October Thought

 

Of all the people who ever inhabited planet earth, this generation is probably the most besieged by a tidal wave of information, messages, facts, figures, truths, and lies that have ever assailed the human mind. It’s easy to feel intimidated and overwhelmed. Christians know that they cannot respond to every message they hear, or solve every problem, or meet every need by applying some once-and-for-all elixir that translates every language and clarifies every ambiguity. What we can do is to deliberately recognize that we cannot avoid being part of the current scene, and that our greatest gift may well lie to also recognize that the Holy Spirit is not limited as we are, and that there is energy from God that is seeking entrance into our world, through us. We are called to recognize that God changes things not by miraculous re-ordering of our social universe, but by planting into the history of the human family the seeds of his living word, like some potent virus for good that has a life of its own, introduced into history through God’s people and growing by its own energy into a persuasive and saving presence in the human scene.

Our task is to transform the human observation of the Grace of God from being a distant and sometimes inarticulate abstraction into a warm-blooded, here and now, observable human version that we experience. In the long term, it is like the October task on the farm (as I imagine it to be in its basic parts) of harvesting the field: to free the kernels of grain from their immediate environment, so to speak, separating leaves and thistles – and other confusing materials – and then to take those kernels of grain to the mill, and grind out the flour that becomes the food that sustains us.

In all humility, it is for the believer to allow the truth of the gospel of grace and love to grow in one’s heart and mind; however one’s environment may challenge or confuse. Then with all humility to allow that truth to shape one’s daily life. The world has been changed not because Christians took on the entire task in one fell swoop, but were willing to be a micro cosmos, a small world of one by one whose faithfulness was infectious, and graciously claimed at least some little piece of the world’s travail each day for Christ.

In Christ,

Pastor Jansen