Pray for the field. If God calls, then prepare for the field. When it is time, go to the field. A life lost for Christ is a life well spent.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of preparing oneself for a life dedicated to serving God's calling.
Paul Washer's quote highlights the significance of being spiritually prepared to take action in response to God's call. It suggests that dedicating one's life to Christ, even if it may lead to sacrifice, is a noble and meaningful pursuit. The 'field' symbolizes the areas where one serves or spreads their faith, encouraging believers to actively engage in their spiritual journey and mission.
In practice
In a sermon about dedicating one's life to faith and service.
We deal five minutes with a person and their conversion and then we spend the next fifty years trying to disciple a goat into a sheep. I'm not saying this because I'm angry. I'm saying this because countless people are being deceived.
There is no such thing as a great man of God, only weak, pitiful, faithless men of a great and merciful God.
Those who would send out thousands of questionnaires asking the unconverted what they would desire most in a worship service should realize that ten thousand unanimous opinions of carnal men do not carry the authority of one jot or tittle of God's Word.
The evidence of conversion is not a decision card filled out, it's a life being lived out.
Repentance is simply giving up to stop fighting against God and to stop attempting to gain your own salvation through your own works; to literally give up and fall upon Christ. That is salvation.
When we realize what we were before Christ and what we deserved in that state, it further magnifies the enormity of the gospel for us.
If you are going to live by faith, then expect your faith to be tested. A faith that can't be tested can't be trusted.
So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.
Christians must lean on the Cross of Christ just as travelers lean on a staff when they begin a long journey.
Let us put our hands today again at (God's) disposition and pray that he takes our hands to guide us. Let his hand take ours so we won't sink, but will serve life which is stronger than death, and love which is stronger than hatred.
Patient endurance permits us to cling to our faith in the Lord and our faith in His timing when we are being tossed about by the surf of circumstance. Even when a seeming undertow grasps us, somehow, in the tumbling, we are being carried forward, though battered and bruised.
A key to everything is surrender - to really come before the Lord and say, 'I will literally stay here as long as you want me to stay' or 'God, I will really go anywhere on the earth.'
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