Do you have a burden for the lost, but feel you are talking to the wall when you try to share your faith? Perhaps you teach a Sunday school class, but feel lucky to get two people to show up. Or maybe you faithfully prepare good lessons, but the class takes up half of the class time with announcements and plans for upcoming events. You have so much to share, but nobody is listening.

Don’t feel alone. The entire Old Testament shares the story about how God tried to teach his people, the Israelites, to follow him, yet they continually turned away from God to seek their own pleasures. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden broke the one and only rule God gave them. In Noah’s day the people had become so wicked that God sent the flood to destroy all except those on the Ark. After King David’s rule, the kings and the people of Israel continually turned away from God. Only a few good kings encouraged the people to follow God during their reigns, but when they died the people again went their own ways.

Even when God sent Jesus to become one of us so we could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears what God was truly like, he was rejected by those who should have recognized him for who he was and exalted him. Instead they crucified him, and Jesus demonstrated the full extent of God’s love to mankind, by taking our sins to the cross. At the time of his crucifixion, you could have counted his faithful followers on your fingers. In God’s time, some people were ready to call him Lord, but never all of them.

My point is this: if Jesus has laid a ministry on your heart, your role is to plant the seeds or do what he enables you to do, and know that God will reap on his own time table. In John 4:36-38 Jesus shared with the Disciples that some sow while others may reap the harvest, but the sowers and the reapers will rejoice together.

Forget about numbers and crowds, minister to those the Lord gives you, and pray for the harvest to come in God’s time. It is possible that one of your small number of students will become a dynamic leader who will reach many for Christ Jesus.

Father God, help us to not become disheartened when we don’t get the results we hoped for. Encourage our hearts and clarify our spiritual vision that me may understand and follow your leading day by day. 
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