I’ve talked a little bit before about how fast our culture has become. There’s no question that we have become a society that expects everything to come easy and quick and when it doesn’t we can find ourselves very frustrated. Too often we look for the same thing in our spiritual lives – a quick fix or the easy button.
As leaders we can get impatient with the time it’s taking our students to work through areas in their lives that God is trying to refine. We need to remind ourselves that sometimes God brings immediate transformation in the form of deliverance, but other times He chooses to take people through a process of transformation. In Galatians 4 Paul referred to the Galatians as his “children with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you.” He was acknowledging that there was labor involved in seeing Christ formed within them.
It’s easy to go to a conference and get excited about God and the things He does in those couple days. I think our conferences are life changing times for many students, but when the emotions wear off do we invest our time and energy to help students walk through the process of what God spoke to them during that weekend?
I appreciated the illustration Mike Cavanaugh shared about reaping and sowing during one of his sessions at this past conference. He talked about how sometimes it takes awhile for us to reap what we have sown. Many people come back from a conference excited to make changes in their lives and reap the benefits of those changes. However, they are still reaping from bad decisions they made prior to the conference and as they see those things happening they begin to get discouraged because they have not yet begun to reap the rewards of the changes they have made.
Students may need even more encouragement and support after the conference than they did before. They may need to be reminded that they will soon reap the rewards of the decisions they made at the conference as long as they persevere and remain faithful to their commitments. Remember that sometimes God chooses to take us through the process because the growth is just as important as the end result. Ask the Lord for patience and the energy to help them walk through the process and be prepared to stand with them in accountability, pray for emotional and spiritual healing, and encourage them to press on!
Proverbs 11:18 (NIV) – “A wicked person earns deceptive wages, but the one who sows righteousness reaps a sure reward.”