Where God is already moving

There is a version of everything in this class that still leaves you exhausted. It is the version where all of this becomes a better technique for producing results.

Two ways to work

One says: here is my community, here is my plan, and here are the results I intend to generate. Success is what I made happen. Failure is my fault. Both are about me.

The other says: God is already at work here, before I arrived and whether or not I ever showed up. My job is to find where, and to join it.

The second is what Luke 10 describes. The seventy-two are sent ahead of Jesus to towns he was about to go to — they arrive somewhere he is already headed. They are not opening the territory. They are meeting him in it.

The harvest is not small

Say it plainly, because it is the sentence that reorders everything else: the harvest is plentiful. The workers are few.

If that is true, then a discouraging season is not evidence that your town is hard soil. It is far more likely evidence that the field is barely being walked. The problem is not out there in the people. It is the number of people looking, and you can do something about that — starting with yourself.

Ripened, not manufactured

Multiplication happens when you find what God has already ripened.

You cannot ripen anyone. No argument, no event, no amount of persistence has ever made a person receptive who was not — and everyone who has tried knows the specific tiredness that comes from it.

What you can do is look, and be there when you find it. That is not a lesser calling than persuading people. It is the actual one.

What this changes on Monday

It changes what you count. Not conversations had or invitations issued, but doors that opened — and what you did about the ones that did.

It changes how you treat a no. A closed door is not failure and not rejection of you. It is direction. Shake off the dust, as Jesus said, and go where the door opened.

And it changes what you feel walking into a room. Not “I have to make something happen here,” but “God is already at work in someone here. I wonder who.”