Bishop Notice charges Church to ‘plant seeds’ for nation’s healing

Administrative Bishop of the New Testament Church of God, Dr Roy Notice, has charged the Church to see themselves as ‘agents of healing’ in the nation.

He stressed that the Church should not only “have a voice that exposes and critiques the moral standing of the nation”, but that it must also ensure that it has a kind of presence that would bring forth healing and transformation across the country.

Notice, who was the speaker of the second session of the fourth annual National Day of Prayer, ‘Heal the Family, Heal the Nation’, which was held on Wednesday at the Power of Faith Ministries International in Portmore, St Catherine, encouraged congregants to walk daily with their “bags of gospel seeds” to be planted in the lives of Jamaicans.

In his message, which included the use of farming motifs, Notice further stated that he desired to see every preacher never allowing their “voice to be silent”.

“When people no longer hear the gospel, they believe that life becomes a free-for-all. So the gospel seed must be planted. Remember that as we plant gospel seeds, we’re identifying young men and boys whose hearts are hardened and we draw near to them ... to hear their stories so we can drop a likkle seed and that seed may be ‘I’m praying for you’. That seed may be ‘let’s sit down and hold a reason (conversation)’, [or] that seed may be ‘You know that we love you and we want to help you’. That seed may be [that] you look at them and begin to speak life over them,” he said.

“As people of God, let us be planters,” Notice implored, adding that believers should also practise patience as they await the period of “evangelistic harvest”.

The “ground of Jamaica [has got] hard,” he said in reference to the many people whose hearts had become hardened over time.

He said that the nation’s psyche needed healing from self-doubt, self-hatred, “a broken and toxic culture that promotes daggering and nakedness and sexual looseness”, and from trickery and deception that lead to scamming and corruption.

ROOT CAUSE

These issues, he reasoned, stemmed from experiencing emotional, physical, and sexual abuse or poor parenting, unresolved conflicts, and buried anger.

Notice deduced that for the healing of the nation to occur and for the nation to be preserved, there needs to be more “sowers of seed”.

“And so without offending anyone, I want to say to us as a Church that along with the language that we use to say that people must plant seeds in our ministries – and there is a time and place for that – but there is another time and another place where the Church cannot be the recipients of seed but [should be] the distributors of seed,” he argued.

Such seed distributions should include that of the gospel of grace, the gospel of power, and the gospel of love, he said.

“We haffi walk with we bagga seed every day. So, ... even though people are resistant to the gospel, even though the new and emerging philosophies seek to contradict the truths of God’s word, we can’t counter it with our eloquence. We haffi just walk and drop a gospel seed. Every time we get a chance, we are dropping a seed of truth, a seed of life, a seed of power because the gospel and the word of God sets people free,” he said.

Notice also called on believers to continue to lean on God in the present and for the future no matter what crisis the country goes through.

“A people who know how to celebrate the goodness of God will never be overcome by hopelessness and helplessness no matter what the present realities are. A healthy nation places God at the centre. When we don’t acknowledge the greatness of God, we do not reduce God in size, in reach or in power. When we don’t acknowledge the greatness of God, we expose our own spiritual shallowness, our own human limitation, our own smallness, and our own unwise risk-taking to live lives without acknowledging God,” he said.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com