Delta Recourse
“The afflicted and needy are seeking water, but there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst; I, the Lord, will answer them Myself, as the God of Israel I will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and springs in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land fountains of water.” Isaiah 41:17-18
The Lord put a very vivid picture in my mind and told me it was a picture of the church. What I saw was actually two pictures. The first was of a very large river, like the Mississippi, into which flowed numerous tributaries of various sizes and personalities (meandering, rushing, etc.). “This,” God said, “is the model of a church. It is a good model, but it is not for you…”
Then my “eyes” were drawn to where that large river flowed into the ocean, and what I saw was a huge delta with countless numbers of water channels issuing out of the main river, winding in their course and crisscrossing one another to the sea. The contrast was unmistakable: many waterways flowing into a large river versus many waters flowing out of the large river.
Although I heard no audible words, I sensed immediately what the Lord was telling me. Instead of trying to get many people to f low into the church and merely become part of the larger church program, concentrate on releasing people out of the church river into the parched regions on either side. Overflow the banks and send individuals spilling over, in their ministries, into the world.
This is why it is so important to see each of you released into your ministry service, with your spiritual gifts fully functional and your spiritual perception adequately heightened. A church cannot do its job simply by collecting many souls; only when we have mobilized and sent forth many people are we doing what Jesus, the Lord of the Church, has instructed us to do.
Obviously, not everyone is sent geographically away from their congregation, but each of us is to be sufficiently discipled and nurtured to the point where we can launch out into some particular phase of ministry and answer to the need of others–to go as Jesus said, announcing the present coming of the Kingdom of God.
For many pastors, their most difficult “job” is finding enough people to do what needs to be done to run the church. My great privilege, in response to the word of the Lord, is finding enough to do for all the people of the church who so eagerly wish to be discipled and nurtured through the “delta recourse”, i.e. serving as individual saints who are willing to assume personal responsibility to grow in their ministry.
Many months later, I was reminded that the delta recourse has an additional meaning. The symbol for delta means “change.” That is what it usually takes to follow Jesus …
Streaming into the desert,
Daniel
