Dear BMAMO churches:
I hope this article finds you basking in the glory and blessings of the Lord. It has been a great month of church camps for the State as well as the Meramec. We have seen souls saved and saved souls dedicated. What a thrill these ministries are to our association! If we do not have youth, we do not have a future. God has truly blessed us with a great amount of youth.
One evening, I noticed a particular group of young ladies that I know to be attuned to the Gospel and I made up my mind to challenge them to a list of questions to evaluate through the month of August.
Here are the questions:
What are you doing?
Who are you being?
What are you praying?
What are you sowing?
How are you cultivating?
How are you worshiping?
What are you saying?
What are you thinking?
What are you refusing… To do? To see? To accept? To
acknowledge?
Now, these are meant to be answered both positively and negatively, because they have both positive and negative answers. If our negatives outweigh the positives, then we have a lot of work to do. These answers can show an accounting of our daily actions, but ultimately it is for the use of evaluation to see where improvements can be made and possibly what the
next step in our Christian life needs to be.
Let me take the first question as an example so that you know exactly what I mean. “What are you doing?” Your answers from the positive, spiritual side might be praying each day, reading the Bible each day, trying to share the gospel each day, etc. On the negative side, your answers might look
like: thinking bad thoughts, watching bad things, listening to bad music, etc. We know we do some of these things even on the same day, and they are obviously counterproductive to each other. But again, this is for the sake of evaluation.
If you discover what you’re doing on a spiritual level is just basically to “mail it in,” to say that you did it, then the rest of the day you’re living less than Christianlike, then we have some drastic, serious changes to make!
This brings me back to the challenge that I gave the association at the mission symposium. I handed out tomato plants with the goal to save
seeds from the plant and replant successfully next year, all along asking God to teach us the lessons of discipleship along the way.
When it comes to living the Christian life and fulfilling the Great Commission, pretty much every discipline that is required to successfully
raise and reproduce a tomato crop is present in sharing the gospel and ultimately planting churches that plant churches.
My hope and prayer is that this challenge will result in a better awareness of how to start a church planting movement among our Missouri Association churches.
May the Lord richly bless you is my prayer.
Bro. Ben Kingston
