our best resource for the history of what happened in the first century of the New Testament church, gives us these three examples:

• The Ethiopian Eunuch
• Cornelius, the Roman centurion
• Lydia, the Thyatiran businesswoman

These examples all fall into the category of what could be called devout pagans: those who have never heard of Jesus and His Gospel but are following the light they have. Does God declare devout pagans such as these saved, deeming their well-meaning search for Him sufficient even though they lack any knowledge of Christ?

Clearly, He does not. Instead, in each case, God miraculously and providentially brings a preacher who will share the Gospel with them.

The Ethiopian Eunuch

The Ethiopian Eunuch has Isaiah 53 open before him on his chariot ride home, mulling over the meaning of the words he is reading. God uses an angel and the Holy Spirit to direct the evangelist Philip to this man (Acts 8:26, 29). When they providentially meet, Philip preaches Jesus, baptizes the believing Eunuch, and then they part ways (vv. 35–39). God answered this African’s search!

Cornelius

The case of Cornelius is perhaps more striking in light of its details. An angel appears one day to inform him that God has heard his prayers and seen his alms. This angel then tells Cornelius where he can find a man who will speak words “by which you and all your household will be saved” (Acts 11:14, NKJV). But to get Peter to Cornelius takes the aforementioned angel, a thrice-repeated vision, an accompanying voice, and the direct leading of the Holy Spirit (10:3, 10–16, 19). Once they are brought together, Peter preaches the Gospel, the Spirit falls, and Cornelius and company are baptized in the name of Jesus (10:34–48). God not only welcomed the search of a Gentile such as Cornelius, as Peter came to recognize (10:34–35), but He miraculously and providentially brought Cornelius a messenger who would speak to him the words by which he was saved.

Lydia

Lydia’s case involves the Spirit’s redirection of Paul (see 16:6–10). Remarkably, the Spirit stops Paul from traveling to Asia, where Lydia had been located (Thyatira is a city in Asia), and directs him instead to Macedonia, where she currently lives. To move Paul from where he is to where Lydia is requires the Spirit’s double redirection of Paul and a God-given vision featuring the man from Macedonia. Paul ends up in Philippi on a sabbath day, by a riverside where some women had gathered together for prayer. Paul begins to speak—which is what heralds do—and Lydia believes (16:12–14).

God has given us these examples in Acts—of an African, a European, and an Asian—to set forth a pattern of how God works. God sends preachers to those who have never heard of Him, just as Romans 10:15 suggests. Missions history, both past and present, is full of examples of this pattern playing out.

• The first Filipino I led to Christ was already searching after God. In the far north of the Philippines, in a multi-lingual conversation featuring English, Ilocano, and Tagalog, Ikko’s eyes were opened to understand the Gospel.
• Just recently, a Cambodian villager fighting demonic oppression cried out for God to send a teacher to deliver him. GFA missionary Forrest McPhail “just happened” to pass by this man’s house sometime after that and share with him the Gospel.
• Several years ago, I was talking with a young man from one of the Buddhist tribes in Bangladesh’s hill country. Out of curiosity as to how he came to believe in Jesus, I asked him for his story. One night he was walking outside, looking up at the stars, when he thought to himself, “There must be a god out there somewhere.” A short time later, a missionary came to his village, preached the Gospel, and he believed.

This kind of thing does not just happen in the tropics of Cambodia or the hills of Bangladesh.

A colleague of mine, on the weekend before leaving to study at Clemson University, walked out of a bar on a Saturday night, looked up at the sky, and thought to himself, “I don’t have a clue what life is about.” Two days later, a man knocked on his dorm room door and gave him the Gospel. He did not believe that night, but the conversation so rattled him that eventually it drove him to put his faith in Christ. 

You and I are God’s heralds to reach the devout pagans of our day. We are the Philips, the Peters, and the Pauls who speak “words by which people will be saved” (Acts 11:14).

Is God sending you to someone today?

Before his conversion, Rolly Ara was entrenched in the spiritist movement, but it had left him achingly empty. While traveling by jeepney one day, he cried out to God for help, hardly knowing to whom he was praying. At the very next stop, a Bible college student boarded the jeepney and gave every person in the vehicle a gospel tract with an address for a nearby Baptist church on the back of it. Rolly had never heard of a Baptist church but determined to visit the next Sunday. He attended church, heard the Gospel, and was gloriously saved—all through the instrumentality of a herald who was obedient to the God who had sent him.

Rolly, now a friend and former student of mine, is a fervent Christian and a faithful herald himself, holding Bible studies with his workers and seeing souls saved.

You too may be the answer to someone’s prayerful search for God. To whom will you go?