Did you know that most estimates show that nearly 1.7 people die in a second. Just for arguments sake, I'll round it to 2. This means that there are 120 deaths around the world in one minute. This leads to a daunting 7,200 deaths in an hour. In one day 172,800 people die, while at current estimates, 63,072,000 pass into eternity every year. Tik tok.
Faced with these facts, my curiosity gets the best of me. Just how many of these 63 million+ souls go to heaven after death? How many are we letting slip through our grasp into the flames of eternal damnation?
I've found that most in the church lack motivation. Simply put many do not have the compassion that drove Jesus to the cross. Often times in church, it is easy to get caught up in the moment of "worship." We say, "God, I desire to know your heart! Let me reach the nations!" There is a full knowledge that something needs to be done...but not right now, right now is for someone else to take charge of.
Compassion is defined as the following: a human emotion prompted by the pain of others. More vigorous than empathy, the feeling commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another's suffering. Jesus was moved by the pain of the people. He would seemingly go out of His way to comfort others. There were many opportunities in which Jesus was thrown into what we would call inconvenient situations, such as the feeding of the four thousand in Mark 8 or throngs of people swarming Him as He sought solitude with the Father in Matthew 8.
Seeing just a few of Jesus' examples, how dare we ask Father for a closer and deeper relationship with Him if we are going to sit around and be disobedient to His heart's desire. Often times we want to see great miracles and lives forever change on just 1 minute of prayer everyday. This is laughable.
Have you ever noticed how in ancient times miracles seemed to be more in abundance, lives more easily changed? Am I the only one who has thought about why more visible miracles happen on the mission field than here at home? Its very easy. Even though Daniel didn't have internet, he still had the distractions of being an administrator of Babylon. Incredibly he found time to pray and seek God at 3 different times during the day. As a result he came out unscathed from a den of lions. Even though Jesus didn't have a cell phone to keep in touch with the disciples, he was busy training up followers and caring for others...He was a mobile Dreamcenter, if you will. Yet He would forcibly remove himself from the public spotlight, to seek His Father's will. To bring it home, in today's age there are as many excuses for distractions as there were back then in Jesus' time. It all comes down to a matter of priorities. Compassion isn't one of those priorities because it requires commitment. Since we don't commit, we aren't disciplined in our Father's business. I would wager to say that we spend more time learning and memorizing regulations for the companies we work for than we do for the Bible.
The short and sweet of it boils down to this, if you are really passionate about rescuing as many souls as possible from the grasp of Hell your priorities would shift. We would put down our iPhone, books, or work to seek the Father. During that time we would become compassionate and as a result more concerned about every soul that passes into eternity. What I'm going to wear to a date tonight or what form of entertainment I want to pursue would soon become trivial in our lives as we become more sensitive to the Spirit.
Just to put things into perspective, during the movie Inception, which is two hours and twenty eight minutes long, 17,760 people slip into eternity. Those are 2 hours that you could've spent on the streets changing a life. While at work during a normal eight hour day, 57,600 pass away. You may say,"But Stephen, surely you don't expect us to quit work to go elsewhere...I have a family to provide for." Well yes, however how many of your co-workers know Christ? Even though we can't stop people from dying, we can certainly help determine their destination. By the time you read this post, it took you approximately 2 minutes 40 seconds. Three hundred and twenty just walked into eternity. We need to become so compassionate that we aren't afraid to go the most needy, even if they are the people in the apartment next to you. As I sit here, the ticking continues...
Tik tok...two more slip away...
