Title:- Clinging To Corpses
Revelation 3:18………and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see.
It is North America's only marsupial, and famous for playing dead. The small unglamorous creature with big black eyes, a pale pointy face and a hairless tail like a rat's, can become so stressed that it goes into shock and quite simply, passes out! Such action may stop predators chasing it, but unfortunately the already seemingly limp and lifeless body takes away from some car drivers, the need to swerve. This one wasn't playing dead now.
The Opposum lay at the side of the road, stiff and sodden with rain. Perched atop the poor corpse were two 5 inch babies, shivering and wretched trying to get what warmth was left from their poor dead mother. A visit to the vet, a warm box, and a surgical glove filled with hot water to act as a warm body; a little cat food, and in just a few hours the little Opossums were bright eyed and running about. They are the most freakiest looking little things. Imagine a smelly 'Clanger' drunk and with teeth. That’s what a baby Opossum looks like!
In a similar vein, I heard on the news today of 'an odious smell coming from a vehicle' left in the car park of a large food store. Investigation found the dead body of someone's mother still buckled into the passenger seat. Her daughter had been driving around with her like that for five days and had just popped in to get some provisions. It was gruesomely obvious that the poor daughter was both sad and sick.
I remember speaking to some church planters in a large American inner city. Some of that denominations dying congregations in the area have both facilities and finances that make outreach to the emerging generation a real and exciting possibility. In addition to that, many local large and successful suburban churches have personnel and resources ready to come alongside and help with a fresh attack against the gates of hell in the inner cities. Unfortunately, the tiny and shivering congregations sheltering themselves in the memories of their great and once glorious past, are either like the baby marsupials I found on the side of the road, frightened and too desperate to move, or like the sad daughter driving her mother’s corpse around, very sick indeed. They are still adamant in their loss and madness and so still clinging to the lifeless corpse of a church that was once, long ago, thriving.
Like the daughter driving around her dead mother, many of our churches are refusing to accept the facts of their demise and are still willing to live with the increasing smell of death. Soon, some group or philanthropist shall turn their remains into a neatly prepared cadaver.
Friends, it’s time to get off the corpse and bury the dead.
Listen:- I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; Deuteronomy 30:19
Pray:- Be it ever so hard, help me this day O Lord, to choose LIFE.
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