Sowing and reaping. There is such a long gap, often between those too, have you noticed how long it takes to reap that harvest? And sometimes, frankly, we get sick of the wait. It’s a bit like a farmer becoming impatient and walking off the land, the week before his crop springs out of the ground.   Seed Time and Harvest Over the last few weeks on Christianityworks we’ve been looking at "Reaping God’s Harvest in my life" and in your life. How, when, why should we sow seeds? How do we get God’s harvest? What does God’s harvest look like anyway? God’s harvest is awesome – God’s harvest is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That’s what Paul writes in Romans chapter 14 and verse 17. He says,“Look, it’s not about food or drink. It’s not about all the physical things and sure, God is in our physical needs; God wants to supply and provide and He does do that, but at the end of the day, the Kingdom of God isn’t about food or drink but it‘s about righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. And I don’t know a single person on this planet who doesn’t want that sort of a harvest; of goodness and peace and joy in their lives. And sometimes we go through life and it’s a big drought. We feel dry, we feel like we’re in a wilderness, – not always, but more often than not – it’s because in some area of our lives we have rebelled against God. And God’s a good Dad, it’s like being a parent to a teenager, you know, when you’re bringing up kids and you want to see them grow up and have a wonderful life, but when they rebel, some times you have to withdraw some of the blessings, some of the privileges from their lives to bring them to a point where they learn. God’s like that too. God loves to rain His blessing down in our lives but when we rebel; when we turn against Him, when we turn our back on Him – maybe not in our whole life, maybe just in one little bit of our lives – God says: “Well, you know, it’s time for some pruning; it’s time for some teaching.” And so, sometimes, when we are going through a drought in our lives, when it’s all dry and that blessing isn’t flowing the way it should be, we need to ask ourselves: “What’s this drought about?” Maybe I have a problem with a relationship, maybe I’m not giving God my top priorities, maybe there’s some area of my life. And when we figure that out, we say, “God is speaking to me in this drought”. That’s the first step. That’s admitting that we have a need and then the Holy Spirit – the Holy Spirit ends up calling us to plant a seed somewhere. You know, when we have a need; when we are struggling with something, we want to feed that need. We want to say, “Ok God, if you want me to plant some seeds somewhere; if I have financial problems, maybe I have to hoard all my money to deal with my financial problems and God says, “No, I actually don’t want you to feed your need right now. I want you to sow some seed in another field.” And it’s a really weird thing because often you say to God, “Hang on a minute, God, my problem is over here yet you want me to sow a seed in the ground over there? What are you doing? What’s going on? It doesn’t make sense – the two don’t even add up!” So that’s what we have been looking at over the last few weeks and if you haven’t been with us the whole time, I really would encourage you - this is one of those teaching series that will just make a huge difference to your life as we learn what it’s about – to sow and to reap – because it’s a Spiritual principle that occurs right through the Scriptures, from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Sowing and reaping and why God sometimes calls us to sow in a different field because it’s counter-intuitive; it’s a step of faith. I remember when I first met my wife, Jacqui, gee, it’s twelve years ago now and she just came to our church one Sunday morning and I was preaching. I wasn’t feeling very well and I was only going to be preaching that morning and she was only going to be in church that morning because she was visiting from a different city and she had really wanted to go down to some markets that were near the church. She had a few hundred dollars in her pocket and she really wanted to go and spend this money down at the markets but somehow her mum dragged her, kicking and screaming, to church that morning and I was in the middle of preaching a message and I looked out and I didn’t know who this woman was and I just felt God saying to me, “That woman is going to be your wife.” And it turns out God was saying that to her about me while she was sitting there. But in the middle of the service, when the offering came around, she felt God calling her to take all the money that she had in her pocket, a few hundred dollars – which is a lot of money to her – and put it into the offering. God was calling her to sow a seed and she obeyed Him and I believe that if she hadn’t done that - if she hadn’t honoured God’s call just to do that; to be obedient to Him – I just don’t believe that she and I would be husband and wife and we would not have the wonderful marriage that we do. Sometimes God calls us to do things that are counter-intuitive, that don’t make sense, and so we decide against our better judgment sometimes to plant that seed and we put the seed in the ground and we wait and we wait and we wait and we wait and in this Mc-world where we live in with the hamburgers and instant access by mobile phones and the internet – we expect everything instantly. We think, “Ok God, I’ve planted the seed, I want it now! Ok, I’ll wait another five minutes – tick, tick, tick, tick. Ok, ten minutes – tick, tick, tick – that’s it, I’ve had enough, I’m out of here, it’s taking too long!” We’re like that, aren’t we? We are pretty impatient. You know, the seed that Jacqui sowed that day that we met, it took months before we became a couple and ultimately, got married. I mean, it didn’t happen instantly. When you think about it, you plant a seed into the ground and that seed doesn’t instantly sprout and give a harvest that same day – it takes time. Yet we do that and we say, “It’s too long, I’m out of here. I know this stupid idea of planting seeds in different fields was never going to work, aw!” And we storm off – but hidden away under the ground, that seed is doing something amazing – it’s germinating; life is sprouting out of it. The Bible talks about ‘seed time and harvest’ and yet we miss the time bit. You plant a seed and there’s time before the harvest. We get impatient and we get bored and we walk off in disgust and we leave the land just as the little green shoot is about to break through the soil. I remember the first time I went to Disney Land, in Orange County in Los Angeles. The Americans do queues much better than we Australians because there are more of them and they’re used to standing in queues longer than we are. We Australians get quite impatient with queues and what I noticed, some of the best rides at Disney Land – at the time, Star Wars ride was there – it was like an hour or an hour and a half wait. And they were really clever with the queues; firstly, they went around bends and corners so you couldn’t see how many people were in the queue or how long you had to wait. But the second thing they did was they put entertainment along the queue, so you were entertained the whole time, so you didn’t really realise you were waiting quite as long as you were waiting. Well, God is like that too. God has got a sense of humour and God knows that we get impatient and God knows that when we plant a seed and nothing happens for a while and we are waiting for the harvest, He doesn’t want us to get bored and He has some things for us to do. What are they?   Weed and Feed Well, sowing and reaping is one of the Spiritual principles that God has throughout His Word, right from beginning to end and when you think about it – when a farmer sows seed into the ground, the farmer just doesn’t sit there for the next few months and do nothing, there’s a bit of work that has to go on. A bit like a garden – there’s nothing like a beautiful garden but its hard work too – just doesn’t happen. Planting, in a sense, is the easy bit but we need to feed and weed and water sometimes. It’s amazing how weeds grow about five times faster than any of the plants that we paid a fortune for! You know the thistles and the rubbish in the garden; they can take over the garden, just in a few weeks. I remember mum and dad when I was a kid, had a compost heap out in the back of the yard and we had pumpkins and watermelon and they’d throw the rubbish onto the compost heap, but invariably, the pumpkin seed and the watermelon seed would end up not dying and would germinate in the garden and all of a sudden this wonderful garden they had would be taken over by a pumpkin and watermelon. Jesus talked a bit about weeds -–He talked about weeds in the context of a church and said in a church there are good plants and there are weeds and He talked about weeds and thorns in terms of faith. He said: Look, the thorns can rise up and choke our faith. So as much as seed time and harvest, reaping and sowing are godly principles, so is weed and feed. You sow a seed and you believe for a harvest, the enemy is sure to come along and put some weeds in that to try and choke it all up. Have you ever experienced that? You go out on a limb, you believe God, you follow Him, you plant the seed – it’s a risk, it’s a sacrifice, you think, "it’s going to go well" – and all of a sudden you do that – you take that step of faith – and all of a sudden it all turns to custard; it all gets hard. So we need to become vigilant, alert gardeners. God wants us to be involved in the process. Maybe we’ve been walking through a time of drought in our lives; we’ve strayed in some area and we come to the realisation that God is calling us home again. And so He takes us through this time of drought and we plant the seed, which is a step of faith – it might be forgiving someone or it might be giving some money away, it might be any sort of obedience and sacrifice that God is calling us to do – and He wants us to be stronger at the end of that. But along the way there’s a lesson, there’s a journey and that journey is the important bit. Isn’t it amazing how when we are going through a time of drought, all we want to do is grumble and complain about the fact that there’s a drought and we’re all waiting for the rains to come? But there’s a journey happening there, I mean, the drought’s the drought, there’s nothing we can do about it. Today is the journey; tomorrow is the journey and that journey – where we do the learning – is important. If you have a Bible, open it at the Book of Galatians, in the New Testament, chapter 6 verses 7 to 10 and this is about sowing and reaping and it’s about the journey, and it’s about what we do on that journey. Let’s have a read: Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. if you sow to your own flesh, you’ll reap corruption from the flesh, but if you sow to the Spirit, you’ll reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right for we will reap a harvest at harvest time if we do not give up. Ain’t that the truth? Let’s get a revelation – we plants seeds whatever we do. We can either plant them into our flesh, into our human nature, our selfish nature, or we can plant them where the Spirit of God tells us to plant them. And so we do that; we get a revelation, we plant a seed in the Spirit where God is calling us to plant that seed, and we believe and we wait and we wait and we wait. But it takes a long time for the harvest to come and we wait and we wait and we wait, but it takes a long time for the harvest to come and we wait and we wait and we wait and then we lose heart and then we give up and before we know it, we’re back sowing to the flesh again. Sowing a seed where the Spirit tells us to, is an act of faith. Maybe your marriage isn’t going well and the Holy Spirit whispers to you, “So, um, how’s your time with God going? How’s your prayer time going?” And we come to conviction and the realisation that we’ve just let our relationship with God go to the wind. And so we go, “You know something, I think the Holy Spirit is calling me to really get close to God,” and that’s the seed we sow; we say, “You know, that’s my step of obedience. That’s what God is doing here. I can’t change what is happening in my marriage right now but what I can change is my relationship with God and I’m going to spend some time with Him. I’m going to do that, I’m going to believe in that,” and so we do that. And we set a time aside and the days go by and the weeks go by and time goes by and we don’t see any change in the marriage and the seed’s germinating but we don’t see the harvest and then all of a sudden we say, “This isn’t working and I’m getting up every morning and I’m praying and nothing’s happening. God where are you?” and we give up. All along God is sorting out our priorities, all along God wants us to exalt Him above all. All along He’s ready to make the changes in that husband and wife and that marriage that need to be made; that only He can make, but at the end He gets the glory. Ever felt that way? You know God’s called you to some act of faith, some seed to plant and it just doesn’t happen quickly enough and we want to give up. Maybe right here, right now, there’s a word from God for you – in season for you. "Let us not grow weary of doing what is right, for we will reap a harvest at harvest time if we don’t give up." You plant that Spiritual seed and you wait and you just keep doing what’s right and you reap the harvest. That’s God’s way; that’s God’s promise. When we plant those seeds in the field, we have to keep doing what is right. I call that ‘weed and feed’. Pulling out the weeds and nurturing His Word, nurturing His call, nurturing the thing that He whispered in our heart through the Holy Spirit, that we felt to be obedient to. That has to be nurtured and we are going to look at some practical ways of doing exactly that, next.   Our Eyes on Heavenly Things Well, we’ve been going through a wilderness experience; a drought, and we know that God has called us in the middle of that drought to plant a seed – to plant a seed, not in our field; not to feed my need but to plant a seed in God’s field – and we do that as an act of faith; as an act of obedience. I have mentioned that sometimes God is pointing out, through difficulties in relationships that we are having, that maybe we have let our relationship with Him slide. It’s really interesting – the Holy Spirit comes along when we are suffering through a drought and He’ll speak to us and He’ll tell us exactly what the problem is. So we plant that seed and we’re waiting and we’re waiting and we’re waiting for the harvest and we’re waiting for the harvest and nothing happens and we get disheartened. You know, we’re human and sometimes it’s just so hard. What are some practical things that we can do when we’re in that space; when we’ve honoured God, when we have obeyed Him but we feel like we are losing heart? The first one we will find in Colossians chapter 3 verses 1 to 3. I love this; this is one of my favourite verses. Colossians 3:1-3 says this: So if you have been raised with Christ seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds of the things that are above not on the things that are on earth for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. I call this "feeding". You know, when we take a step of faith, it’s inevitably counter-intuitive. Faith always is because faith is a choice between what God is calling us to do in the Spirit and what we want to do in the flesh. And so when we listen to God and we go and follow Him in the Spirit, the flesh says: “You shouldn’t be doing that, that does not make sense, that is not going to work.” And so when we take a step of faith and go and plant God’s seed where He has called us to plant it, our flesh is going to rise up and say: “Give me a break – that is not going to work.” Here Paul is writing to the Colossians and he is saying: Set your mind on heavenly things, not on the stuff you can see, not on the things on earth but on heavenly things. Keep your eye on the ball, keep your eyes and your hearts on God, your prayer life, the time you spend in God’s Word, the time you spend worshipping God, this is your Spiritual nourishment you need to feed yourself. You need to feed your spirit with the Holy Spirit. And that’s what you are doing right now. That’s why I’d like you to get the Study Guide for this series and we’re making it available at no cost because I just believe the more we spend time in God’s Word, listening to Him, we are fed, we are made whole, we are growing strong. Pick up a good Christian book, sing Christian songs, be filled with the Holy Spirit, set your minds on heavenly things, let the word of Christ dwell richly in you. The closer we get to Jesus, the more we are changed, and the shorter the drought and the closer the harvest because the purpose of what God is doing when we’re going through drought and the purpose of what God is calling us to do – to plant the seed in the middle of a drought – is to change us. So let me encourage you, when you are in that space  when you have stepped out in faith, when you’ve planted the seed, when you’re waiting in faith for God’s harvest, set your mind on the things that are above - set your mind on heavenly things, spend time in prayer, spend time in God’s Word. Don’t let those things slide because those are the very things that we need to get us through the drought – being close to Jesus. The second thing is to crucify the flesh. The Spirit is life, the flesh is death. That’s what Paul says here in Galatians: “Don’t be deceived; God isn’t mocked, you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh, but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit,” and right now there is a battle going on. If you are in this place of drought and you’ve planted a seed in faith and you’ve taken a stand to be obedient to God, you are on a spiritual battlefield and the flesh; the carnate, the old man inside us is going to act up; is going to get irritable and complain or get impatient or something else in our lives will flair up. Maybe a conflict at the office, maybe we are sowing seed in a particular area and we end up in a deep argument with someone over there. These things are the weeds; this is the enemy coming along to try and rob us of God’s harvest and the only thing to do with weeds is to pull them out. We don’t want to pander to the flesh. Paul writes this in Romans chapter 13:11-13, He says: Lay aside the works of the darkness and put on the armour of light. Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead put on the Lord Jesus Christ and wait for this, make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. You’ve got weeds coming up, your flesh is acting up against your step of spiritual faith to plant that seed, do not make any provisions for the flesh. The one thing to do with weeds is to pull them up and throw them into the fire. That is the only thing that we should be doing with that. But we want to pander to the flesh as it whimpers; as it is dying. The flesh always whimpers when it’s dying, it doesn’t want to die but God wants us to live in the Spirit, not in the flesh. God wants us to walk in the Spirit, not in the flesh. Is God’s harvest a priority in your life? Righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit? Then make no provision for the flesh. Pull out the weeds. Don’t let them choke the harvest. Don’t let the devil or your flesh rob you of that harvest of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That peace is awesome, that joy is awesome! Look at this passage again. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh but if you sow to the Spirit you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right. Let us not grow weary in doing what is right for we will reap at harvest time if we do not give up. We will reap – that’s God’s promise – we will reap at harvest time, at God’s time and part of that harvest – a big part of that harvest – is a changed me and a changed you. As God works on us inside in a way that He couldn’t do if we weren’t in the middle of that drought, in a way that we couldn’t do if He hadn’t called us to plant a seed in His field in faith. If you’re struggling through drought, could I ask you to find out what the drought is about? To go to God and say, “Lord, what’s going on in my life? Why am I struggling here?” And as the Holy Spirit answers you and speaks His Word into your life and says, “You know something, the reason you’re going through this at the moment is because this area in your life, you’ve rebelled, or this area in your life is broken. I want to fix that.” And we go and plant that seed where God is calling us to plant it and we nurture it and we feed it. That’s God’s plan that we should live through that, that we should be changed through that, that we should rejoice in that, that we should experience His harvest of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That’s it; that’s God’s plan; that’s the process of becoming more like Jesus. It’s exciting; it’s awesome; it's part of what is ahead of us in our lives. Let me encourage you to sow into the Spirit; to sow a seed into the field that God is calling you to sow in and then to live and walk and breathe in faith, in the presence of the Holy Spirit and you will reap a harvest at harvest time. That’s God’s plan!

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