Six Weeks of Prayer: Wednesday, October 25, 2017

| Posted By Charles Gaston

There is an urgency in the callings of the first disciples. The Lord speaks and is heard; immediately, they leave and follow. What happened to that urgent immediacy? Why don’t we experience that same effect today? To be sure, many do. Around the world, each day the word speaks and does its work, bringing immediate and sudden change. The proclamation of the freeing power of the gospel creates a transformed life that begins to make disciples in the places where God has placed that person. For many of us, however, we are like someone who – after looking in the mirror – walks away, forgetting what we look like. There seems to be no impetus, no catalyst, no urgency for change.

Perhaps the Spirit will simply work his work as you read his word, and create the same response of the disciples: you may immediately leave your nets and follow. For others, it may be only after you realize that the stranger rode through town and saved you from danger that you look up and ask, “Who was that masked man?” And then you begin to hear.

And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. (Matthew 4:19-20)

PRAYER

O Lord, speak to your servants and to your church, speak so that we may hear. Speak and call us in such a way that we might hear and follow, going to the places where God has placed us, responding to the grace we have been given by doing that which he has given us to do, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.