Prepare for the Harvest

CVB: The book is called Prepare For the Harvest. Tell me a little bit about your book and what motivated you to bring this message forward.

Pamela Christian: Well, we know that we’ve got the Bible and also the prophetic words indicating that we will have a last days influx of a great harvest of people. I got to thinking that this harvest is going to be people from all walks of life and from alternative lifestyles. If 10 new people arrived at my 200 member church, would we be ready to actually welcome them and minister to them? If they came from all kinds of alternative lifestyles, are we prepared to love them and be the hospital that the church is supposed to be?

So my concern is that the Church isn’t prepared. We’ve got a lot of individual Christians that are not prepared. Many leaders are not prepared to instruct the congregation.

CVB: Yes. That’s good. I appreciate that message.

Pamela: I want to help the Church be prepared for whatever we’re supposed to be doing. We’ve got people who are addicts and in all kinds of lifestyles who are going to be coming to the Church for help. We must have our heads on correctly and not have the judgment, the bias, and the fear. I needed to write a book that would explain the past, present, and future; the past for how we got to where we are; the present with the condition of our culture and how it is really antichrist and thinks the Bible and the Church is irrelevant. So we need to step it up.

God does not want to return for a bride that’s anything less than spotless. So we as the Church are failing, and the Bible says judgment begins with the Church. We’ve been given the charge of the Great Commission and at this point in time, we’ve failed. But we know God is a God of second chances. So I’m delighted to think that I get to be a small part with this book and my ministry to come alongside the Church, and specifically church leadership.

This book is also written for individuals, but I want to encourage churches to find those organizations that are already in place and are proven to help people say with pornography or with addictions. The Church does not have to reinvent the wheel, but we can associate with these proven Christian based organizations and get their leadership trained so that when the people arrive at their doorstep, they can welcome them with open arms, like Jesus would.

CVB: You talk about apologetics and that you’re not only appealing emotionally, but you’re appealing intellectually. Tell me about that. What was the motivation for that approach in this particular project?

Pamela: It’s really not just this particular project. I’d say it’s the way that the Lord birthed me into the Kingdom. I didn’t find Jesus until I was almost 30 years old and I had a life crisis. And so everything I’ve thought I had based my life on I learned was fake. It was deception. I had proven that without Jesus, I could only make a mess in my life. And I said, “God, if you’re real, if you’re everything that I’ve heard about and you can make something good out of my life, I want you to have my whole life.” So that’s when I completely surrendered to him.

I was just short of turning 30 years old and I wanted to make up for lost time. So I tuned into Christian talk radio and I listened to it every chance I got. I found a church. I was a sponge – so much so that within five years of being converted to a true believer, the Lord actually called me to teach for community Bible study. By having the responsibility of teaching the class, I had to study a ton, which was feeding me.

CVB: That’s wonderful.

Pamela: Yeah. It was another way that the Lord hurried to grow me up in Christ. I found myself being invited to speak and teach across the country. I also found myself being drawn to Christian radio and actually was a radio broadcaster in Los Angeles and in San Francisco. I had people all along tell me, “you’re going to write a book.” I thought, “I don’t want to write a book. That’s too tedious. It’s a very long process.” But I read an article by ABC News about how Americans are surprisingly flexible about religious faith. I thought I would read that we don’t mind having people from different countries or different religions living in our country. Instead, I read that highly educated people, people in positions of influence and leadership who are taking tenets of different religions and creating a religion of their own preference.

CVB: Yeah, exactly. It’s a smorgasbord faith.

Pamela: And there are even names for it like “Chris-lam,’ which is Christianity and Islam, or Bu-Ju, which is Buddhism and Judaism. This enraged me and broke my heart at the same time. So I thought I would be writing an op-ed piece, but while I was writing I really felt the Lord whisper, “No it’s going to be a book.”

I said, “Okay, Lord, whatever it takes.” I realized that people are deceived, and the nature of deception is that the victim is unaware. So in a loving way, you have to be in their face to get them to even consider what they believe and why they believe it.

So the first book is called, Examine Your Faith, Finding Truth in a World of Lies. That one is endorsed by Josh McDowell. I wanted to appeal to people’s intellect with respect, so I talk about truth versus relativism. I talk about religious pluralism and that all religions are not equal. And I provide evidence for my positions.

I tried to be as inductive as possible because I want my readers and audience to know that I respect them. So rather than tell them what to believe, I’m trying to help them understand and to use their own logic and reason to come to their own conclusion. Then I included a chapter on each of the five major world religions and one on the New Age. I wanted to show the origins and the tenants of the religions so that any intelligent person could see that you can’t blend them. There’s no way.

Then I go through and I use extra-biblical evidence in support of the Bible. Well, if the Bible is the real deal, let’s examine what it says about Jesus. With all that I do, I’m trying to get people to discover and live in life-giving truth.

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Order your copy of Prepare for the Harvest! Confidence in God’s End-Time Promises by Pamela Christian