Perhaps it’s time to start talking about what God is doing for and through us
The gospel is the “greatest story ever told” but is it now becoming the “greatest story never told”? When do we stand up and shout about what God is doing? | by Mike Rosas
“…When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the Earth?” Luke 18:8
The Lord knows the statistics we will have at the end of time and has known that today we would have hundreds of thousands of churches and close to two billion professing believers. But how many other people know our stats?
Perhaps you’ve heard the lament among churchgoers that Christians today aren’t exercising faith or seeing miracles like we read in the Bible. My response is, “Maybe it’s true that we don’t see lives of faith like we saw in the Bible. But even if we did, would we talk about it?”
Many humble believers in the church don’t want to draw attention to themselves so they don’t talk about what God is doing. And yet, when they do, movies are made! The gospel spreads! People flock to churches!
In ministry, perhaps I’m as guilty as everyone else, yet it seems we have been led astray by misinterpretations. We think our good works are as “filthy rags” so we don’t want to tell anyone about them (Isaiah 64:5-7). I believe the correct interpretation is that good works are only “filthy rags” when we depend on our good works to bring us to righteousness. When we come from righteousness, our good works glorify God (Matthew 5:16).
My mentor Doug Stringer says, “Those who tell the story, define the narrative and create the history.”
We have extreme forms of media, on the right and the left, communicating bad news. This bad news causes people to fear rather than to have faith. Since “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17), we live in a culture growing with fear rather than faith.
We have to tell of the marvelous works of God. His children have to extol his great work in our lives so that the next generation can be brought up in the ways of the Lord. And it’s not just for our next Christian generation…it’s for the world to have a record.
Before working in ministry, I worked in marketing and worked on one event for the government. At the event, an executive from one of the major television conglomerates told me flat-out how they own a group of networks that “entertains” their end-user from infancy to advanced adulthood. It’s planned. And it is called “discipleship.”
The media is spreading the news of their work and, in doing so, are discipling the masses. That man’s words haunt me. The world spends 10 percent of its time doing work and 90 percent of its time talking about it. The church spends 90 percent of our time working—saving marriages, cleaning up addicts, providing for widows and orphans, and so much more—and we spend 10 percent of our time talking about it.
My conclusion is that the church has to begin to spread the word about our good works so it will cause others to have faith in God. We must begin to disciple, in our churches and also in the world, by being bold about what the Father is doing through us. This will cause faith to arise again in the world and fulfill the verse of scripture, “When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the Earth?”
