Northern Farmer

Glory to God! It’s warming up around here a bit! In the twenties today and it feels alright! The odds are that it should step up a level here and there as time goes on around here with higher lows at least. I just get sick of day after day of twenty below when I start up outside. I must be getting soft in my later days eh! So with a little luck things should start getting back to normal here. I’m behind on e-mails and everything else after this week. But such is life out here. Good thing I don’t make a living at this blogging or I’d be mighty hungry. Still have enough feed around here for quite a while, just praying for early grass this year. I didn’t even order any garden seed yet, don’t know what’s wrong with me, just never got in the mood yet. But the big garden crops I don’t get from catalogs anyhow, like taters, peas, beans, sweet corn etc. I just get them bulk from the co-op. Except for the sweet corn everything is the old fashioned varieties anyhow at the co-op. And the sweet corn seed I get for free, old money saver Farmer here, I just ask the co-op secretary for a bunch of last year’s seed. They give it to me free and a person can plant quite a patch for little or nothing. I really haven’t had much luck these last few years with the old varieties of sweet corn, in fact I have yet to get my first cob, but I keep trying, just don’t depend on it yet.
But I like our sweet corn patch, its fairly large. I plant it with the four row corn planter and plant anywhere from four to eight varieties. It stretches the season out quite well. Last year I planted sixteen rows, but only a small percentage made it good because of the drought. The stuff that made it was watered heavily every week, from six at night till six in the morning. It was so dry here that if I’da attempted watering it during the day the ground would have never gotten wet. The blazing sun and the already pepper dry soil just couldn’t get wet during the day. But even with that disaster we still had more than enough for ourselves, and for a church folk get together, and for relation and friends. I just wonder what it’ll be like when the weather returns to friendly and we have the crop that we should of gotten.

But such is the past, it doesn’t exist anymore, just learn from it and the present means spring is on its way in a few weeks. I don’t know what this year will bring, but then again show me someone who does. But what ever it brings there’ll always be church stuff to keep a person going strong. For the life of me I can’t figure out how anyone could even attempt to live like this without a strong faith in God. And the last few weeks I’ve talked about small rural churches and things like that. That’s because these things are dear to my heart. And the question on how to revitalize the small rural churches is on my mind all the time. No rock solid answers come when I’m thinking about it. But then again man can’t do it anyhow, it’d take God. So if it’d take God that means that the answer is in His Word, right in front of our noses.

I hope I don’t get into to much hot water here on this post but here goes anyhow. I think I must’a taken a course years ago on how to offend everyone. But the way it looks to me the reason for the churches drying up and all of that is that’s because they’re playing church. Like they were something special or something, when they’re not. In the Bible the church was not a denomination nor a building. In fact they didn’t have church buildings for a long time. What can I say, its a fact that cannot be disputed. Now fast forward to the earlier times of this great country that we live in. During the frontier days there was a great awakening in this country and the Word was carried to every corner of this country and there were very few churches until things got more settled. I’m not talking about the east coast which was well established but the heartland.

The Gospel got preached everywhere by circuit riders and preachers of that sort that risked life and limb to carry the Gospel from town to town, farm to farm, ranch to ranch. In my opinion those were the glory days in this country. Because it was the first time in a long, long time that the church was acting even remotely close to the New Testament. The church was alive, preaching was done anywhere. People were convicted and saved. And here’s where I get myself in trouble. In my opinion it will take this same act of the church in this day and time to become Christian again. Because the church in this country is for the most part dead! If a church is not sending out people to do the work that Christ Himself commissioned the church to do, (this means everyone in the church), then the church is dysfunctional. The main reason a Christian is on this earth is to be Christ like, and that includes spreading the Gospel as Christ did and the early church members did. To do the works that Christ did and to do the works that the early church did in the Bible. But it doesn’t, not because it can’t, but because it refuses to do so.

So what will it take now in the countryside? One thing for sure, we don’t need churches that the folks go to and hide behind the walls figuring that they are so holy. Because rest assured, they are not. We need folks that are on fire for God, who aren’t afraid of what folks my think or say. We need folks that believe the Bible, the whole thing. And with that, we need folks that believe God is the same today as He was back then, not this humanistic garbage that says God took away His gifts and power and we are now left with the Bible as our guide. Because that statement is so false its unbelievable! If we are left with the Bible, well how come we don’t believe it then? No, rest assured everything that was, is! I pray God sends folks that are true to His Word into the countryside again. To go house to house, town to town. To throw some of these dead churches on their side. To preach under a tree or a tent. To have church services in a house or barn. I’d like to see young folks set out to preach with the Gospel with the saying imprinted in their hearts, “MAY THE LAMB THAT WAS SLAIN, RECEIVE THE REWARD OF HIS SUFFERING!”

This is what is needed. No human plan can accomplish it. It has to go back to the basics, the basics that are laid out plainly in the Bible. And every church building in the countryside should be a breeding ground for a huge percentage of missionaries that would travel the countryside and the cities. No more of this unscriptural thinking that people should find the church, that’s nowhere in the Bible, believe me! The church goes out, not in! I do believe I might see this in my lifetime. To most I’m sure it doesn’t seem likely, but that’s when God loves to move! And all of this will probably start in the homes of people that have a love for the Lord, it’ll spread through their families and infect a small church here and there. And a church here and there will become a sending out church to affect more and more families. And on and on it will go.

It might sound far fetched, it might sound impossible but its not! I pray to God that He steps in and starts the process out here in the country. In fact I do believe that He’s started it already. Twice within the last week I’ve had confirmations of this right out of the clear blue. What I once thought of as just my own dreaming was brought up to me by two different preachers, without me mentioning it first. Something’s in the wind, rest assured of that!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.