Our Personal Harvest

"ASK THE LORD OF THE HARVEST, THEREFORE, TO SEND OUT WORKING INTO HIS FIELD." Matthew 9:38

This verse struck me this morning, and I was unable to move beyond it for quite some time, I thought, and sat on it, and pondered what that meant for me, and for others. Have I been asking the Lord of the Harvest? I always read that verse and focused mainly on the phrase above the one I shared with you, "The harvest is plenty but the workers are few" and that also is a powerful phrase, but the fact that He TELLS us to ask Him about this harvest gives us keys and direction to where we should go to find our harvest.

If you are a worker, and by worker I mean devoted to following Christ with all you do, then you, and I should be asking Him, "Lord, where is my harvest?"

And why do we do this? He tells us that too..

"Freely you have received, freely give!" Matthew 10: 8b

Because we received the knowledge of the truth, freely we should give it to others, but He does go on to warn us all throughout this chapter that there are those who will simply just reject us in this message. He warns us that we will be like "sheep among the wolves" in verse 16, but to not let that deter us from our work in our harvesting. He tells us we are going to be handed over to the council, flogged and imprisoned. (Now days, in some areas that does not seem that far off, and for some Christians is going to be their reality.) But we are not be scared of this friends, and it's not for shock values sake that I say these things, it's because I think so many of us (myself included) live and read words like this in such a way that "these type of things only happened in the Bible times" and friends, this is naive thinking on our part.

He Will and does supply our needs when we face such trials because, "But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it! At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of you Father speaking through you." -vs.19

This whole concept is something that I never would spend a lot of time thinking about because I was afraid of it...I did not want to even entertain the idea that my comfort might be disrupted for the sake of others. But friends, what are we here for? Why are we on earth? Jesus commissioned His disciples in this chapter with these words not because He wanted to depress them, but because He wanted them to know that they were there for bigger reasons than to simply live life to please themselves.

Now-a -days, I think most of us consider life in such a way that we are always striving to make life more comfortable for us...and our families. I am no exception!

However, my thoughts are starting to shift slightly because if I truly take this whole faith seriously and my callings seriously, then I should see my life and it's actions begin to change from what they are currently. Shifting more towards the area of getting the "word out there" and caring less of what I look like and sound like while doing it.

If I get distracted by the distractions of self while trying to "preach the gospel" then the message is not going to be portrayed in the way I was designed to portray it, and my personal Harvest ground will go on without growth, and without life.

Have you ever seen a field after the harvest? It's empty, tilled and barren. That's what it looks like before a harvest as well. But when a harvest is in full bloom, you cannot even hardly see the soil in which the harvest is growing from because there is so much growth!

So it made me ask myself this: Is my field empty because I have not tended to it? Is my land barren because I was more concerned about how I looked before I headed out to the field, and wasted all my time planning what to do with the field, so much so that I never even made it out into the field that day?

If you are like me in answering those questions, you will know that there is much work to be done on our hearts in regards to this area. We are not be afraid of what will happen in the field, we are only the to head out, and just start doing it.

Jesus warns us it's going to be hot out there, the working conditions may not always be pleasant and people might even walk by and ridicule us for our hard work, but in the end, we are doing what we were called to do, designed to do, and doing the only thing that will truly give our lives real satisfaction. Things to ponder...things to challenge us...things that need to change...

It's all there in His word my friends...He wrote it because He knew we would struggle with it. And so He gave us real life examples by which we can follow. Dig in, get dirty, and lets do the job we were created to do!