Trust in the Lord with all
your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding… Honour the Lord with
your wealth and with the first fruits of all your produce; then your barns will
be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.
Cast your bread upon the
waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even
to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth. If the clouds are
full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth, and if a tree falls to the
south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie.
The point is this: whoever
sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also
reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not
reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is
able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all
things at all times, you may abound in every good work.
Proverbs 3:5-10, Ecclesiastes
11:1-3 & 2 Corinthians 9:6-9
The principle of sowing and reaping is found in the
Old Testament scriptures, as in the above two passages from the writings of
King Solomon.
Sowing should be done with deliberation. In the
parables of the sower that Jesus of Nazareth told, he tells how some seed fell
on stony ground and among thorns, and from this we might think that sowing seed
was a rather haphazard business in First Century Israel. But in those parables,
the sower was not planting a cultivated field but open land that anyone was
free to use.
(To explore this point further, take a few minutes to
compare these parables recorded in Matthew 13:3-9, Mark 4:3-9 and Luke 8:5-9,
and their respective interpretations later in the chapters, with the parable of
the farmer who sowed his field that is recorded in Matthew 13:24-30.)
Sowing assumes forethought: no farmer would carelessly
throw seed where it will not grow or where birds will eat it and, although it
is inevitable that some seed will be wasted in these ways, the farmer will
expect a harvest. In the parables of the sower, the expectation was anything up
to a hundredfold. In modern terms, that is 1,000%! I believe that in farming
that is a high but not uncommon return but it is an incredibly high return on a
financial investment!
Yet while a farmer will expect a harvest, and can use
all his skills to maximise it, he cannot predict with any accuracy just how
abundant it will be. He cannot control the weather or foresee some catastrophe that
might wipe out the crop before it matures. Nor can he rule out the sort of
sabotage experienced by the farmer in Matthew 13.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
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