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Yesterday I suggested that Jesus used spectacular events to give everyone a chance to believe in him, but that overall, the spectacular didn’t work as well as investing in the twelve. Those twelve, with a total of 120 upper room believers braved hardship and reached the world.
My observation of the two large crowds in Luke 7 (Jesus, his disciples, and his followers going into Nain and a large funeral procession coming out of Nain) was new. Here’s something on the ineffectiveness of spectacular events I observed a while back.
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’” (Hebrews 3.7 – 11, ESV)
The Hebrews passage speaks of the generation that experienced three of the most spectacular events imaginable: Passover (Exodus 12), the Red Sea (Exodus 14), and Sinai (Exodus 20). And out of 600,000 men who left Egypt (Exodus 12.37), the total number who entered the Promised Land was 2–Joshua and Caleb.
For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. (1 Corinthians 10.1 – 5, ESV)
As leaders, the lesson is that we shouldn’t build all our ministry strategy around spectacular events. As ordinary followers of Jesus, it’s the daily walk that counts, and we can’t rest on some exciting experience from years ago. It’s how we walk by faith today that matters!
We received the same promises as those people in the wilderness, but the promises didn’t do them a bit of good because they didn’t receive the promises with faith. (Hebrews 4.2, MSG)