Christmas is probably the No. 1 day of the year for people around the world to say the words, “Thank You,” but you wonder how many people thank Jesus Christ on His supposed birthday.

Paul tells us in Romans 1 that the reason God gave up on the Gentiles after the Tower of Babel was “because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful.”

Here’s a passage on this verse from a recent sermon by my pastor, Richard Jordan:

“One night when I was at the Pacific Garden Mission (in downtown Chicago), preaching to a house full of bums—now they’re called ‘clients’ to be PC—I made the point to them (we’d been having some problems with some of the men), ‘You know, I don’t understand you guys. It’s strange to me that you come in here, and Christian people provide a place for you to get out of the weather and off the streets, giving you food and clothes, and you curse the God who provides this stuff to His people!’

“Well, ooh, did they get upset with me that night! They said, ‘Man, you're telling us we’re ungrateful!’, and those guys got all mad because I said, ‘You’re being ungrateful,’ and they were. . .

“In an interview on TV the other day with New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who’s written about Hurricane Katrina in a book, he said people in the Superdome were ‘starving.’

“Now any one of us in America could go 3-4 days with no food and not be ‘starving.’ I talked to a man just last year who lives in central Africa and he said that in the whole state where he’s from there are no animals at all. No wildlife, not even birds or insects. Nothing. Why? Because the starvation level is so bad, and the food supply so scarce, that people have literally eaten everything. Now that’s hunger. That’s real starvation.

“The fact is words mean things and when you study the passage here in Romans 1, words mean things. And what’s happening here is they’re not thankful. They’re not willing to give God the credit He deserves. They said, ‘We don’t like the way God thinks; we’ve got our own ideas.’ ”

*****

Jordan reported getting an email the other week from a missionary in China who wanted to inform him that a Chinese evangelist who they had earlier been led to believe was dead, turned out to have been locked up in prison, all for preaching the gospel, which is forbidden in the Communist country.

The email, which Jordan read aloud, said, “The truth is that (Paul) was arrested and has been in prison again for another three years. His misdeed? For daring to be guilty of preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ. Guess who turned him in? Not the Communist party, nothing like that; it was an Anglican minister who threatened Paul’s flock, saying, Paul was not practicing water baptism and therefore was not a Christian.

“And because of that turncoat professional slime -- pardon my flesh -- and because of the persecution heaped on him through organized religion, our dear brother spent three years in jail. I know you have stories that could cause one’s blood to turn cold, but this is the most severe payment I have personally known of for a Believer. In spite of all this, he remains so full of faith and joy; he’s a real blessing to all who are around him.”

Jordan said of the note, “Imagine that, the first time he was put in prison the Communists did it because he was preaching, and then the next time the religious system turns him in because he’s not practicing water baptism! You know, we got it made in America, at least right now. You just think people get mad at you.

“I was in North Carolina last week, and the brothers down there, after they changed their name from a denominational one (Baptist) to a Bible church, their friends wouldn’t talk to them. They turned a cold shoulder on them.

“The pastor there even talks about going to visit a lady he and one of his deacons have been visiting for years and years, and she wouldn’t even acknowledge him being in the room. She said, ‘I no longer have a pastor; he’s dead,’ and he’s sitting right there, you know. But that’s not like spending three years in the pokey in a slave labor camp prison.

“Now the reason for this letter from China was to thank everyone for the Grace School of the Bible DVDs that were sent. He wrote, ‘All my books that I brought into the country were confiscated and not returned to me. But the package containing all the school lessons were not touched or even inspected. I had a dilemma. Who would I find to preach those lessons in mandarin?

‘Paul didn’t occur to me since, for all I knew, he was dead. To make a long story short, we have been reunited these past two days. Paul has greatly improved his English skills and is a fast learner but he needs help with English. Our goal is for three English speakers to review the lessons, take notes and then for two of those English speakers, who are also native Chinese, to teach Paul. I am the third who will also review each lesson and train the other two workers.

‘What this means is that we all will be hearing a lot from Richard Jordan here in China. The lessons, translated into the language, will reach millions. We plan to design a label for the disk that says, [Please reproduce and send to others.]

“So you can from this letter how people in places that aren’t nearly as free or blessed with the opportunities that you and I have, rejoice in just a little light. Imagine what it would be like to have almost 4,000 assemblies of Believers waiting to get that information! To me, that doesn’t even sound logical. But when you think about where they are, and the fact that they don’t have much information beyond just the simple gospel . . . Well, it’s a real privilege to know people like that.”

*****

Jordan continued, “I keep here in the pulpit a little magazine called the Voice of the Martyrs. It comes out every month and has stories in it like the one about this brother (Paul). Many of the stories are about those who have lost their lives. Did you know that in the last two weeks in Indonesia, over 200 Christians were slaughtered, murdered? About 30 Christian churches were burned to the ground.

“Now, in the last two weeks, you didn’t hear anything about that on the news. All you hear on the news is stuff like how some comic told an off-color remark. Silly stuff, inconsequential stuff, and the real battles out there just kind of go by the wayside.

“I keep this magazine here just to remind me that there’s a cost involved in what we do, and even though we might not have to pay it personally—right now—there may be a day when we do. And God help us to be as faithful as these brothers and as hungry-hearted as they are.

“Brother (Oscar Woodall) used to say, ‘Americans are gospel-hardened,’ and I never understood what he meant until I went outside the country and I came to agree with him, and to marvel at the openness that the world has. As I’ve said to you, in the last two decades, especially the last decade and the decade that’s ahead, the world has come to America. The paganism of our culture is fairly well complete and what that’s going to mean is people are open.

“Just last week (in Charlotte, N.C.), on two successive evenings, I ate supper in a restaurant where when we witnessed to the waitress—a 24-year-old mother working seven days a week in the restaurant to make a living and provide for her family— and shared the gospel with her. She said, ‘You know, I never heard this before. I never heard that.’ All she’d ever heard is people telling her how terrible it was she didn’t go to church on Sunday and she worked seven days a week.

“This young woman was so happy about what she’d heard she went back and told her manager, and he came out (to our table) and said, ‘Now, she’s telling me this. Is this right? Does faith alone in Christ mean I have eternal life in heaven as my home?’

“The next evening, waiting in a long line of people at the cashier counter, we started talking to two fellows sitting in the lobby that were wearing skull caps and had gang jackets on. We asked them about if they knew where they were going to spend eternity.

“These two young men, in their early 20s, said almost the exact same thing as the waitress and they, too, volunteered the information—we didn’t ask them. They said, ‘Nobody ever told me anything like that before.’ Now that’s in the Bible Belt! North Carolina!

“We’re raising a generation of Americans who don’t even know what it is when they hear the gospel; it’s not that they’ve rejected it. Now, what that does is change the whole complexion of things.

“What strikes me is, those people who’ve never heard the gospel, they’re going to be voting. They’re going to be making decisions that determine the direction of our society. And they don’t know anything about eternal life and the truths of the Word of God.”