I've spent the last week in the United States, teaching Romans 6-11 in the Spanish Bible Institute of the Kansas City Baptist Temple. It's been a great time of fellowship around the Word with my brothers in Christ up here at my sending church. But, I've taken notice of something here in the U.S.
There are a lot of churches up here.
There are churches of every flavor all over the place, and sometimes they are even right next door to each other (you can even see “strings” of them, three or more all lined up on the same street). As I've been working on some area studies in order to pray about the possibility of starting a new church, should that be God's plan for us, I've seen lists as long as my arm of churches in every area of town. The Kansas City metro area is saturated with churches, as is (for the most part) the entire United States of America.
Well, then, what's the problem?
The problem is that no one is out among the lost preaching the Gospel. Christians are “sick in the feet.” I'm teaching Romans 10 this evening in the Bible Institute and verse 15 says this:
How many people, of all those that attend services in all these churches I see, are intentionally going out to seek the lost and witness to them in order to call them to salvation in Christ through repentance and faith? That's the commission that the Lord gave to all those who are saved (2Cor 5.18-21). Every one of us is called to the work of evangelism, and yet how many are faithful and how many are simply negligent? We're like Asa; we're sick in the feet!
The Church is now almost 2,000 years old; it appears we are in the final stage of Church History. We are the Church of Laodicea.
We need to respond to God's rebuke and to His gracious chastening. We need to repent and get back to being zealous in the work to which He has called us: Seeking and saving the lost! We need to fix our feet, and the only way to do that is to use them to move our bodies out to where we can engage the lost and challenge them with the preaching of cross.
I'm still saying it: I hope God gives me a good job when I get back to the States so I can buy tracts, and DVDs, and books by the boatload... May God be pleased to give me the grace to go and make disciples preaching the blessed Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to every creature!