Those Whom the World Was Not Worthy Of
There is a sentence in the Bible that most of us read too quickly:
“of whom the world was not worthy.” (Hebrews 11:38)
It is written about men and women who “wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground” – people pushed to the edges of their societies because they refused to let go of God. The world looked at them and said: “You do not belong here.” God looked at them and said: “This world does not deserve you.”
Today, this verse is not a museum piece. It has names and faces.
In Afghanistan, a young man met Jesus and could not keep quiet about Him. For two years he shared the gospel in his home region, and more than thirty people quietly gave their lives to Christ. When his family discovered his faith, his own father drowned him for refusing to return to Islam. His story rarely reaches the news. There is no monument for him in any capital city. But Heaven calls him by a different title: “of whom the world was not worthy.”
In Central Asia, pastors and small congregations meet in secret apartments, changing the time and place each week so the authorities will not find them. When they are discovered, they face fines, raids, interrogations, sometimes prison. One pastor in Siberia says he feels the church is being “slowly strangled and silenced,” yet they keep preaching, keep gathering, keep loving their neighbours in the name of Jesus. The world around them treats them as a problem to be controlled. God sees a treasure that this world does not deserve.
In war‑torn regions of Ukraine, church buildings are bombed, pastors disappear, believers bury their loved ones and still gather to pray in basements. They bring food to neighbours who curse them, and read the Psalms with people who have lost everything. They are not heroes because they are strong. They are heroes because they are weak and yet refuse to let go of the hand that holds them.
These people are not famous preachers or bestselling authors. Many of them will never stand behind a microphone. Some of them cannot even say the name of Jesus loudly, because walls have ears. Yet the Bible says that the measure of a life is not comfort, success or safety, but faith – a stubborn trust that clings to God when everything else is taken away. By that measure, the poorest persecuted believer in a forgotten village may be richer than entire nations.
Why does this matter to us, reading these words from safe places, with a full stomach and a screen in our hands? Because Hebrews 11 does not exist to make us feel guilty, but to wake us up. It is a reminder that we are part of the same family. Their story and our story are one story. We are not called to envy their suffering or to seek persecution, but we are called to the same Jesus – the One who was Himself rejected, despised and crucified outside the city gate.
Maybe your faith does not cost you your life today. Maybe it “only” costs you your reputation, your career prospects, your friends’ approval, or your comfort. The temptation is to look at that cost and quietly step back, to make your faith smaller, more “reasonable,” less visible.
But when we remember those of whom the world was not worthy, something shifts. We realise that we do not honour them by admiring them from a distance. We honour them when we decide that Jesus is worth more than our comfort too – in our office, in our family, in our bank account, in our private choices when nobody is watching.
The persecuted church does not ask us to feel sorry for them. Again and again, they ask for one thing: “Pray that we will remain faithful.” They are not begging to be removed from Hebrews 11; they are asking for grace to finish their part of the chapter well.
And maybe that is the real question for us:
If God were writing Hebrews 11 today, would there be a line – even a small one – that could honestly be written about us?
Not because we suffered as much as they did. Not because we are strong. But because, in our small corner of the world, we chose the same road:
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to love when it is costly,
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to forgive when it is unfair,
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to speak the name of Jesus when silence would be safer,
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to stand with those who suffer for His sake, in prayer and in practical support.