There Is No Next Year

I am a college sports fan. To be specific I follow SEC Football and University of Kentucky basketball. When you are a KY fan, you have to follow the whole SEC in football to have a successful season, though my gridiron Cats have be strong"er" the past few years. So I was disappointed when my Cats lost, even though I am proud of their very good season. But the 2011/2012 Preseason Top 25 is already out and I am glad to see the UK Cats on the very top.


Wonderful thing about basketball, one team gets to celebrate, congrats to UConn, (and the Texas A&M ladies) I'm over my brief bout with basketball bitterness, and everybody else get to say, "Just wait till next year."

The truth of the matter is that's fine for sports, because in the grand scheme of things, who really cares. Our lives and especially our eternal lives are not saved or lost based on what five teenagers do on a basketball court. It is though, very dependent on what we do in our churches day after day, week after week and year after year. For the lives of lost and hurting men and women, there is no "next year."

After spending another weekend with the KAIROS prison ministry team inside the walls of Bertie Correctional Institution, a closed (max) security prison facility in Windsor, NC, I realize again just how fragile this life and our time on it is. Of the six guys at my family table, all of them were under 42 years old and four of them under 25. What they did to land in prison or how long they have to be there is not nearly as important as all of them sharing with us that they had a close affiliation with a church growing up.

What is KAIROS

As a pastor and ministry leader, I have had the "I don't know what is wrong with my kids, I raised them in church their whole lives," conversation untold number of times. I think I may have a clue as to what is wrong. We raise them in church, but we fail to raise them in Christ. There is a huge difference. In this culture, church has become an institution or club that we join out of generational obligation or for the social status that membership in this congregation or that one brings us. That is not the church, the church is a disciple-making, evangelistic, mission-centric extension of the ministry of Jesus Christ, that is why we are called the Body of Christ.

I have to wonder, are we putting off ministry and truly reaching this generation for "next season" or are we willing to get back in the game and work hard to reach everyone we can in the name of Jesus Christ while it is still today. The guys we met this weekend were blessed with another chance, but we met 42 out of 1000 residents, and maybe consistently minister with about 100 at any given time, and this is only one of the 70 or so institutions in NC and of the thousands in the nation.

The point is this, we are living among a people that do not know the Lord, they know the church and don't like it, but they don't know Jesus. The worst thing that will happen is not that they may go to prison, the worst thing is that millions will go to hell, millions in our hometowns across this nations, and billions across the globe.

Church, there is no next season, if people die lost, they die eternally lost. The need, from rural communities to huge cities, from every corner of the nation and world, is for us, the church to take seriously the commission of Jesus Christ and begin now making disciples of all nations, both the nations we travel to and the nations that travel to us.

Kentucky fell one point short of a trip to the championship game. But that’s alright, they have next year. How many people have to fall short in life, have to die without Christ and without a next “season” before we wake up and make the difference, the Lord has called us to make?