The nearness, importance, and desperate need of the harvest is something that ought never leave our minds and hearts. I started tweeting about it but I didn't want to go Rodney Howard-Browne on you guys, so let me just say that this has really been striking thus far into the trip. My perspective is always opened to a new level when I leave the country; that is, my perspective of the harvest.
Everywhere I look here, there is just need. Need for vessels, need for laborers. If the harvest were any nearer, we would be doing the work by accident. The world is so big, and it is also so lost. There are so few who are found, and even of those but a mere handful swing the sickle.
And all the while, God is calling. The blood of Jesus calls out from the ground, even as the blood of Abel cried out to God. The cry is a cry of injustice. Jesus did not wait for a petition from men aware of their eternal plight before coming. He just came, spoke the truth, subjected himself to the cross, rose again, and sat in heaven. He has more than done his part.
I am tired of hearing preachers say we need to go to the lost, I am tired of their congregations nodding their heads and shouting, and I am tired of the lost of whom they speak remaining in darkness.
Whether from inaction or ineffective action on the church's part, the harvest all to often goes untouched. This is because the bridge between the results of active compassion and the spiritual poverty of inactive complacency is suffering. The will of God is accomplished through no other means than the painful crucifixion of the flesh and its subsequent resurrection by the power of God. Indeed, the cross is our model, not our shrine.
When we say we are in need of laborers, we are in need of sufferers. The suffering is that which distinguishes God's laborers. God must first win the battle for your heart if it is from the abundance of your heart that the lost will hear of Him. A heart that is not his will do no good. The degree to which I am purely God's is the degree to which I will be effective in the harvest. It costs the pleasure of the carnal and the ease of the natural to find true satisfaction in God. It costs.
So the need of the harvest cries out to us in their need of the delivering power of the blood, and His spilled blood calls to us for the sake of His cause, which is the harvest.
Now the call of the cross is the call to pay the price. The motivation for the call is the cross itself. "For Christ's love compels us." The cross reveals the love, the nature of God; it is a call to be His. Let's answer his call.
There is much more I have brewing in me, but this will have to do for now. I know perhaps an "update blog" is typically less spiritual, but this is what's really going on with the trip. I can tell you about conferences and outreaches and churches and services and you still have no idea what is happening with me. I'm sure I will write more about that later.
