When I was a boy milking several cows each morning and night, I dreaded the cocklebur season. In late summer this prolific weed turned brown, and its seed pods, each armed with dozens of sharp spines, caught in the cows’ tails until the animals’ fly switchers were transformed into mean whips. One hard switch of such a tail in the milker’s face made him lose considerable religion.
So I learned to hate the cocklebur.
Later, comfortably removed from the dairy industry, I learned a remarkable fact about the cocklebur: its sticky seed pod contains several seeds, not just one. And these seeds germinate in different years. Thus, if seed A fails to sprout next year because of a drought, seed B will be there waiting for year after next, and seed C the year after that, waiting until the right conditions for germination arrive.
I realized this delayed response is similar to the way the Word of God operates. Ministers may preach “Oh, why not tonight?”-certainly a good question. But some people may not respond tonight or tomorrow night. Certainly our theme should be “Now Is the Hour,” but we shouldn’t forget that people respond in different ways and at different times to the same appeal. Circumstances may not be right for an immediate decision. Perhaps the hearer hasn’t been sufficiently chastened by life. Maybe something else prevents a response. At times like these, I remember the cocklebur seed.
This delayed response is a frustration to any serious preacher. Yet we must also remember that many of us waited years before heeding the call to preach. Some went into business. Some took other indirect routes into the ministry. Some were not called until middle life. Many of us, too, took our time.
Faith in the power of the Word honestly delivered tides us over the dry seasons. If we sow with confidence, God will provide the harvest, sometimes even after the sower is gone.
One woman told me her daughter and son-in-law were attending church regularly in another state six hundred miles away. For two years I had worked with this couple and their two small children, visiting their unpretentious home many times. When they moved away without any spiritual commitment, I figured my efforts had been wasted. But once they settled, they evidently connected my efforts with their present churchgoing-at least they wanted me to know about their change in attitude. It gave me faith to keep on with similarly unresponsive families.
In 1819 Parson David Elkin, an itinerant Methodist preacher, stood above a simple grave in the Indiana wilderness. He made a brief, heartfelt statement about the good character of the person buried there-Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Who knows what seeds of faith were sown there, later to sprout in the greatness of Abraham Lincoln? Though never a church member, he was a church attender and faithful to the church’s teachings. Something must have been planted in the lonely, hungry heart of that scrawny boy by backwoods preacher Elkin.
An English nurse, looked down upon by her lord and lady, sat teaching a small boy the Bible and its truths. His parents were too busy in society to pay him any notice. The only reason we know about this nurse is that she was teaching the future Lord Shaftesbury, England’s great nineteenth-century reformer, the man who got the children out of the coal mines. We have no reason to believe he would have been anything but a privileged wastrel had this Christian nurse not planted the right seeds.
Our modern impatience for immediate results has achieved wonders in science and industry. But human beings are not coal and steel. They react, not according to formula, but by inner spiritual winds we cannot discern. Hence, we patiently plant the seed. With tireless persistence we sow by word and deed, always believing in the potency of the seed, never overlooking a plot of barren soil.
Some years ago a lotus seed was germinated after lying dormant for several thousand years in a peat bog. Human beings don’t live that long-at least not here. But they do have a remarkable power to respond to seeds of spiritual life sown years before.
Isaiah states far better than I the power of the Word to spring to life after long periods: “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10-11).
-Graham R. Hodges, interim pastor
First Congregational Church
Fulton, New York
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
