What Harvest?

Harvest time in many parts of the world brings golden glow of changing leaves, balanced beauty of grapes thick in triangular clusters, heavy branches of apples red, yellow, or green streaked, rows of brown tassled corn with hidden yellow kernels popping with juice, curling spirals of sweet-smelling smoke from burning leaf mounds, the rich odor of charcoal roasting chestnuts.

What are the crops? Terraced vines climbing old stone pillared arbors on Italian hillsides, or wrapped around individual wood or iron sticks in Swiss fashion, bring forth grapes. Neat garden patches in suburban gardens produce peas, beans, beets, broccoli. Orchards in the American northwest fill endless boxes with individually wrapped pears or apples or plums for distant customers, while people in warm climates are packing crates of tangerines and grapefruits from their groves. The universal answer to the question “What are you harvesting?” is, “What I planted.” A harvest consists of what at one time or another was carefully, or carelessly, planted.

The time to pour over seed catalogues or tree descriptions is before planting season. It is too late when harvest time arrives to change one’s mind and say, “I really wanted blackberries, not raspberries.” “I don’t like spinach. What I actually wanted was cabbage.” And God means the yearly time of harvesting to remind us of the solemn reality that there is an unbreakable connection between what we plant and what we harvest.

God has warned us, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Don’t let Satan deceive you, God says to us. Don’t let your own foolish optimism fool you. Your choices of what to do with your days and years, the decisions you make, are like seeds. A reaping time will follow, and your harvest will be apparent to you and others.

It would be good to stop and read the whole book of Proverbs in this context. “My son, forget not my law.… Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct they paths” (Prov. 3:1, 5, 6). So much has been given us as warning, as direction, as signs of the dangers we can so easily tumble into through our own weaknesses or Satan’s carefully placed traps.

What are we sowing? Are we looking day by day into the “catalogue” of God’s Word, to find the precious seed we need when faced with a pressing problem, a titanic decision, a strong temptation? Our decision in this moment’s need, our choice among the alternatives that come into our minds, will affect our reaping. We can’t put off planting time; in the land of the living we plant every day right up to the end!

Going to Galatians, let us think soberly for a few moments about another statement of this principle. “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting” (Gal. 6:7, 8). This faces us not only with the basic and central decision—that of choosing to accept what Christ has done, to be born into God’s family with the assurance of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit—but also with the fact that it is possible for us as children of the living God to “sow to the flesh” and “reap corruption.”

This happens when we deliberately put self first. An angry Christian can create much destruction or corruption. A Christian giving in to pride, or engaging in malicious gossip, can be sowing corruption that will result in a corrupted harvest. A Christian saying inside himself, “I don’t care what God wants me to do; I will do thus and so; later I can do the Lord’s will, after I finish what I am determined to do first”—such a Christian is sowing seeds of corruption, no matter how good the thing he is doing seems to be.

As Paul begins this sixth chapter of Galatians, he says very carefully that if we find a fellow Christian who has been overtaken by a fault, we who are “spiritual” (and no one is spiritual except through the cleansing blood of Christ, and the strength of God that is made perfect in our weakness) are to “restore such a one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.… For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself” (6:1, 3).

The Word of God to us as individual Christians is very strong here. Not one of us is above doing the thing we are with meekness to point out in another person. “Spiritual” persons fall. We are told to watch out that we don’t get filled with a blinding kind of spiritual pride and miss the trap Satan will set before our feet. To think that we cannot fall, that we cannot ever sow the wrong seed, is the first wrong move. We are not heeding God’s warning if we shrug it off with the feeling that it no doubt applies to someone else, but not to ourselves.

“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Gal. 6:9). “But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing” (2 Thess. 3:13). There is a danger of saying, “Why bother to do this hard thing, to put in a lot more working hours than the others, to care about the burdens of other people, to try to live according to the Word of God,” when one is surrounded with others who are tearing off to do “their own thing.” There is a danger of turning away from the absolutes of the Word of God and making up a list of rules for living that fit into the hedonistic self-first pattern.

Come to Hebrews 10:36–38: “For ye have need of patience, that after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. For yet a little while and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him.” It takes patience to go on and not draw back, not be weary in well doing. It takes patience to go on with a desire and willingness to do the Lord’s will, no matter what he unfolds it to be. It takes patience to wait for the promise to be fulfilled of the Lord’s coming.

But we don’t have to wait until the coming of the Lord to be affected by our sowing. He has warned us. Our earthly lives will be greatly influenced in future years by what we are sowing today. “But this I say, he which soweth sparingly shall reap sparingly, and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully” (2 Cor. 9:6)—that is true in this life. Today we can bow before the Lord and ask him to help us in today’s sowing, and tomorrow’s, that the harvest might be changed.

This is true of churches, universities, towns, states, and nations as well as in individual lives. As we read the newspapers each day we see reaping of what has been sown. What will be tomorrow’s harvest? What responsibility do we have in our personal decisions for the wider “reaping,” locally, nationally, and internationally?

EDITH SCHAEFFER

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