Don't call us or we'll come!
The tiring truth is that we weaklings are demanding. If
you go out, in the name of Christ, to call the weak and the needy, we’ll
turn up—weak and in need! If you don’t want us, don’t call us!
We have no right to sulk, but we do; we wish we were finished with
our sin, but we aren’t; we’d like to stand on God’s grace without having
to lean continuously on you, but we can’t right now. We came because
you called us in the name of God, and we believed the good news.
Sometimes people act as though the invitation for us weak and needy
people to come to Christ dissolves our needs—but it doesn’t! We come the
way we are, weak and needy!
But many in the church want winners—self-motivated,
go-getters who can run for miles on a glass of water and an occasional
smile of appreciation—people who show no signs of fatigue, and if we do
show fatigue, we will still refuse your help with a pained grin and
plough on.
To bet only on winners or on those who give you reason to believe
they soon will be winners is pagan! To choose only those who cannot
burden you is unlike Christ. To choose only those who can help you is to
be an exploiter, a taker...
Ministers and other leaders who are trying to "glorify God through
the growth of a big church" [for the wrong reasons] especially feel the
"burden" of the weak....and they’re the ones who get mad when we won’t
get involved in their programmes...But the church isn’t the minister’s
chariot on which he is to ride from glory to greater glory...It is a
body of people to whom ministers are called to minister.
Paradoxically, as Bonhoeffer has taught us, this is true: it’s only
when you feel people as "a burden" that you're getting a chance to know
them as a brother or sister. It’s then that you realise they’re not
something for you to "use". If you've never seen or experienced them as a
burden you’re a "user".
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.