There is a price to pay for things not done. If we have a season in the church when we are not visiting the community. then even if we restart tomorrow, which we should, there will be a price to pay because of the time we have missed, we have lost the harvest. We have not reached people who were there to be reached. The apostle Paul says that he rushed to get back to Jerusalem for the day of Pentecost, because that is when all the pilgrims were present and the city was swollen with the people. It was the time of opportunity, and we must not miss those windows of opportunity.
We missed the boat in the Soviet Union years ago just when all the imprisonments of unregistered Baptists had ended in 1990. In Moscow there was the marvellous sight of the barrows set up by the unregistered Baptists in the Metro, in the underground, where they were running libraries of Christian books in the underground tunnels. They could not sell them because they would have sold out and had no more – so many people wanted to read – and there were queues several hundred yards long along the passage of tunnels of Muscovites who wanted to read Christian books. So they were running these libraries. That window of opportunity was opened just for a few months, and then the mood changed. But how sad that we, Reformed people, did not have many books translated into Russian ready for that time. The cults were ready but we were not ready.
There are churches that have been gently subsiding and yet they are sound, and they have dear people in them, but they have not opened a Sunday School, and they have not visited the community. And now there is almost too few of them to do those things effectively. They have left it too late. Never let it be said that the standard for any one of us is what is convenient and what is comfortable. That is not the way to live for the Lord. You know how untiring the Saviour was, night and day, and the apostle Paul too constantly pressing himself, driving himself. We are here to serve the Lord, and eternally we shall enjoy the fruit that God gives by grace.