FAKED OUT BY GLOWING REPORTS

Be still and know that I am God--Psalm 46:10. Be still translated let go and relax smacks against the church ambitious. Rather, we have a bent for manipulating, coercing, and imposing self-effort upon the nature of the kingdom....and it doesn't work.

I graduated from preaching school defeated. In one hundred and four weeks of Monday morning chapel reports........I never had one. Glowing reports were given of responses to their sermons or conversions of next door neighbors. I listened with enormous envy; but never made a contribution to success during those two years.

It was the practice that the school sent out the students to preach in area churches beginning in their sophomore term. All were given assignments 'cept one. I was not given a place to preach until my senior year. They had to send me sometime!

I was so pumped....and got laryngitis. That would be me....failure. No report the next day in chapel.

While the graduates moved on to large and fairly large congregations, I moved to one of eight; not eighty nor eight hundred.....but 8....well....plus ten kids.

Where were my glowing reports, anyway? Our goal for a church that small was Don't anybody die. On that count we did succeed. I lasted there only one year before moving on.

So about you....how are you doing? Nothing much to report? Others seem to have that church-knack and you don't?

I say hold on to God. He will give you something to report when He is ready; not you. What kind of report would have Joseph made about His co-labors with God....from the dark pit? How did Gideon look when he could report for duty having reduced the number of soldiers from 22,000 to 300? We know the disciples report on Saturday while Jesus remained entombed.

Don't allow yourself to be faked out by glowing reports. The glowing isn't wrong. Rather, what we count as reportable is. Buying 40 acres and having 38 baptisms isn't the only items worth knowing. The green beans prepared for the funeral meal, the paint brush strokes upon the Bible Hour cabinet and the cup of cold water to the insurance adjuster count.

We in the church continue to struggle with the fact that it isn't what we get done that matters. It is in Whom we believe can get the big things done that rocks the world.

We've got work to do and that is to believe in the one whom He sent....Jn. 6:29. When we apply our energy first upon believing the skill of Jesus, he will give us all sorts of wonders to report!