12 October 2022
I have a parable for you.
The couple had just gotten married. The man was a farmer; it had been his lifelong obsession. As a youth, before inheriting the land, he had cleared one large field of all the stones over several years. Now that it was his land, grain was his most important crop. He went out the same time every year, taking a bag of kernels from the previous year's crop and sowing by hand. Some years were better than others, but still, the man did things pretty much the same way every year.
The couple had children, including sons who grew up to take over an increasing number of chores as their father aged. There was plenty of land and crops to feed them, and room to build onto the house. By the third generation, the grandsons were perhaps a little less eager, a little less attentive to all the details. One of them went out to sow, and this time there were a few pebbles in the sack. Nobody knows how they got there. He paid no attention to them as he sowed the grain field.
Somehow, the ratio of pebbles to grain kernels increased over a couple of generations, until one of the descendants went out with nothing but pebbles in his sack. Nobody remembered why they were sowing in the first place. The crop was poor as the soil became rockier and the harvest was not really worth the trouble. The only grain growing was voluntary from the unharvested crop of the previous years. The expanding family had gotten into so many other ways to make a living. There were simply too many other things to occupy the family's attention, and farming was just a family custom.
The tiny pebbles got hard to find, and the size of the rocks grew, strewed across the field for the simple sake of tradition. Eventually the field was covered in rocks of all sizes, even small boulders hard to carry. But the people faithfully carried rocks out and spread them on the field, having long forgotten what the exercise meant in the first place. Almost nothing grew, and nobody seemed to care.
This is the mainstream churches today. They have no idea what they are sowing, and no idea what they should be harvesting. For them the "gospel" is a cerebral and emotional exercise, and "salvation" is just some decision people make to "come to Christ". There is no real understanding of surrendering to your feudal Master in Heaven. All the concerns are earthly and human. It's not personal, one-on-one with the Creator of the universe.
That is, it's not personal except by accident. The orientation of western Christian religion remains almost entirely worldly. It remains too important to meet the worldly standards of organization, of leadership education and professionalism, and worldly standards of wealth with fancy facilities and big budgets. It's worldly and materialistic. They make jokes about otherworldliness being useless for the church. It's not spiritual with a high moral pursuit of heavenly things. Most people go through their lives with at best a sort of hybrid faith. They really do trust the Lord, but have no idea what His Covenant actually means.
This is not anger and condemnation; I feel a great sadness that so very many children of the Lord will never get hold of the vast promises our Father gave us in His Word.
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