PREPARING FOR THE HARVEST

David Wilkerson wrote about the coming harvest in his newsletter this week. Here is some of what he said: He says the 1980s were called the Decade of Harvest as culturally-relevant churches repackaged the Gospel and grew to become megachurches numbering thousands in attendance. It looked as if the great harvest was underway, but it proved to be building on the wrong foundation.

When the decade was over, there was no overall growth among evangelical churches; instead, the net result was that megachurches had catered to Baby Boomers, who had left their traditional churches and gone to join the big ones. In fact, fewer among the boomer age group attend church than before the decade of harvest began. Apparently, it was not a harvest time of biblical proportions.

Then Wilkerson writes, "There is one statistic that startles me more than any other. That is, only a minute number of Christians has ever won a soul to Christ. . . . Pastors ask me how to build a strong, growing church. As I look around their city, I see poor neighborhoods, teeming with downtrodden people bound by sin. . . . You can build a great church with those poor and weak who are being set free from Satan's bondage."

"As laborers, we are the harvest instruments in the Lord's hand. . . . God is forging laborers. He isn't just pounding away at sin. And this forging process explains why the laborers are few. The majority of churchgoers are like the thousands who volunteereed to go with Gideon in the Old Testament. God saw fear in many of them, knowing they wouldn't endure the fire, the pounding, the hard times. And out of the thousands who followed Gideon, only three hundred were chosen."

"Where did the disciples start their ministry? . . . Jesus sent them to the distressed, the poor, those who were bowed down with sin, bondages and life-controlling habits." Sound like our neighbors in Price Hill?

"Dear saint, Jesus knew what we were going to face in these last days: a generation steeped in sin far more than any other . . . stress and loneliness such as has never been experienced by man . . . financial disasters, rampant divorce, militant homosexuality, immorality that would bring a blush to even the worst sinners just thirty years ago. This is why Christ seeks laborers who have submitted to the fires and forgings. He wants a people who'll stand before the world and proclaim: 'God is with me! Satan can't stop me. Just look at my life. I've been through fire after fire, pounded agin and again. But I've come through it all more than a conqueror through Christ, who lives in me. What I have preached has worked for me. I am living proof Jesus is all-sufficient!'"

Amen.