[Monday's Devotional] - He is able to do immeasurably more

There are a lot of anecdotes around in the church about how God can use our efforts and make them fruitful for his purposes. Some of them are a bit clichéd, but I am unashamedly going to add another. You can decide where to file it!

I was chatting to a nice youngish lady at New Wine this summer (I say youngish as she was about my age). She explained to me that she had been working in Nepal. I had to admit to her that all I knew about Nepal I had learned as a child in the 70s by doing CMS fundraising projects at Sunday school. She commented that the church in Nepal had been small in the mid 70s, just a few hundred people. I asked how many Christians there are in Nepal now. "About a million" came the casual answer. I was stunned. A million! From just a few hundred 35 years ago! So, if there were a thousand Christians in Nepal in 1976, to have a million by 2012 means that the church has multiplied tenfold every twelve years. That is a 21% increase a year! My wife did the maths for that and so it will be right. Despite the encouraging figures released this summer on church growth in the UK, we are nowhere near that level.

Later, I reflected and talked to my wife about it. I remembered my Sunday school days. There we all were in a smelly church hall, watching slide shows about Nepal and other nations during Lent and learning new songs about them from a reel-to-reel tape machine. Each week we prayed for the country and, most of us, put a portion of our pocket money into a cardboard box for the work of CMS in whatever nation we were focused on. At the end of the project my Granny would take all the boxes in, count the money and send off a cheque. We never learnt what the money got used for.

So I stood in a Somerset field at twilight with a gas light flickering in my hand, some thirty five years later, being told by a real life missionary exactly what God had put all of our small contributions towards.

The message is obvious and I won't labour the point. You may be surprised by what God has done with your efforts.

For prayer….

Thank God for what he has done with your efforts and how he is able to use them for his purposes.

Thank God that he has asked you to work with him and that he has chosen to use you to help build his kingdom.

John Martin-Jones