Sometimes we're very tempted to look on the outward evidence of God's blessing. And for a local church, one of those can be, Oh, our church is growing so much, we're being blessed by God. And that may, in fact, be the case. But the other side of that coin is, Our church hasn't grown in years, or we're losing people here and there. And is God judging us? Are we in trouble?

I think that may be the wrong question to ask, because if you look at the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3, Six out of seven of them were gaining new members, and yet almost all of them are rebuked by the Lord as being inadequate in some way. There's only one church that was losing members like crazy, and that was the church at Smyrna, because they were dying for their faith and they were faithful to the end, and we would never say the church at Smyrna was under God's judgment. They're under the blessing of God.

More practically speaking, though, there can be two pastors who are identical in their philosophy of ministry. Their preaching is excellent. everything they do is the same and in one location his church thrives and grows and people are coming to faith in Christ and in the other location it just seems like nothing is happening in those cases we just simply defer to Christ he is the Lord of the church our call is simply to be faithful to obey him what he does with numbers is completely up to Jesus that's his call not mine