The Heart of Jeremiah

Prayer is a funny thing. For the past two weeks I've walked into Wednesday night prayer service thinking I was going to pray in one direction, only to find myself led to pray in a totally different direction once we started. Today I thought that I would be praying for our nation, our government, our church and the members that where sick. That was before church. Once I started to pray I felt led to pray for our community.

We are a poor, rural community that the world's problems have flooded into. We had a drug bust within our school recently. A number of the students caught had been members of my Sunday School class a short, few years ago. It broke my heart. Gangs have also come. I look at kids that have been taken away from their parents because they are drug addicts and I wonder how will they be good parents when they have never had an example to follow. I see the problem growing exponentially as generation after generation has no knowledge of what a real family is.

The worse part is that we as the Church share a large part of the blame. We have watered down the gospel. We have stayed withing our four walls and treated our churches as if they are social clubs, tut tutting at those we feel are not "good enough" to belong. We talk to each other about our salvation and how good our Lord is but hide that very solution from those with the most need.

What good are we to the Lord? The only plan he has ever had since Christ's death is to use us to reach others. When we refuse to do our part, we may as well be saying that we want those who don't know the Lord to suffer eternity in hell. How will we stand before the Lord on the day of judgment? When that friend or co-worker looks at us with eyes that say "Why didn't you tell me?"; how will we live with that? The consequences are frightening to me.

I thought I would be praying for growth for our church but instead I found myself crying out to the Lord for the lost. I found myself asking not for church growth but just for a chance to be a light house for Him. The Southern Baptist Church is big on numbers, but the fact is that the numbers don't mean a thing, except where they represent lives. So I found myself praying that we be an influence to help change lives, even if we never added another member to our list.

What good are members if they never come? Or, worse yet, if their lives are never changed? Just as standing in a garage doesn't make you a Ford, setting in a pew doesn't make you a Christian and having your name on a church role will not get you into heaven. Our mandate isn't to fill pews, and tisk at those who won't enter our doors. Our mandate is to introduce others to Christ, to help make disciples and change lives. Until we, like Jeremiah, have our hearts softened to the point that we weep for the lost rather than feel superior to them; I don't think we will be usable by God.

What a shame it would be to make it into heaven and realize that we never did the things the Lord intended us to do.