STAYING FRESH AND FLOURISHING (4)
I trust the previous blogs in this series have challenged you to assess how is your spiritual hearing and sight? It is not only blessing me as I write but also challenging me, as like the Apostle Paul I don’t want to preach to others and myself be disqualified.
I don’t have to remind you about the time in your physical development when you entered puberty and the sexual drive began to develop in you, which produced an attraction to the opposite sex, and the desire to fall in love and marry and become a parent. Our God is an awesome creator, but it is a time of tremendous temptation and struggle, and very few come through without being bruised in someway.
Most people complete their family before they leave their thirties or early forties, and the desire to continue to have children dramatically diminishes.
LACK OF DESIRE TO REPRODUCE
Do you remember when you first came to Christ you wanted to tell everyone what had happened in your life ? Is that desire even in your life today ? Statistics tell us most people come to Christ by their teens and then it dramatically tapers off, Is that because people stop sharing their faith with people ?
Dawson Trotman, the founder of the great discipling organisation called “The Navigators” wrote a book called “Born to reproduce”. That just as naturally there develops in us a desire to procreate, so spiritually when we are born again there should come that drive within us to see people born again.
LET ME ASK YOU SOME PERSONAL QUESTIONS?
How long is since you witnessed to someone about Jesus ?
How long is it since you led someone to Jesus ?
Are you discipling someone in their walk with the Lord ?
Are you walking with a young developing leader to help them in their leadership growth ?
Of course, spiritually we can reproduce in many different ways, so this blog is not to condemn you, but to challenge and encourage you to develop the best way for you to reproduce. We all want to hear those words “Well done good and faithful servant”. For me I want to see thousands of people on that glorious day rise up and call me blessed because I was involved in reproducing something in their lives.
I preached yesterday on “Do you love the Lord ?” we cannot love the Lord in our own strength, but His love has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5.5) so with His agape love we can love the Lord, and our brothers and sisters in Christ, AND THE LOST.
Just as Jesus looked on the crowds and was moved with compassion, and saw them as sheep without a shepherd, let me encourage you to go to the local shopping mall, sit down and look at the passing crowd, you will see so many sad and tormented faces and this will stir something in your heart not only to pray but to seek to see Christ reproduced in them.
Many of you know I have had the privilege of going to Vietnam 32 times, when I could not get there for a few months,, I would drive a few miles from my home in Sydney to a whole suburb that has been taken over almost completely by the Vietnamese community. I would smell the spices, I would hear their language, I would smell the Durian, I would drink Vietnamese coffee, and the intercessory burden would come afresh.
Naturally, we don’t have many children these days, but I want to have thousands of spiritual babies who grow to maturity and in turn reproduce many more for the Kingdom of God. I need to stay FRESH AND FLOURISHING and reproduction will just happen.