When do you know if you are pregnant...?

Being born again is a strange mystery indeed. After the message on Sunday, I invited people to respond to the gospel and to repent of their sins, surrender their lives to Jesus and invite Him to dwell within them by His spirit. Two people responded. This week one of them ended up being escorted out of a local hospital after violently threatening a woman...the other attended a youth rally and spent the night in worship and prayer at the altar. The pregnancy of spirit isn't always so pronounced, dramatic or evident...maybe there has been conception and new life has started, but the evidence of that new life grows and grows until it is born. Sometimes we look on the outside and see nothing but inwardly something has taken root that will increase and take over. Having a fertile pulpit results in life taking hold, spreading, implanting, watering, stirring up, creating desire, awakening appetite, thawing frozen minds or hearts and shinning light in dark places. You just preach the Word of God and watch what happens...sometimes things are not always as they seem.

It reminded me of this quote from CS Lewis:

"The world does not consist of 100 per cent Christians and 100 per cent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name; some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it….Many of the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth many have been in this position. And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together. Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgments about Christians and non Christians in the mass. It is some use comparing cats and dogs, or even men and women, in the mass, because there one knows definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn (either slowly or suddenly) from a dog into a cat. But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking of real people whom we know at all, but only two vague ideas which we have got reading novels and newspapers. If you want to compare the bad Christian and the good Atheist, you must think about two real specimens whom you have actually met. Unless we come down to brass tacks in that way, we shall only be wasting time." -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Chapter 10, “Nice People or New Men.”