Episode Details

In our text this morning, we witness Jesus sending out seventy-two people to various towns and places to prepare the way for his coming. He gives them encouragement and instruction which are still relevant for his followers today.“The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few”What does Christ mean by this statement?To begin with, for those he was sending out, there was great opportunity for the message. Many folks would listen to them. The harvest is plentiful.But does this translate into our own day? Is there receptivity to the Gospel now? I would say that there is.It is certainly true that there is widespread indifference today, and this can be wearying. But we can focus instead on those who are receptive to Christ. And these people do exist.Some of you may have heard the following story:One day, a man was walking on a beach after a great storm. Thousands and thousands of star fish had been washed up on the shore. The man came upon a young boy who was picking up the star fish, one by one, and gently throwing them back in the sea. The man approached the young boy and asked him why he was doing this since there were countless thousands of star fish along the shore. “You can’t possibly make a difference,” he said.The boy picked up another star fish and threw it back in the ocean. “It made a difference to that one,” he said.It is true that we cannot save the whole world. And nor does God call us to. But we can make a difference in what God puts in front of us – to the people he calls us to love, to the tasks he calls us to complete.This leads to the second part of Christ’s statement: “The labourers are few”.I take this to mean that those who are truly willing to respond to the call of God to serve him are rare. Most are preoccupied with other things. And it is certainly easy to be so in our day and age.The question for us, then, is: Am I willing to be available to the purposes of God? To be like the prophet Isaiah, who responded to the question, “Who will go for us?” with, “Here I am, Lord. Send me.”That kind of thing is easy to say, particularly for young and enthusiastic people. But Jesus elsewhere tells us to count the cost before promising things which we are not willing to give.It sounds exciting to put ourselves in God’s service, but it involves a complete commitment: our attention, energy, relationships, finances, food, even our lives.Most profoundly, it involves our willingness to suffer, to pick up our crosses and to follow Christ wherever he calls us to go.Even given this challenge, we can still ask God sincerely, “What would you have me do? Where would you have me go?”And we can ask ourselves, “Is anything holding me back?”“Lambs in the midst of wolves”Christ continues by saying that he is sending out the seventy-two as “lambs in the midst of wolves”. And he continues by telling them, “Carry no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals, and greet no one on the road.”What is referred to here is the manner of our going out. Consider the gentleness and innocence of lambs in comparison to the aggression and violence of wolves.As followers of Christ and his messengers, we are told to conduct ourselves differently to the world. The world is a very harsh place filled with aggressively ambitious people, filled with anger and violence, filled with selfishness, and, as a result, filled with pain.A lamb sent out in Christ’s name seeks not to add to all of this sin and misery but to be different. To be a source of grace. To be gentle, to be present for and to other people in love, as Christ was.And why does Christ tell his disciples not to take any provisions with them? Literally, here, to teach them to rely upon God’s power and provision. And we can learn a similar thing.It is all too easy to find confidence in the material means of our existence: our money, our intellectual capacity, our status. The established Church very much has this problem. Perhaps we have this problem in our own lives.And yet Christ sends his workers out int