“[Jesus] told them, ‘You have a saying that goes, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” You find it easy enough to forecast the weather — why can’t you read the signs of the times?'” (Matthew 16:2-3, Peterson)
A friend of mine has recently returned from a holiday weekend on Lake Superior. He went sailing — and aboard a proper schooner with two masts and a galley, not the sort of poke-abouts that I remember as a boy. We had an opportunity to debrief the experience a few days later. My friend taught me something about sailing.
I was especially impressed with a detail that I had not heard about before. Proper sailing vessels have proper sails, and proper sails display a series of “tails” along their leading edge. They are sown into the sail’s fabric, horizontal-like, one high, one low, and one in the middle. And the tails have a story to tell. They are “tell tails.”
The tails tell an experienced captain whether the boat is “lifted” or “knocked,” and when the time has come to “jibe.” (This has something to do with keeping the boat on track and under way.) They flow with the wind. When the sail is trimmed properly and the boat stands at an optimal angle to the wind, the tell tails stream straight out. When something is amiss, the tails flutter and droop — and the boat may eventually stall. But when the tails stream out, my friend explained with enthusiasm, it is as if the boat shifts into a higher gear. It is energized. It picks up speed. It slices away toward the horizon.
My friend and I agreed that a sermon illustration was lurking somewhere in his sailing experience.
The “wind” of the Holy Spirit of God is blowing across our world. Every day in Africa, the church grows by approximately 21,000 souls; this is a “tell tail” standing straight out in the breeze. The burgeoning church in China proposes to recruit, train and send 100,000 new, cross-cultural missionaries, from Central Asia to the Middle East. Another “tell tail.” And missionary-minded churches, agencies and individuals around the world are partnering today as never before, in creative international and interdenominational relationships that are prepared to bend every effort to get the job done. Here, too, is a “tell tail” standing in the wind of God’s Spirit.
God is growing the church beyond our shores, mobilizing the church to mission, and building dynamic partnerships in missionary obedience. God is reviving churches, transforming communities, and reforming individual lives. God is at work. He is building a Kingdom.
We need to keep an eye on “tell tails” such as these; they are the “signs of the times.” If we were sailors, we would trim the sails and set the rudder to catch this kind of wind. But we are not sailors, of course — and we don’t trim canvas. We have values and commitments to trim. We have lives and vocations to set into the waves. We have service to render and a direction to chart. And if we trim well, like well-trained sailors, we hope to catch the wind of God’s movement and power in the world. He is building a Kingdom. He invites us to join in.