The first question God asked Adam and Eve was, “Where are you?” The first question the wise men of the New Testament asked was, “Where is He?” There are many hurting, broken, bruised and wounded souls around us today. The cares of life can overwhelm; and when we make mistakes and wrong choices, those heavy emotional and mental weights can become overwhelming, many times turning into physical deterioration. The church has done a good job of recruiting new converts, but has failed at her responsibility of training those new babies in Christ in a personal relationship with their Lord. Many people are following a charismatic leader, or a set of doctrinal teachings, or a loyalty to grandma’s denomination; but few are following Christ in a personal daily walk of studying His Word for themselves as they spend any significant amount of time in prayer and meditation. As a result, many souls fall by the wayside into rocky soil, and end up producing little fruit for God’s Kingdom. Other souls allow the good seed of the Gospel to become overgrown with thorns, and the cares of this life, and a desire for worldly things. Their fruitfulness becomes unfruitfulness. Sometimes people fail to walk close to God due to their own lack of discipline to stay in His Word and spend time in prayer and fasting. Sometimes people fail to walk close to God due to others demanding that they produce fruit that they are not mature enough to produce. They become bruised, broken and wounded in the process, and soon withdraw into themselves to nurse their emotional and spiritual pain.
To make matters worse, the pastor and elders fail to make a distinction as to why souls quit producing fruit or stop attending their meetings. They also fail to make a concentrated effort to maintain contact with these bruised and wounded soldiers of the Cross, leaving them to find their way on their own. Many end up broken, with horrible spiritual wounds to their souls, and look back at church with anger and resentment that no one cared enough to seek them out for coffee and prayer. The, in turn, look toward God the same way, as a mean and uncaring Father who has forsaken them. The pastor speaks from the pulpit about the need to pray for backsliders. The prayer requests keep coming in for the backsliders to be restored. The process of spiritual healing and restoration for the wounded soldier, often never realized. Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. (Psalm 127:1) Pastors and saints dedicate their lives to prayer and keeping the rules of the church, but they fail to allow the Lord to restore His bruised and battered children in His way and in His time. Just look at the Nation of Israel and you will see how patient God is; as He has dealt with the children of Abraham for thousands of years to bring them back to being the Nation of Israel, longing to build a temple for their long-awaited Messiah. The church has been asking, “Where is so and so now?”, when they should have been asking, “How can I release my spirit into God’s Holy Spirit, so He can minister to so and so as He sees fit, in His way and in His time, in a way that will cause him or her to cry out “Where is He?”
Jesus prayed for each soul that believed in Him, that their faith fail not, and that no one be able to pluck them out of His Father’s hand. Jesus’ prayers are always answered, even if it takes a lifetime. Jesus said He would not break a ‘broken reed’ nor quench a ‘smoking flax’. Jesus is a God of Restoration. He restores and forgives the vilest sinner and the coldest backslider, when they ask Him to do so. |
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