May 01, 2015
Re-Commission
A recent newspaper article
reported that Mormon missionaries are now going to spend more time trying to
“reconvert” people who strayed. The thought is to put more focus on retention
and reactivation, rather than on conversion. For followers of Christ such an
idea would compromise the Great Commission, which is to make disciples for Christ. To re-make or reactivate wayward disciples
benefits the church, but making disciples benefits the Lord. Jesus said, “Therefore
go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to
obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19-20a NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Who among us is totally commissioned? If we were to give whenever asked or help whenever we see a neighbor in trouble, who among us would have anything left? Two-thirds of the world’s population live below our poverty line, yet see our poor as living like royalty. Most of them live in shacks we would tear down as eye-sores rather than use for even storage sheds. We would shudder to eat their diets, and for every fifty times we see a doctor for a hang-nail, they don’t see one at all. Yet, we don’t give until it hurts or even feels a little uncomfortable, let alone until we are consumed. We just continue wrapping ourselves up in our own silks and linens, poking little mignons into our mouths already full of sauteed mushrooms.
-----For every one of us who know the Lord, or say we do, how many are there that don’t, or refuse to know Him? Two? Three? In general, there are many of them and few of us. Jesus said it. Hell is a tormentingly bad place whether it be from heat or darkness or from the gnawing quiet of solitary aloneness or the crowded bellowing of torturers and torturees constantly writhing against, over, and under each other. Its misery can not stop because the Lord has taken all His good and left those people to themselves at their stupid request. We who know the Lord and choose to go with Him are full aware of this. Yet I do not daily see one third of the people on the streets pleading with the other two-thirds and presenting every logical argument and every rhetorical device they can think up or learn to persuade the others to change their minds. Instead, we just walk past each other like the Lord only exists in our own faith while everything of reality will continue more blissfully tomorrow than today.
-----Two of our last three Presidents have lied into our faces with practiced abandon, and we lied about the other one just as badly. We know our politicians now lie as a character trait, and more than three quarters of the journalists clear the way for them to do so. And we, who worship Truth, do nothing. For eight years our justice department has winked at government gun running, thuggery at polling places, the IRS used as a political weapon, in fact, it has gone out and ratcheted up tensions in the midst of racist rioting (which journalists call anti-racist rioting.) And the old top of that justice department is now being replaced by a woman who let unprecedented international drug-money laundering escape for a penalty of pocket-change. And we who love justice do nothing. Our courts are pulling on brown-shirts and taking kristallnacht to Christian florists and bakeries and threats to the rest of us. Yet every Sunday’s church service is another dance through the flowers, another shot of Novocain, another diversion of attention from the festering pit of debauchery we have allowed our culture to become. And we, the salt of the earth, have surrendered the halls of education to ignorant and deceitful people donning titles of Dr. and Prof. and teaching our children worse lechery than even they are themselves. The only thing we, like good and wet salt have done is stick together. We don’t mass together in the streets like the Egyptians did in Cairo to oust their traitor. No! We just hide and try not to get wet.
-----Let’s talk about retention and reactivation. I don’t think there’s a one of us who couldn’t use a little of it in some way.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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