It is a natural thought, though not necessarily supernatural, to want to quit on after much sowing with no visible, immediate fruit. That urge in us to quit, however, is also resisted subconsciously by our training (think of Winston Churchhill’s “Never never never never quit.”) I for one was taught by my father to not quit.
So, how do we know what to do? This is something I have spent a lot of time dealing with over the last five years.
Should we follow our natural instinct to quit and just follow the path of least resistance?
- If that were the solution we should all go to the Philippines or some other third world Catholic country where we already agree on the Bible and 90% of it’s content. That wouldn’t be faithful to the command of the Great Commission “into all the world”.
- Another result of that would be that William Carey, Adoniram Judson, Henry Martyn, Samuel Zwimmer and others would have never went to Arabia, India, Burma, etc where the peoples were not receptive to the Gospel for years. There are now millions of believers in India and Burma after many years of fruitless sowing 150 years ago.
- Thirdly, if we did that, we would spend our lives following the apparent harvest and not the Lord. I know a missionary who left Iceland to go to Central African country because he heard of the big numbers he could gather there. When he got there he found that it came with it’s own challenges. First, it was blazing hot. Second, the numbers were in church (it’s not hard to get Africans to come to a church pastored by a foreigner, at least for a service or tw0 to see if he is going to get some help) but real conversion and life change of the people was just a grueling and difficult there as in Iceland. He returned to Iceland after a couple years letting his churches know that he had missed the will of God.
Ok. So maybe we should stick with it till death do us part? Here are two biblical reasons I have found when it is time to knock the dust off of our feet and move on:
- When you have been forced out of a city/country unable to return. Acts 13:50-51
- When everyone has heard (and understood) the Gospel in a given town or region and rejected it. Mark 6:11, Luke 9:5.
When one of these two things has happened then IT IS TIME TO QUIT. Until that time, IT IS TIME TO PREACH. Never, never, never, stay and be quite. That is something you’ll never find in the pattern of the apostles of the early church.