February 15, 2011
Faux Pas
Last Sunday the President of one of our Bible colleges was our speaker/preacher. During the Sunday school hour his presentation was interrupted at 9:38 am when his cell phone went off…a real faux pas I thought for a professional speaker. It was later during the sermon that he explained the significance. At a meeting of Bible college Presidents there was an emphasis on the need to be praying for the next generation of workers. It was suggested that as a reminder they could set the alarm on their cell phones to go off at 9:38 every day and at that moment to pray for a revival of the next generation. The Matthew 9:38 call to prayer, “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
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Gail;
-----On one hand I admire the vision of these Bible college Presidents. On the other hand, I fear they are making the same mistake that causes young people to search for their spirituality elsewhere. Are they implying that the next generation needs to produce many good missionaries, preachers, and youth ministers? It does. Are they implying that it needs to produce many good elders and teachers and leaders and Christian mentors? It does. Are they implying we need to teach and train them in this way they should go? We do.
-----But Christianity is not merely an intellectual exercise. Certainly a Bible college education, or even a comprehensive and methodical education in the churches and homes, will produce many good workers. Part of what I love about the new life is that it engages the mind because it is real. Yet training is only half of what makes a good worker. Proverbs 22:6 states, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” “In the way he should go...” is partly the subject matter of that training. But it is also partly the environment in which the child is raised. It is not that if a child is merely taught the things of the way he should go, then he will not depart from them. It is that if he grows up experiencing the way he should go, seeing generosity and forgiveness and kindness and humility and decency and purity at work in the way situations and affairs of his family life are handled, he will understand what he is being taught. And the more he sees the way he should go happening in the neighborhood and community and around the cities of his country, the more its influence takes root.
-----I wonder if prayer for the next generation is not a prayer that is too late? I see tarnish and mold and rot in the current generation. I wonder if prayer is not enough? I hear the same old navel gazing sermons Sunday morning as Hollywood continuously pipes filth into the country’s homes. Hardly a whimper is raised! I sit in Sunday schools to learn again about Moses, or even about how to pray, as teachers from kindergarten through post graduate school teach the next generation that they are simply a modified monkey having no higher power to contemplate than that of complex organic chemistry. Then I see the next generation ape the trash they saw on TV last night, “for that must be all there is,” as they’ve dutifully learned.
-----Belief does not come from reason alone. You can convince a man of what is right, but he will believe in what is wrong if he rather desires it. What? Our whole culture presents the desirability of what is wrong while we are taught by our leaders to sit silently on the sidelines as it rots our children? To just pray and ponder the sermons about Moses and tithes and missions? We must revive the “way he should go” in the home and carry that revival through the neighborhoods and communities into the cities of our country where is the rest of the way they’ve been going. Or have we allowed the scoffers to bully into silence what this country was founded to behold, the way we should have gone? We need more militancy from the preachers and teachers and leaders and elders and dads and moms.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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