There are many times in life that looking up and waiting on the Lord is necessary, and if we are not faithful to do so, we are foolish and misguided. There are also times when we have been given clear instructions from the Head, and to stand around uplooking without any resulting action would be shameful disobedience! I love it when the Lord looks at Moses and says, “Why do you cry to Me? Tell the children of Israel to go forward” (Ex. 14:15b). If I was to put that into my own words, I would say it this way, “I have already told you what to do; you don’t have to wait on Me anymore. Just get busy doing it!”
We aren’t suffering so much from a lack of knowing what to do, but from a lack of putting it into practice. My brothers and sisters, please let us continue the faithful uplook and, to add to it, the Christ-like outlook. I so earnestly want to be a part of a generation here in North America that obeys the Lord Jesus’ instructions to “Go in to all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mk. 16:15), and “Go therefore and make disciples” (Mt. 28:19a).
I also earnestly do not want to be part of a generation that wanders around in a wilderness of disobedience (with lives marked by materialism, selfishness, prayerlessness, worldliness, legalism, pride, etc.), waiting to die so perhaps the next generation will go and take the land.
My prayer is that the Lord will start a fire in this generation that will burn for years to come, that we will obey the Lord’s command to go and reach North America, that Christ-loving, biblically-functioning local gatherings of Christians will be left all across this land when we are gone. There are several men that I pray with who have been asking the Lord for 50 new assemblies in the Midwest and 500 new assemblies in North America in this generation. If Jesus Christ comes back today, I want to fall at His feet and cry out, “My Lord and my God!” If He does not come back today, I want to spend and be spent to see a generation that obeys and presses on, not a generation that pulls back and dishonors our Lord. I have wept this before the Lord many times: Lord, please move among us and make it so!
I watched far too many movies growing up. One of those movies (one I don’t recommend) depicts the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who used his own funds to save the lives of eleven hundred mostly Polish Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. Near the end of the film, he says:
I could have got more out. I could have got more. I don’t know. If I’d just… I could have got more… If I’d made more money… I threw away so much money. You have no idea. If I’d just… I didn’t do enough!” Looking at his car, Schindler continues: “This car. Goeth would have bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. Ten people. Ten more people.” Then, removing his Nazi pin from his lapel, he opines, “This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would have given me two for it, at least one. One more person.… For this… I could have gotten one more person… and I didn’t! And I…I didn’t!”
We have to get to the point where we think this way! We have to get to the point where the value of souls is so much a part of our thinking that we, like the Lord Jesus in Luke 19, weep over lost souls that are under the judgment of God!
Paul thought this way, “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win the more” (1 Cor. 9:19). The Lord Jesus lived this way. “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Lk. 19:10). If we recognize that we are not like Him, we must seek the Lord until we are so radically and biblically changed that we think, feel, and so act the way our Savior does. There are over 500 million people in North America to be reached with the gospel in the next generation.1 The day that you are reading this, more than 10,000 of them will die and enter either eternal condemnation or eternal blessing.
My dear brother or sister, do you think and feel about this the way the Lord Jesus does? If not, I beg of you, on behalf of a worthy Savior, seek Him until He so changes you that, for the rest of your life, you love what He loves, hate what He hates, and weep over what He weeps over.
We have one chance to live this life for Him! The Scriptures are full of examples both of people who ran well, and of those who didn’t. I know many who are running well, and there are many who are not. Which will the Judgment Seat find us to be? Will we be fruitful for Him or will we bear the disgrace of suffering loss? I earnestly pray that ours will be a generation that will seek Him with all our hearts, and joyfully give Him all we are and have! May the Lord give us help and move among us for His name’s sake.
1 Covers the landmass north of the Panama-Colombia border, and the Caribbean islands.