Learning How to be a Faithful Farmer for God’s Harvest!

Reap a Harvest: The Fourth Step of the Farmer’s Strategy!

Matthew 9:37-38; John 4:34-38; 1 Corinthians 9:7-11; Galatians 6:7-9 (NAS95)

We are learning that the strategy of a hard-working farmer has four steps, each of which the faithful farmer must diligently work, if the farmer hopes to harvest a large crop yield:

The fourth step of the faithful farmer’s strategy is the heart’s desire of all hardworking farmers – the reaping of the harvest! As farmer’s cultivate the soil, they do so in preparation of sowing good seed. They sow good seed into the ground so that it will grow into the intended plant they have planted. Their expectation is the same as that of Jesus’ claim from Matthew 7:16, “You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?” Farmers cultivate the soil and plant good seeds in expectation of having good crop yields of that which they planted.

To bring about the harvest, the farmers care for the maturing plant as it buds out of the ground. A farmer that uses the wrong kind of fertilizers, or provides too much or too little water, or doesn’t protect their crops from animals or insects, will find an otherwise healthy crop not producing as the farmer expected. Never forget that farming doesn’t feed just the farmer’s family, it feeds the whole world! We all would be concerned by a farmer that would feed the world with a crop he wouldn’t first feed to his own family. As 2 Timothy 2:6, our theme verse for this sermon series demonstrates, “The hard-working farmer ought to be the first to receive his share of the crops.” Paul communicated to the church in Corinth a similar message, in 1 Corinthians 9:7-11:

Who at any time serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat the fruit of it? Or who tends a flock and does not use the milk of the flock? I am not speaking these things according to human judgment, am I? Or does not the Law also say these things? For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing.” God is not concerned about oxen, is He? Or is He speaking altogether for our sake? Yes, for our sake it was written, because the plowman ought to plow in hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of sharing the crops. If we sowed spiritual things in you, is it too much if we reap material things from you?

There was a man who went out to change the world. After years of travel and great effort, he came to the realization that if he wanted to change the world, then he needed to start with his own nation. Upon seeking the welfare of his nation, he came to realize that if he wanted to change his nation he had to return to his own state. After great effort, he understood that if he wanted to change his state he had to start in his own community. Then after many years, he had the clarity that if he was to change the community he needed to start with his family. Finally, in his advanced years, with great wisdom and life experience, he had the epiphany that if you are going to change anything, then you first must be transformed yourself. The problem he saw with the world, with the nation, with his community, with his family, was his own and he could not bring thriving to the community until he was first transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ Himself.

This story captures our church’s mission and vision statements: We exist to transform stories through the gospel of Jesus Christ (mission). As the Spirit does this work in us through the good seed of God’s Word, we will see our communities thriving to the glory of God (vision). In other words, when you are blessed, you will become a blessing to others and that will bring flourishing (thriving) to our communities then to the region, nation, and nations. It is the Spirit of God who catches the good seed that is multiplied through the harvest of fruit bearing in your life which spreads it to the ends of the world as you go wherever and whenever God calls. This is the mission of God, and this is how we participate in the harvest work of God – it is the work of the Spirit to first transform us through the renewal of the mind so that others will come to life through the passing on of the good seed, from field to field, worker to worker.

What is it I hope to reap from this sermon series as I pray in the Spirit over each of these messages and over you who will receive the good seed of God’s Word? C. H. Spurgeon preached in 1871, “Preaching is sowing, prayer is watering, but praise is the harvest.”[1] It is my desire to see First Baptist Church of New Castle, Indiana witness a large crop yield of praise to the glory of God! That we will be an epicenter of revival throughout our region, into our nation, and to the nations. Until all worship, let us continue to be faithful to the Lord of the Harvest and respond to His call upon our lives to be hard-working farmers!

Jesus said to His disciples in Matthew 9:37-38, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.” Again, in John 4:34-38, Jesus said to them:

My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work. Do you not say, “There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest”? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest. Already he who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for life eternal; so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. For in this case the saying is true, “One sows and another reaps.” I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored and you have entered into their labor.     

Like last week, I want to pull from a farmer’s experience to help us understand how we are to respond to the call of Jesus from these two passages because there is a very important concept here that is the whole point of this sermon series, which is called, “Grow Strong in God’s Grace.” Penny shared with me, “farmers need to maintain their equipment, faithfully. Otherwise, their work is doubled, their harvest reduced.” If you are going to answer Jesus’ call, then you must “maintain” the spiritual equipment of a hardworking farmer who seeks to produce a larger crop yield. As I have already taught you in a previous sermon, this is done by abiding in the vine (John 15:1-8) and taking on the easy yoke of Jesus (Matthew 11:28-30). Growing strong in God’s grace is all about absolute submission to Jesus Christ so that the Holy Spirit can flow into our lives. I’ve already taught you this in one of the earlier messages of this new sermon series, but like it has been pointed out to me after last week’s sermon, I need to remind you of this every week, so that no one thinks they can do this by their own power.

Harvest workers must “go” in God’s grace through prayer and by the power of the Holy Spirit. As we learn from Jesus about the harvest from Acts 1:7-8, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.” Missionary Elizabeth Elliot said, “Don’t dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.”[2] As you go into the harvest fields, go with faith in God and trust His Holy Spirit to do the work in and through you. Never forget how Jesus called His disciples in Mark 1:17, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” Jesus promised that if they followed Him, the Spirit would transform them into Harvest workers. It is the same thing He promised using vineyard imagery in John 15:5, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” This is the language of growing strong in God’s grace! We are to go as Paul went – by the power of God’s Spirit! Just as Paul exhorted us and testified to in Ephesians 6:18-20:

With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints, and pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

Furthermore, Paul testified to this truth in 1 Corinthians 15:1-10:

Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me.

There are so many more passages to support this harvest reality; Reaping a harvest is dependent on God’s grace – the work of the Spirit. Here’s one more, Paul said in Galatians 6:7-9:

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.

Jim G. told me a story after service that illustrates this point. He used to work in a farm store and one day a man came in with a problem. He had accidently used a ground sterilizer instead of a ground fertilizer. [cue the audible groan] The biggest problem was that he had good intentions when he did so, because he not only sprayed his own property, but he sprayed his neighbor property, too. [cue an even louder audible groan] He was trying to be a good neighbor, following the words of Jesus to love your neighbor as yourself. I believe this a metaphor for our fleshly efforts, when we use worldly wisdom, to try to reap a harvest. As you’ve heard me say before if this is how you are going to love yourself then please don’t love me – I would hate for someone to hurt me when they thought they were loving me well. Can you imagine how that neighbor reacted to his neighbor’s love? I the same way that the world has reacted to an infighting, backbiting, fleshly church. They see us, then hear that we are followers of Jesus and say things like, “If this is the Jesus you represent, then no thank you!” To finish the story, Jim told me that to make things right with his neighbor the man had to remove 3 inches of earth from under the sod line because the ground sterilizer he thought was ground fertilizer got into the roots. Church, let’s not do damage to the soil and make the work of harvesting harder for future workers.

Unfortunately, this is a modern-day parable of the work the church of Jesus Christ needs to do in America today. Our witness to Christ, so often done in the flesh and motivated by a spirit of religion, motivated by ambition and ego, and not through prayer empowered by the Holy Spirit for the glory of God, has done more damage than good. Now we must do what the well-meaning man in the above story had to do. We must patiently, lovingly, and prayerfully cultivate the soil, removing the poison from the ground caused by worship wars and denominational wars so that the good seed can bear fruit in its time. We must not grow weary in doing good!

We need to learn from the example of the first great missionary of the church, the Apostle Paul, how we are to do the harvest work. In 1 Corinthians 3:5-7 Paul explained:

What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.

Amen! It is like the modern-day parable I shared last week. We are to share our award-winning corn with our neighbors because the wind (the Spirit) will take the good seed from our harvest field and pollinate our neighbor’s field. We are in this together as the body of Christ – we are many members working together as one body to the glory of God. May the Spirt of God empower us to the glory of God!

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] C. H. Spurgeon, “The Joy of the Lord, the Strength of His People,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 17 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1871), 717.