10
Mar

The Lord of the Harvest

   Posted by: brandyness   in News Updates

Matthew 9:37,28

Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

What is the harvest?

Who are the workers?

How does this Lord “send out” workers?

This passage of scripture is learned by many people, some even from a young age, as it pertains to missions. Rightfully so, I believe. It is important to learn to pray for the lost, and even more, to pray that God would send people to tell the lost of the hope they have and the redemptive possibilities thanks to the sacrifice Christ made. I find it interesting that in this passage of scripture that Jesus considered the “harvest” something other than a group of previously evangelized people who were yet to make a commitment for Christ. When Jesus identified the harvest, he was talking about people who were “harassed and helpless. Like sheep without a Shepard.”

I think perhaps it is my own wrong thinking, but I have always pictured the “ripe” harvest as the previous. Maybe it was referring to a group of people in a small town in the Midwest who were missing someone who was passionate enough to convince them that the gospel was worth their time. It could also be a group of people so devastated by a natural disaster that they were willing to immediately cling to any good news that would come their way.

And to some extent, maybe these are the ripe harvest.

But I think that when we look at the next chapter, the part where the Lord of the Harvest is ACTUALLY sending out workers….a real life demonstration of that for which we are implored to pray…we see that maybe the ripe harvest is not as obviously willing to receive the message as I had previously thought.

When Jesus looked at the lost, and when we look at the lost, sometimes there are two different pictures. Jesus saw the lost through the lenses of the understanding of the power of the gospel. There is no other story like it. There is no other fact in history that demands such a change in our lives. There is no other message that has been ripped apart, put back together and then thrown aside and ignored, because to give it your attention means to give it your life.

Jesus understood this.

When the call of God rests heavily on your life, it is your responsibilities to trust in this power. It is not something that is always given to you supernaturally. There are times when we will doubt the power of God. There are times when we will wonder if the sacrifices we are making are even reasonable considering the possibility that perhaps we “heard God wrong.”

I don’t think that people call themselves into the ministry. I think ministry is something other than what the flesh desires. Ministry, from human understanding, means instability and constant possibility for failure. But through the lenses that Christ looked through in Matthew 9, the picture is very different. A choice to follow Christ, pick up your cross, and be obedient to the call from Heaven, is a choice of ultimate stability and guaranteed success.

I can’t think of one other career choice that can tempt with that kind of outcome.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 2:19 pm and is filed under News Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One comment

 1 

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May 24th, 2011 at 10:52 am

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