Watering the Dirt // Reaping God's Harvest in My Life, Part 2

Sometimes, when we go through a bit of a rough patch, instead of running away (which is always our first instinct) instead, we make a good choice and decide to plant a good seed in that place. But then for a while, it feels like nothing’s happening.

Have you ever planted a seed into some dirt? There’s something that, well frankly, is unnerving about this simple transaction. You take the seed and invariably it costs you something, you put it into the dirt and you cover it up and it's gone. There's a little kid inside each of us who wants to sit there and say, "Ok, well. I planted you, I watered you, where are you?" Now we're patient, we give it thirty seconds, a minute maybe. "Come on, grow you little sucker."

It's true isn't it? We expect instant results. When something in our lives isn't quite right sometimes we have the good sense to sow a good seed into that place. A broken relationship – we sow a small act of kindness, a boring job – we throw ourselves into a project with new vigour, a rebellious teenager – we do something that says, "I love you" and then we expect instant results but life’s not like that.

When we plant that little seed in the dirt it disappears for a while and that "while" can seem so excruciatingly long can't it? And all we seem to be doing is watering the dirt and so we have a problem. We plant a seed and we wait. Let’s explore that time of waiting just a little bit more today.

A seed is a simple little thing but it might look simple but it has a complex DNA soup inside and this dry, brown, little thing is a container of life, of potential, of reproduction. A seed doesn't look like much but every flower that will ever grow already exists in a seed somewhere. When we survey the landscape of our lives we so often see parts of our lives that are going so well.

It's like being at a lookout and you look out and you see the valleys and the fields and the trees and way over on the left it can be sunny and you can look over on the right and there’s a storm happening over there and life can be like that. Some parts of our lives can be just fantastic but one or two areas of life might be, well a little less than what we expected, we might be missing out on something.

Maybe we're in credit card debt and our finances are a mess or maybe, I don't know, something’s going wrong at home with the kids or the marriage relationship or maybe at work or maybe emotionally. Some relationship, some situation is not producing a healthy harvest and when that’s happening, got to tell ya, I don't know how you are but I don't feel like planting a good seed into that particular space.

When I have a relationship with someone that's not working well the last thing I naturally feel like doing is planting a seed of blessing, of kindness. We don't want to do that, you know, when we've got problems with our finances and we're starting to sort them through and God says, "You know something? I want you to plant a seed of financial blessing over here into this ministry or into this person’s life."

We don't want to do that but God, God wants us to plant seeds in faith even when the going is tough, in fact, especially when the going gets tough and especially when we don't feel like going and planting a seed.

Now, lets say its our finances and lets say we decide to start disciplining ourselves with our finances and paying off the credit card debt because we just know we can't go on like this, we've prayed about it and that's what God’s calling us to do, let me ask you, the day that we decide that, the next day is the debt gone? Of course it's not, we don't end up debt free overnight, it takes time doesn't it?

And it's like that when a farmer takes a seed and plants it into the ground. It's a tense time, farmers spend a huge amount of money on seeds and everything has to be just right and there's nothing else they can do. They plant the seed into the ground and they just have to believe that it's going to come out.

When you and I sow a seed into a difficult situation, that waiting, you know you put the seed into the ground, it disappears, it's like it's gone, it's like almost it never happened. A seed in a sense, a physical seed is different because you know you planted the seed into the dirt.

But when we plant an emotional seed or a spiritual seed, when we show someone some kindness or faithfulness or we do something to someone who is not nice to us, a week later, a day later it can seem like it's gone because they're back to their old behaviour again and having a go at us again. And we think, "oh well, that didn't work, did it? I knew this seed planting thing would never work."

Yesterday we saw how Isaac, and you can read about it in God’s Word the Bible, in Genesis chapter 26, sowed a seed in the midst