Church can be a very dispiriting place sometimes. Just this week I was speaking with someone about yet another person who had professed faith and seemed to be seeking to engage the gospel who then turned round and jacked it all in. Our church has also seen a fair share of Iranian brother and sisters join with us who, for a range of different reasons, end up drifting away.
These things can be quite discouraging when we see them happen again and again. The question is, how do we respond to them? What should we think about it? Here are some key things to bear in mind.
Jesus told us to expect it
This is the key thing to remember. In his parable of the sower, Jesus tells us that gospel seed goes out and there are all manner of people who do not respond to it. Some never accept it, some accept it for a time and drift away and other appear to accept it but produce no fruit. Jesus seemed to be preparing us for this reality; it is a normal part of gospel work.
The next one might be genuine
It is very easy to become hard-hearted in the work of ministry. We see people come and go with depressing regularity. It never becomes less hurtful when it happens. One of the ways we try to protect ourselves when we see these things happening is to become hard-hearted. I just won’t welcome the next guy, I won’t open up to them so then it will hurt less when they leave.
The problem is, the next person might be the genuine one the Lord is working in. You might have dealt with 99 chancers who all showed great promise and then upped and left, but the 100th might be the one who repents, believes and begins producing fruit. Only, if we become hard-hearted and refuse to meaningfully engage them, we will never know because we have decided our need to protect ourselves from being hurt again takes precedence over their need to really know Jesus.
Jesus doesn’t give us any get-out clauses
The bottom line is, Jesus does not give us any caveats on his Great Commission. He doesn’t give us license to reach out with the gospel but only to those we are convinced will respond as they ought. How would we even judge that? What, exactly, does somebody ready to respond to Jesus look like? We don’t get to pick and choose the people we will share the gospel with and seek to disciple.
This doesn’t mean that there is never any time to pull back. It doesn’t mean there is never a time to say, ‘I’ve done my best with this person’. But it does mean that we can’t automatically assume the next person will necessarily turn out to be the same. We must have soft-hearts towards each new person that comes our way. We simply don’t know what Jesus will do in the next person and he doesn’t give us any get-out clauses to reaching them.