"Dead" Christians?

The year was 1963. The catechist decided to go see the missionary for a short visit. After an evening spent in mutual companionship, he got up to leave the vicarage. His eyes fell on a light bulb beside the neatly arranged volumes of books on the vicar's desk. He asked to be allowed to take it home. Efforts by the vicar to explain to him that it was "dead" and could no longer supply light proved abortive. The catechist had his way.

Back home, he ingeniously hung the bulb on the rafters of his hut in just the manner he had become accustomed to seeing at the vicarage. And no matter what he did, the contraption simply failed to provide any illumination for the ever-bewildering catechist? It took the vicar's visit two months later and a diagrammatic explanation before he agreed that not only was it really "dead" but without any sort of electrical wiring to transmit power, it was of no use.

The year is 2012. Many a Christian walks around dead! Cut off from the True Vine, most of us remain mere spirited contraptions with all the attributes of the living but absent the divine. It comes as no bewilderment thus that though "Churches" multiply exponentially and are only surpassed by the "worship activities" of today's "Christians" conjoined with the intensification of religious preachments, there is little or no noticeable difference in those who ought to be the "Lights of the World." What lights there were, if any, have been snuffed out. With no "electrical wiring" to the TRUE VINE, darkness prevails.