Sunday, January 12, 2014

Receiving or Reproducing?

'Imagine being in Sudan.  You walk into a Thatched hut with a small group of Sudanese church leaders, and you sit down to teach them God's Wrod. As soon as you start, you lose eye contact with all of them. No one is looking at you, and you hardly see their eyes the rest of the time.   The reason is because they're  writing down every word you say.  They come up to you afterward and say, "Teacher, we are going to take everything we have learned from God's Wrod, translate it into our languages, and teach it in our tribes." They were not listening to receive but to reproduce. '  David Platt, "Radical".

These are people, in Sudan, who take Jesus' words to "make disciples of all nations" very seriously.  As we sit and listen to teaching from the pastors of our churches today, will he or she see your eyes or will you be diligently writing down the message so that you can share it with others?  Will you be receiving the message only to forget it soon after you leave or will you be recording it to reproduce your learning in others helping them to grow in discipleship with Jesus?  

2 comments:

Safari Through The Word Ministries said...

Paul, the same in Kenya. The phenomena of Kenya is that when you take a flight everyone has their heads gown and are reading their Bible s at the gate and in the plane.

Anonymous said...

Jim Rohn taught that anything worth remembering is worth writing down. How much more so, the Word of God.