Sowing Seed During Drought // Reaping God's Harvest in My Life, Part 1

Let's face it – we all want to get the most out of life. We want to reap a harvest. And in fact, that's exactly what God wants for our lives, too. He promises us an abundant harvest. And yet so often, life feels more like a drought than anything else.  In those times, we're left asking ourselves … So, where's my harvest?

Generational Sin

Well, welcome to Christianityworks again this week and we are starting a new series called, "Reaping God's Harvest in My Life". What is it that you want out of your life? Health, happiness, family, a job, career, a reasonable level of comfort, joy and peace, we want our kids to grow up and be happy, we want to have a happy fulfilling marriage, we want to have friends, we want to have balance, we want to have a good life, don't we? We have different variations, we have different permutations; the things that you are going to enjoy in your life, well, maybe I won't enjoy in mine and vice versa, because we are different people, we come from different backgrounds, in different circumstances and different outcomes will satisfy us.

But there are the basics aren't there; the things that I spoke about before that we all want in our life? We want a life of significance, we want a life where we're part of a family, we're part of a group, we've got friends, we've got joy and peace. Those things are important to us and we expect to put in the effort and to reap the reward. We expect to reap some sort of harvest from all the hard work. What sort of harvest, is a different question, sometimes we get our expectations and our desires and our needs out of whack.

You know, I spent a lot of my time before I became a Christian, chasing money and success and career. All of those things are good things, but when we get them out of balance, when they become the main thing; when they dominate above all the other good things in life, well, then we can end up looking for the wrong things, striving for the wrong things, hurting other people to get there and we reap a harvest, that frankly, is the harvest of our own selfishness.

On the other hand, if we do good, if we get up every day and say, "Well, you know something, God, I know I'm not perfect, I know I am going to make some mistakes but my heart, Lord, my heart is to follow you today. My heart is just to do good things for other people and for myself." Well, we get up and do that every day and we are going to reap, by and large, a good harvest.

Well, over these next four weeks, today and the following three weeks, we are going to take a balanced look at "reaping God's harvest in our lives". The problem is that most people can't really describe what that harvest looks like; exactly what do we want?

Let's just take a look at our own lives today. The bits where we don't have a harvest, you know, normally look across our lives and there are some areas where we are getting a great harvest – the results are good, they're satisfying, they're fulfilling – but so often there are one or two areas in our lives and we look at them and we go, "Wow! You know, I'm not getting a harvest here, in fact, I'm nowhere near to getting a harvest and I've made such a mess of my life. I'm never going to reap God's harvest in that area. Why would God ever even bother with me? No, God's harvest isn't for me. No! Harvest? No. it's a drought, it's parched, it's hopeless, it's devastating. The dam is empty, the crops are dead."

We can have such deeply entrenched patterns of behaviour that they rob us of the harvest. Sometimes we take on the weaknesses of our parents. We might have generational sin. A man, whose father was a gambler, may well end up being a gambler. A person, whose parent was alcoholic, could end up being an alcoholic. We take on the good traits and the bad traits of our parents and sometimes we look at our circumstances and we look at our failures and we think, "Aw, it can never work."

We are going to look today at the story of Isaac in Genesis chapter 26. If you've got a Bible, grab it, open it. It's right at the front of the Bible; the 26th chapter of the first book of the Bible and it's a story about Isaac, the son of Abraham and what he did in the middle of such a drought, this is what it says:

Now there was a famine in the land, besides the former famine that had occurred in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went to Gerar, to King Abimelech of the Philistines. And God appeared to Isaac and said, "Look, don't go on down to Egypt; settle in this land that I'll show you. Stay here as an alien and I'll be with you and I'll bless you because to you and your descendants I'll give these lands and I'll fulfill the promise that I made to your father, Abraham. I'll make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and I'll give your offspring all these lands and all the nations of the earth will gain bl