“and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.”” -Romans 15:20–21
Here we get a glimpse of Paul’s missionary heart. He is a church planter, a trailblazer, a pioneer. It is not out of arrogance that Paul makes this claim; rather, it is from a promise that he draws from Isaiah 52, a messianic passage that speaks of what the Jews called the Suffering Servant. Paul identifies Christ as the Suffering Servant and the source of the missionary impulse. God through his prophet Isaiah has made a promise that there will be people who have never heard of Christ who will be saved if someone preaches the gospel to them.
Though two millennia later, most of the world has heard the name of Jesus, there are still pockets of people around the world who don’t know the name of Christ, people who have never heard the name by which we must be saved.
“And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”” -Acts 4:12
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I think of young John Chau who went to that island at the North end of the Andaman island chain to bring the Gospel to the indigenous people there and was martyred on the beach because he had been called to preach the Gospel to those who had never heard it. And he was scorned by the world for it.