Don't Pretend To Care If You Don't

There is a lot of emphasis on our personal place in the Kingdom. It's a lot of "me" stuff. The Church markets itself as a great place to be with all the various services that we offer. In many ways church is big business and so it is marketed as big business. The seats have to be just right, the music too. Success depends on how many parking spots we have and whether our building has just the right number of seats/people ratio to promote growth. It's all about formulas and systems and no one sees anything wrong with it.

I didn't realize we were responsible for church growth. I mistakenly thought it was the responsibility of the Holy Spirit.

I really thought that we were just responsible for spreading the gospel, telling people about Jesus and helping them grow in the Lord. I thought salvation and all the other stuff belonged to the Lord. Well, of course it does and it is the reason we have cheapened the Church and faith with all this marketing stuff. How do we handle what Jesus taught:

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how. For the earth yields crops by itself: first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head. But when the grain ripens, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. (Mark 4:26-29)  

Does this not clearly tell us who is in the driver's seat? We scatter the seed. We go out and tell as many people as we can about Jesus. Anyone who will actually give us a few minutes we tell them about the greatest news ever. Our testimony is a seed. The Spirit is going to do something with that seed. He is going to grow it until the heart is ready. Then another worker will come in and that person will enter into the Kingdom.

Now you can complicated it if you want but I don't see why you would try to improve on what Yahweh is doing. You can attend as many evangelism classes as you want. You can learn as many techniques as you want. You can take as many psychology courses as you want. You can write as many books as you want. It still comes down to us going out and talking to people about Jesus. But we don't.

We are quickly losing our love for telling others about Jesus. It is more the attitude of "live and let live" or perhaps it is more accurate to say "live and let die". We have lost the sense of urgency that so many generations before us had. I think it's because we either don't believe it any more or we just don't care what happens to anyone else. We don't care that people are going to hell and we have the answer. We don't care enough to put ourselves out, to take a risk, to show love and compassion by scattering seed; telling others about Jesus.

I think we should at least be honest with ourselves. We go to seminars and take training to deflect the attention from the fact that we aren't doing it. We appear to be doing it by going to training but we show our lack of compassion by not doing anything with the knowledge we have gained; knowledge that complicates that simple task of talking to people. Jesus said the mark of genuine relationship is to "hear" and then "do it". There is no getting around Jesus. Either we obey or we don't. We either scatter the seed or we don't. We either believe he will do something with our testimony or we don't.

So either go back to what you were doing (I am sorry for disturbing you) or start flapping your gums about Jesus. We talk about what we are excited about. I hope you are more excited about Jesus than anything else, so you talk about him more than anything else. Just don't pretend that you care if you don't.