Rain

... like gentle rain on grass...

 - From Deuteronomy 32

A little word of correction to most evangelists. 

Now, I love a fiery sermon. Sometimes, an angry resounding from the pulpit is what we need, to get our attention, to motivate us to action. At the very least, it's what's required when the need is for people to repent, and turn.

Brother Jed Smock has been visiting college campuses throughout the US, for decades. He plants himself on central campus and excoriates college students about their lifestyles and attitudes. For many of them, it will be the first, and maybe only time, in their lives, that they will be so close to a person that will challenge them so mercilessly. 

There's that kind of preaching. 

We used to love hearing it from Brother Donald Rose, at Camp Schockley in Oklahoma, back in the 1980s. He visited Dexter, Michigan, once, for a weekend revival. He had no college education, had a career working in a printing plant, but on the weekends would preach in country churches up in the hills of south Ohio. He was from West Virginia originally. He seemed to have the entire Bible memorized, and could quote and harmonize it like none I have heard, before or since. His pleas were not laced with anger. But there was a thread of desperation and urgency as he pushed the congregation to listen to the Word of God.

Those are a form of communicating the Gospel that we truly need. 

But Moses reflected on God's approach to the Hebrews of his time. "Like gentle rain on the grass." The man that saw God pass by as a violent wind storm, that witnessed Him blazing forth from a bush, that joined Elijah outside of time, and the Son of God, on the mount of Transfiguration. This same Moses, when he thought back about all of it, remembered that it was really mostly a gentle, steady, relentless, soaking, over time.

And that's the way it should be with us. Don't try to knock them over with sudden words of admonition. Let God's word flow through you, steadily, constantly, quietly. But in the end may His word soak you, and those around you; giving life, and giving hope.