The Wisdom of My Wife
My wife looked at me the other day and said, “Don’t spend so much time writing that you’re not getting time with Jesus.”
It hurt, but she was right.
Two lessons can be drawn from this incident.
One: Wise wives are the best pastors for their husbands. Wise husbands listen to their wise wives.
Two: Whatever it is that God has called you to do is not more important than the relationship God has called you into with Himself.
The Cloister, The Harvest, and Where the Laborers Are (Part 3)
In the West, we have an interesting problem. The Church is cloistered. But because of that cloistering we believe no one wants to hear the Gospel. The opposite is true. The harvest is great, but the workers are few. And that sets up an interesting problem.
Jesus’ answer to a great harvest and a shortage of laborers is simple and yet very different than ours. We start Bible colleges, seminaries, training programs and apprenticeships. Jesus starts with the Father.
He said to his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.
-Matthew 9:37-38
So Jesus’ first response is to pray. We look for strategies, but God is looking for people to pray. The raising up of laborers is a divine act that requires us to go to God in prayer. Have you been doing this? What does your prayer life look like in regards to God raising up laborers? I would suggest this is a good litmus test for how connected you are to God’s heart for the lost.
Now, a lot of people are familiar with this verse and some people actually practice it. This isn’t just Jesus’ being impractical. He expected God to answer and He did. But how?
Jesus called his twelve disciples together and gave to them authority to cast out evil spirits and to heal every kind of disease and illness…Jesus sent out the twelve apostles with these instructions: “Don’t go to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but only to the people of Israel—God’s lost sheep. Go and announce to them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, and cast out demons. Give as freely as you have received!
-Matthew 10:1, 5-8
Did you catch that? God answers the prayers of the disciples by raising up laborers among the very people Jesus told to pray. The people who prayed for laborers became the laborers themselves!
We can’t miss either of these two ideas. For the believer who sees a need for laborers, we need to spend time asking the Father to raise up laborers for the harvest. God is the source of true laborers for the Kingdom and if we ask Him for them in faith, He will give them. But the other idea is equally as important: If we pray for God to raise up laborers for the harvest, we shouldn’t be surprised if we ourselves are some of the very people that God raises up as a laborer.
This idea is crucial. So many people see the need for laborers, see the situation of the harvest, and may even pray. But few are willing to step out and be the very thing that they’ve been asking God for.
But we’re going to need more than just you in the harvest field, we’ll need others as well. God will raise up laborers from the church in much the same way as He did with the disciples. But one of the places we significantly underestimate finding laborers is among the lost.
Why the lost? Well, as we make disciples of lost men and women, we should be teaching them that they have a responsibility to make disciples as well. The teaching and modeling of this responsibility cannot be underestimated. New believers who are amazed about their new relationship with Jesus are often the best at convincing unbelievers that Jesus is real, and often are better at it and more motivated than long term Christians. As a ministry that I know of is fond of saying “The resources for the harvest are found in the harvest.” God has actually stored up laborers for the harvest in the harvest field. We should expect this and teach this as a normal thing, and quickly we will find the number of laborers dramatically increasing.
Friends, the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few. Have you prayed to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest field? Are you prepared not just to pray that prayer, but also to be an answer to that prayer?
The Cloister, The Harvest, and Where the Laborers Are (Part 2)
Yesterday I wrote about how the church (predominantly in the West) has been cloistered.
I see this regularly in our attitude toward the unbelieving world. Most of the church believes either consciously or unconsciously that unbelievers don’t want to follow Jesus. Don’t believe me? Ask someone to go share the Gospel with you on the street. The responses will be telling. Our cloistered attitudes tell us the world has no interest in following Jesus.
But this perception of the harvest comes more from our experiences than from Jesus. Jesus told his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few.“Jesus never seemed to have a hard time finding people so broken they didn’t need healing. Jesus never had a problem finding people who were outcasts that needed love. He never had a hard time finding those marginalized by society and telling them God has a better Kingdom, a better family where they would be welcomed.
In fact, from Jesus’ perspective, the problem wasn’t the harvest. He actually saw so much untapped potential for harvest that he told them the problem wasn’t with the harvest—it was with the laborers! They didn’t have enough laborers to accommodate the harvest that was coming.
This is a massive perspective change for the church today. Rarely do we spend time praying and raising up laborers for the harvest because we don’t really believe the harvest is that great.
Oh if we only had Jesus’ eyes.
Friends there is a sea of humanity, not just across the seas, but across our fences and streets and cities that have no answers. The John 3:16 sign held up at a professional sporting event wasn’t enough to reach them, nor was the chick tract they found in the bathroom at Walmart. But a living, breathing expression of the gospel that has a testimony of transformation is something they’ve never seen. And while I agree with the church that the world at large doesn’t want traditional religion like they’ve seen, they do want the Kingdom of God. They do want Jesus.
And if you begin to touch this realm just a little, you begin to understand how big the harvest is. One year our house church began to serve food at a local park and play sports with the kids in our neighborhood. Word got out and quickly our house church was filled with people from the neighborhood that had barely ever darkened a church. One of the lessons we learned from that season was that there was no shortage of people who had interest in what we were doing.
The problem with that season was we didn’t have enough laborers. The needs they brought to the table were overwhelming. The amount of discipleship each person needed was more than we were used to. We weren’t ready for the harvest that came in. I think most churches are in the same spot.
One of the lessons I took away from that season is it’s not the harvest that’s in short supply. It’s the laborers.
Photo Credit: Wheat Field by Dennis Behm
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 