|
News
and Commentary
Have You Gone Deaf?
An urgent message to all the servants
regarding the whimpering…
Do you think you have answered the call? If you are
truly a servant and have answered the call then you surely must now be
hearing the whimpering! It is a horrible, wretched whimpering, from an
abandoned new born baby who froze to death on the asphalt of a hospital
in Indianapolis last week. If you are a servant, then you surely must
have heard the whimpers of the wives and children of the missionaries
murdered last week in front of their families in South America. If you
are a servant, then you surely must have heard the whimpers of Africans
being butchered to death by other Africans. If you are a servant, then
you surely must have heard the whimpers from the people who are being
shot, stabbed, kidnapped, molested, raped, tortured, starved, or worse
in your town or city, or your country, or your world. And surely in your
ministry and the ministry of every person who calls themselves a
Christian we are now going to do more than talk, aren’t we? The call
WAS to show love, to reach out, to heal, to spread the Word wasn’t it?
Could now be the time to shut up with all our pulpit talk and start
ACTING?
Is now the time to really start showing love, caring,
compassion, and forgiveness? Our pulpit talk has been enough hasn’t
it? Surely our pulpit talk has been enough because all of these whimpers
have nothing to do with us, do they? Just because whatever word we’ve
spread has not had enough impact, that has nothing to do with us, does
it? And we can support our not hearing the whimpers with some Biblical
foundation, can’t we? I mean, there has to be a verse somewhere that
helps us maintain our deafness to all the whimpers, isn’t there?
If you have truly answered the call then when you go to
bed tonight you will not rest easy. If you are truly a servant, then you
will toss and turn, and squirm because your conscience is burning a hole
in your soul. For if you go to bed and rest easy, or if you are sure you
are answering the call, you do not hear the whimpers, the pleading for
mercy, the groaning of those taking their last breathe, or the tiny
whimper of a little baby freezing to death. Walking around somewhere in
your world is a woman who gave birth to and left that child to freeze to
death. Walking around somewhere in your world is a man or boy who helped
make that child. And if you rest easy without any guilt because you
think your have done enough to answer the call then could there be
another call waiting for you upstairs? Could this call be one you don’t
want to take? Perhaps you can put this call from upstairs on hold for a
while so your conscience will be eased. After all, we are all talking,
and writing, and administering as much as we can, aren’t we? Being a
servant has its responsibilities. Being a servant means you do your job
to the best of your ability, you give 110% every day, and you hear the
whimpers and you do not sleep well at night. In this business called the
church, there are a lot of selfish, self-centered, ego-filled, smug,
self-satisfied, arrogant people who think they have answered the call.
You might have indeed have picked up the phone to answer and heard the
voice on the other end, but have you gone deaf since you answered? If
you are smug, self-satisfied, self-centered, and arrogant enough and
your soul has already been consumed, or if you have gone deaf, then you
won’t hear the whimpers. And you can rest easy, and in a few days you
will forget about this email, and you will go on and be satisfied with
pulpit talk. So maybe I should not have sent this. After all, we all
want to rest easy and not hear the whimpers, don’t we?
|
