Why Serpents 5

About this time last year, I posted a series on Jesus’ instruction to His disciples (which we also are) concerning how they were to be as they took the Gospel to the world.

I built it on the serpent’s physiology, limitations and vulnerabilities.

But I remembered recently that I probably overlooked the foundation to the whole thing.

We are as sheep being sent to wolves.

It is the hunted hunting the hunter.

It is the prey searching the prowler.

Just imagine a cow looking for a lion or a goat looking for a leopard.

Yet that is the reality of that instruction.

We are not being told to be shrewd the way some are called streetwise.

We need to be shrewd because we are being hunted by the same people we are seeking to win over.

This means that any slip on our side is not just disastrous, it will result in our consumption.

You see, the hunter lives to eat the prey. He must eat the prey to survive.

Can you imagine a deer being sent to Esau just before he had gone home to sell his birthright?

That is the kind of chance we have with our mission field.

Forgetting that simple truth has led many believers into spiritual destruction.

I have severally written about people who have gone to minister becoming the vices they had gone to rescue their mission field from.

Like pastors burdened for harlots ending up as their customers. Or others who have gone to rescue others from alcohol dens ending up being drunkards.

How many ministers have gotten into politics to bring righteousness into politics have ever dented that wickedness? Do not they become part of the problem they had sought to solve? Do they not become as wicked as the people they had gone to ’save’?

But it is not a lost cause or Christ would not have commanded us to go.

It is only that we, in our passion to rescue the damsel in distress (a lost world), we overlook the giant holding her captive, and especially the fact that the same giant is not satisfied with having one captive.

The bravado many of us employ in our rescue (evangelistic) efforts expose us to the giant long before we get anywhere close to his tower, meaning we will find him ready for our approach.

Our proclaiming victory before we get to the battlefield extinguishes our fire before we need to use it.

But the most dangerous part in our endeavours is the fact that for the most part we want to get into the battle field before getting any orders from our King and Lord.

Allow me to share a verse many know yet assume never exists.

Therefore said he unto them, The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth labourers into his harvest. (Luke 10:2)

The fact that the harvest is plentiful is not an open invitation to rush into that field. The fact that there are no labourers does not make you one immediately.

Our first call is to pray; call the Lord of the harvest to send labourers into that field, availing yourself in case He may see it fit to send you yet leaving the decision to Him.

And that because only the ones who are sent are equipped for the job at hand.

Even in military circles, when there is a war, it is not everybody who picks the weapons, it is the ones who have been assigned those duties.

The driver does not rush to the armoury. Nor does the cook or doctor.

Each will run to the place where the tools of his part in a war are.

Incidentally, that is the same way with ministry and spiritual warfare.

We must know what our commander wants us to be doing. We must receive His direct orders on the same.

Allow me to give an example.

I have gone for numerous missions.

You will find everybody rushing for the flowery parts of ministry leaving the very essential ones to somebody else.

Everybody will want to be in the door-to-door and open-air campaigns and nobody will be left in the kitchen or washing dishes, thinking those are inferior tasks in a mission.

Then they come complaining that supper is late, yet only one person was responsible enough to realise that those ‘evangelists’ also had stomachs.

And there will be a battle the next morning because nobody wants to lower themself to wash the dishes, especially because they will be left out of the actual mission of reaching out to the lost.

That is why as I grew older, I found myself gravitating around those ‘lower cadre’ ministries lacking volunteers so that I can fill in the gaps.

It is sad that on a week-long mission you will have one person smelling of smoke because nobody had any burden for anything other than ‘lost souls’. That you will find someone who never left the camping ground to even get a glimpse of the land being ‘conquered’. That you will find someone completely exhausted from doing all the donkey work alone without any assistance or appreciation.

That is why you will hear such a person vowing never to be involved in any other mission due to the draining that one exerted on them.

That happens because probably none in the whole mission had a personal invitation to participate in that mission.

They simply interpreted that verse to mean

The harvest is plentiful, the labourers are few, please rush into the harvest field before time runs out.

The sheep rushed to the field to save wolves without any order and equipping.

Imagine a sheep going to the wolves’ den and introducing himself thus,

Good morning my friends. Will you allow me five of your minutes to share with you about the love of God (or the four spiritual laws)?

Would be the wolves be listening to the narration or whetting their appetites for this juicy meat that brought itself to their den, saving them valuable hunting time and energy?

Yet is that not how many of us approach evangelism?

What is the application?

I leave it to you to pray about your part.