Thought for the Week – 6th August 2016 – Dennis Pethers

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.  Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.  Luke 10:1-3

Jesus sent the seventy-two to go out two-by-two into the harvest field.  I have spoken about this previously but want to remind you, as you go about your daily life this week, that wherever you go, you are in God’s harvest field.

A few weeks ago I was at a church just to the South of London speaking with a group who are being taken through a short course that is helping them to ‘Join Jesus in His Mission’.

As a part of the evening people were placed into small groups and were asked to consider a number of questions.  The first question was ‘where do you go?’

I listened in on one group and heard a man say, ‘I don’t really go anywhere!  I come to church and I go home, that’s about it!’

The person leading the small group said to him, ‘Don’t you go anywhere else?’  The man thought about this for a moment and continued ‘Well I suppose I do go the park most days to walk the dog, and I do go to the shops fairly regularly’.  He paused and then continued ‘And when I walk the dog I see a lot of the same people walking their dogs, and now that I am thinking about it, it has never occurred to me that God might be in the park, that the park is part of His mission field.’

Interestingly, his comments very quickly got the other people in the group talking about the places where they go – work, the gym, visiting friends and family…….  What was fascinating was that each of them admitted that they had never thought about the places they go as part of God’s harvest field.  They believed that God was in the church and with them when they are at home but had little expectation of God being in the places where they go.

So how about you?  What difference might it make to your witness if you recognized that God is already at work in the places you go?