Discipleship at Messiah

Night and day, whether he [the sower] sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows. -Mark 4:27 

     Do you every feel overwhelmed when you look around at how much work there is for the church to do and how few there are to do it?  We regularly are bombarded with calls for help in some ministry.  We wonder how in the world God’s work can every get done with our limited resources and leaders and workers.
      A mental health worker, Dr. Darold Treffert tells the following story:        

“Amy, 15, had always gotten straight ‘A‘s’ in school, and her parents were extremely upset when she got a ‘B’ on her report card.  ‘If I fail in what I do,’ Amy told her parents, ‘I fail in what I am.’  The message was part of Amy’s suicide note.”

This attitude, belief that performance, accomplishment,  production is the measurement of life saturates our thinking, fuels our living, gives us ulcers and destroys some of us.
          Someone has said that much of the nervousness and the lack of time is because “we have taken over control of our world.”  We can and must do everything.
          In the church it is expressed in what someone has called “the atheism of technique—the belief that we can hasten the kingdom by using the right methods, trying some new gimmicks, and working our heads off.”¹
          In Jesus’ parable comparing God’s kingdom to “growing seed” we read these words: “Night and day, whether he [the sower] sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows,…All by itself the soil produces grain.”   In midst of human activities—good, bad, indifferent and in midst of human problems and cares God’s growth goes on.
          This gives us perspective about what matters.  We can slow down.  We have to time to pray.  Look at Jesus.  Humanly we would have expected him to be frantic, with all that needed to be done but exact opposite is conveyed.
          The late preacher, Helmut Thielicke wrote:

“Woe to the nervous activity of those of little faith!  Woe to the anxiousness and busyness of those who do not pray!…In most cases today we do not sin by being undutiful and doing too little work.  On the contrary, we ought to ask ourselves whether we are still capable of being idle in God’s name.”

Martin Luther put it this way: “While I drink my little glass of Whittenberg beer [“Pepsi,” the Methodist version] the gospel runs its course.”
         It is about power—a tiny tree can split a rock as it grows.
          This is not a not a parable about doing nothing.  The seed is sown.  There will come a day when you can’t produce.  To see God carry out a plan quite independent of what we do or don’t do is the ability to be at peace.

^{1 Robert M. Johnston}

Filed under: Discipleship, Faith, Growth, The Journey |