people come at you with this thing of, "Well, what about that guy that's out in the jungle?
He's never heard of Christ." You know, you hear that, right?
What about in the deep dark jungles of Africa? Well, they'll bring that up about Africa,
and they'll often bring it up about India, and then they'll bring it up, you know, about
other places in the world. In fact, I saw some statistic from some missionary prayer
card that said that there were like hundreds of millions of people in India who've never
even heard the name of Jesus. It's not true, folks. It's a lie. I actually took the prayer
card home, and I fact-checked it, and I came back and told the guy. I said, "Hey, no offense.
I know you didn't come up with this statistic, but this is false." This is not true. There
are not hundreds of millions of people in India who've never heard of the name of Jesus.
It just simply isn't true. Now, one of the interesting things about India, too, is that
over a great part of their history, they're ruled over by Muslims, and Muslims talk about
Jesus all the time. Now, their rock's not as our rock. They have the wrong Jesus, but
to say they've never even heard of Jesus is a lie because every Muslim knows about Jesus,
and the Quran rips on Christians, and Muslims rip on Christians. They've heard about Christians
and Christianity. So, when I brought the card to the missionary and kind of confronted him,
like, "Hey, you might want to look into these stats. You might want to check this out."
He said, "No, no, no. You don't understand." He said, "In India, there's all these hundreds
of millions of people, and they're remote. They're living in villages and tribes, and
they have no technology." He said, "They live and die in these places. They've never heard
of Jesus." And, you know, we're going and taking the gospel to them all and everything.
And the guy, I think, was a bit of a charlatan, based on a lot of conversations I had with
him and a lot of questions I asked him. There's a lot of bogus missionaries out there, folks.
This guy was bogus. First, he claimed, "There's hundreds of millions of people who've never
heard of Jesus, and he's bringing it to them every week, and send your check and everything."
But it was like, when I asked for any kind of evidence, he had no evidence. You start
to ask him specific questions, he's like, "Hey, I gotta go," you know? Because most
pastors are just like, "Sure, brother, here you go." They don't really go there or fact
check it or look things up. They just blindly trust that every missionary is telling the
truth. So I did some research on this, okay? And it's pretty interesting what I found.
What I found is that there are people in India who are considered the most aboriginal people
of India that supposedly they claim were the first ones there and they're kind of the natives
and they're living tribally. And the government refers to these people as tribal people, the
Indian government. They refer to themselves as aboriginal, that they were their first.
And these people are known as the Adivasis in their language, okay? In Indian government
and so forth. These people are a recognized minority in India, the so-called forest dwellers
or tribal peoples, primitive peoples of India known as Adivasis. Well, how many Adivasis
are they? Well, they make up about 8% of the population. But this is partly because a lot
of people want to just claim to be Adivasis in order to get government benefits, scholarships.
It's sort of like, you know, that Cherokee princess that's about six generations back
in all of our genealogies, you know, "Hey, let me get some free college," or whatever,
because I'm part Cherokee or whatever. You know, whatever. You know, a lot of people
are like, "Wasn't there that famous politician woman or whoever she was? What was that woman's
name?" Yeah, Elizabeth Warren, you know, white as snow, but she's like, "Oh, I'm a Native
American," to get the benefits. So a lot of these people are just claiming to be Adivasis
to get the benefits. They're not even that primitive. But even by those statistics, it's
like a little over 100 million people or whatever that would be classified by the government's
official numbers. These are Adivasis. But you know what's interesting about that? "Oh, I've
never heard of these!" Actually, throughout history, if you study it, it turns out that
Christian missionaries and Baptist missionaries throughout history actually targeted the Adivasis
as being receptive to the gospel, and one-third of them converted to Christianity of some kind.
So these natives are more Christian, the Adivasis are more Christian than the rest of the people!
But we're supposed to be—oh, I've never even heard of Jesus. I talked to an Indian guy at his
door one day, and he's like, "Oh, how can, you know, Jesus Christ be the only way to heaven?"
In my country, I said, "Well, hold on. You're from that country. Did you hear about Jesus over there?"
He went, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Well, how old were you when you heard about Jesus?"
Well, I learned about him in elementary school, but he's like, "I didn't hear the whole story
about how he died and was buried in Rose again until I was a teenager. He just told me you
learned about it in school and you heard the whole gospel. By the time you're even an adult, you've
heard it." Look, folks, and don't even get me started on Africa. There's been more missionaries
in Africa than anywhere else. Every missionary is going to Africa. When you think missionary,
you think Africa, right? I mean, just so many missionaries to Africa, so many missionaries
to India. And yeah, India has been an unreceptive place to the gospel, but these people that
are the tribal people, a lot of them received it more than anybody. In fact, did you know
where the state, there's a state in this world, a state that has more Baptists than any state,
percentage-wise. It's not Texas. You say, is it Alabama? Is it Georgia? Mississippi?
No. Nagaland, India, 75% Baptist. Yeah, there are three states right next to each other
that are heavily Christian, heavily Baptist. 75% Baptist. And then 10% of the people are
some other denomination. So look, and obviously most of India is not like that, right? India
is just vastly Hindu. I mean, a billion Hindus. Don't get me wrong here, folks. I'm not saying
India doesn't need the gospel, because they do. But my point is, they've heard about Jesus.