How you think will change the way you view your city

This weekend we continued our series, “City within the City” and continued our exploration of the Biblical and global reality that all of humanity is moving toward a mostly urban demographic. And the implications of this for the church are sizable.

The Lord now chose seventy-two other disciples and sent them ahead in pairs to all the towns and places he planned to visit. These were his instructions to them: “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields. Luke 10.1-2

The harvest is people! People are the precious fruit of the earth and are valuable to God. Every person we come in contact with on a regular basis is the harvest Jesus is talking about here in Luke 10. So, if you want to be a farmer you have to go to the city and think harvest. Everything a farmer does is centered around harvest time. From tilling the ground, planting seeds, watering… it’s all to reap a harvest. Is the purpose of your life to be part of God’s harvest of the precious fruit of the earth?

This means we must be cultivating relationships with people that are far from God, planting positive seeds of God’s truth with others, and watering the message with God’s love. If the church is to be a city within the city and make it hard for people to go to hell in our city, we have to think harvest.

Yet, the problem here is that many Christians think like an astronaut instead of a farmer. It’s an attitude of escape. Escape from the hostile workplace, elements of society that offends Christian thought and the pollution of the world. Our focus is so much on heaven that we forget our primary purpose of being on Earth- being a city within the city.