“You know the saying, ‘Four months between planting and harvest.’ But I say, wake up and look around. The fields are already ripe for harvest. The harvesters are paid good wages, and the fruit they harvest is people brought to eternal life. What joy awaits both the planter and the harvester alike! You know the saying, ‘One plants and another harvests.’ And it’s true. I sent you to harvest where you didn’t plant; others had already done the work, and now you will get to gather the harvest.”
John 4:35-38 NLT
Jesus once again used an analogy that would be well understand in that culture – the process involved in the growing of crops. But Jesus was using a natural analogy to represent the spiritual world, a world where the harvest is not grain but souls.
As Jesus pointed out, there was a delay of four months between sowing seed, and harvesting the resulting crops, and this was a time of anxiety for the farmer, because any adverse weather events could ruin the crops and destroy his livelihood. In extreme times, even famine could result. The farmer also had to withhold some of the seed so that he had something to sow in the ground the following year. In my early years, “Harvest Festivals” were held both in my school and in the local churches. These were times when we brought food items to school or church and sung hymns such as “We plough the fields and scatter, the good seed on the ground”. And all in celebration of the importance of the natural sowing and harvesting process. In those services we thanked God for His blessings, for providing us with the food we required for our very existence.
Jesus told us the parable of the soils, which we can read in Matthew 13. But the fruit of the process, when good soil was found, was a multiplication of the seed originally planted. In Matthew 13:8 we read, “Still other seeds fell on fertile soil, and they produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted!” Near where I live, the farmer often plants a field of barley, and sometimes I select an ear of grain and estimate the crop yield. God’s blessings are there for all to see, though we take His multiplying provision for granted most of the time. But Jesus was using the analogy of sowing and reaping to illustrate a spiritual principle to His disciples. He equated the variety of soil conditions with people’s hearts.
Jesus said to His disciples, “wake up and look around. The fields are already ripe for harvest“. The “seed” had already been planted in the hearts of the people by others, the prophets and the religious leaders, and Jesus said that the people were ready to hear the message that would produce in them a spiritual harvest. And in the following years, the disciples saw the establishment of the first century church. Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 resulted in 3000 people being added to the church. That is harvesting!
So today, we pilgrims have an opportunity. There is still a spiritual harvest waiting for the reaping. I meet people who know about God, who even recognise and believe in His existence, and who are just waiting for someone to help them bring to life that knowledge and introduce them, perhaps once again, to the Saviour Jesus Christ. But I meet others who have no ideas about God at all. Their spiritual knowledge seems to come from social media and occasional encounters with news reports about other religions. They perhaps wonder about the churches dotted around our country, perhaps seeing more and more of them closing, perhaps having a perception that they are only relevant to elderly people. These are the people who may be good soil, just waiting for a seed to be planted, a seed coming straight out of God’s unlimited storehouses. Once planted, we can see the outcome as the Holy Spirit encourages the growth. Sometimes we may have the opportunity to be harvesters. Sometimes others will have that privilege.
The church I attend meets every Sunday morning in a leisure centre, and often people passing by in the corridor outside will look in, in apparent wonder and puzzlement. They sometimes stop for a few moments, perhaps receiving a seed that will start within them the process of germination. God is always at work.
We pilgrims are engaged in the farming business. Spiritual agriculture is our calling. The church goes through seasons of growth and decline as the years go by. But we are in the thick of it, sowing and reaping whenever we have the opportunity. There are never a lack of opportunities. We just need to pray for boldness and have our messages of hope ready and waiting.
Dear Father God. We pray today for divine encounters, enabling us to plant seeds whenever we have the opportunity. And lead us, we pray, to those who are just waiting for someone to introduce them to You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 