NUMBERS

Often today a lot of Churches and its people are concerned with numbers and 'growth'. While its admirable to want to win souls and to see God's Kingdom grow, it's important for us to embrace a truth that Jesus revealed in the Word:

John 6v37:

'All that the Father gives me will come to me…'

While we are faithful to simply go about Church in a simple yet Godly manner, God will give His people whoever He has chosen and whoever He has led to come to Him, to them. When we are faithful to simply shine the light and to go about fulfilling His commission, God will add whoever He wants to add; sometimes to the congregation, sometimes to other congregations.

Yes, it is great to want to win souls and to have the body of Christ grow in that way, but God's way of growth has always been likened to that of salt and seed being scattered throughout the earth, and wherever that may fall, is a good and sovereignly ordained thing. God doesn't need one place to be huge in terms of numbers, for His Spirit is everywhere and He is at work everywhere, even if it is often unseen or unknown by us. God is as happy with two or three in one place, as He is with a few hundred or a few thousand in another. And He is no more powerful in one place with a few hundred than He is in another with two or three. This should always be obvious and evident to us through what the Lord did with 12 men.

Pastors often get upset and self-righteously angered when people leave their Churches, and yet they often forget that they are not their Churches at all. It is not even their work, and it certainly isn't their right to be overseers of Christians' souls if God is leading them on (they may be caretakers for a while, but that is all they are). Such Pastors need to relax, for it is God who sustains every work and every soul, and it is God who is the Great Overseer and Great Shepherd of every man's soul.

If God allows great numbers in one place, great. If He allows few in another place, that's just as good. Let Him be the one that adds and the one that takes away if that seem good to Him (just like Job said, 'The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away'). Wherever men may be, they are in God's Church and God's body; they have Him as their Shepherd, Apostle and every other gift.

All that God has deemed good to give to men, let them be glad with what they have been entrusted with. Let men only be concerned with how they are going to go about fulfilling their shining of the light of God before men, and His commission, for the sake of His Kingdom, and His Kingdom alone. In this way His ministers won't be concerned with how 'their Church' is going, for they will fully understand that it is not their Church at all, and those they minister to are not their people. They will not need to struggle and strive and to constantly strategise and plan in a fleshly sense, and to be a burden to God's people in terms of always asking and crying out for more money, but they will be able to completely rest in the will of God, and in whatever God has chosen for them and His Church in their place of worship.