The Time Is Right

I am wrestling with a cold.  I am too sick to do anything productive, so I was looking at various things that popped up in Google -- articles and blogs and the like.  I saw nothing enormously good, so it was a reasonable sick-time activity.

I noticed a number of pieces, blogs and such, that focused on spiritual sounding topics from a non-spiritual perspective.  One listed twelve rules of a personal philosophy about how to become a better you.  Another observed the tendency of people in our modern world to invent things to be distressed about: Zombies, phony apocalypses, potential but unlikely disasters and the like.  One writer saw the problem as boredom.  Another saw it as a flaw in human nature.  Many of the articles sounded like Christian writings of our era, only struggling to not sound Christian.

The sense I came away from the articles (as a group) with was how the world really needs what Christ has provided.  One article actually used a progression of something like 'malady -repentance - redemption'.  There was no mention of Christ or how this closely followed the sin-repentance-redemption of the Christian Gospel.  But the world around us is trying to make sense of what only God can explain.  They want a self-improvement program that echoes what the Gospel teaches us about our conduct as His people.  They are bored with this decaying world and need something to focus them and lead them through to a salvation of some sort.  They need the Law and the Gospel, they just don't know it, and they don't want the misrepresentations that so many religious bodies advance instead of the Gospel.

Jesus had it right, and it is still true today: The fields are white unto harvest.  Pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into the fields.