Sowing and Reaping

A sermon delivered to All Saints Anglican Church on July 8, 2007, based on Galatians 6: 1-18 and Luke 10:1-12,16-20


Like many of you, my relatives were farmers. I remember spending time with my grandparents on their farm out on Mulberry ridge in Spencer. They raised cattle mostly, and baled hay for feed. And they always planted a big garden. I can recall several times ‘helping’ my grandfather plant beans and corn by dropping the seed into a handheld planter – a contraption that looked a little like a long bellows with handles you could push in and pull out, a place to drop in the seeds, and then a metal tip that you poked down into the ground to deposit the seed.

As a child of about six or seven, the process of planting fascinated me, but I couldn’t quite get a handle on what happened next. Grandpa and I spent a lot of time putting seeds in the earth and all we had to show for it was a barren piece of earth with little lumps in it. I had to come back several times during the summer to see the progress of the plants in order to realize that when you planted something it would grow and you would eventually have something good to eat.

You drop the little seeds (hold up Cheerios) in the ground and eventually you harvest a crop (hold up a Krispy Kreme donut). When you pick these babies off the plant and they’re fresh…mmm, mmm, there’s nothin’ better!

Farmers call this sowing and reaping. In our lesson today, we see this concept applied to our lives.

The Law of Sowing and Reaping
Now there is a Law of Sowing and Reaping, of cause and effect. There are rewards or consequences attached to our actions. “Whatever a man sows, that will he also reap,” says Paul in Gal. 6:6. There is no escape from this Law. And it is impersonal – like gravity. It is no respecter of persons and it is immutable, unchangeable. Our actions will always bring us a consequence, affecting us in every way.

But let’s quickly make a distinction: Sowing and Reaping is not the same thing as Karma. In Karma, the law of cause and effect is understood to impact the destiny of the next incarnation. If you do well, you may indeed come back as a higher, better person, and you may be able to continue the long, long upward climb through countless reincarnations of your soul, waiting for the time when you might, through your good efforts, achieve Nirvana. Thus, one escapes the endless cycle of suffering, death and reincarnation. Too much bad Karma, however, and you might actually go backwards – you might come back as a Frog!

Sowing and Reaping differs, then, from Karma. The writer of Hebrews tells us that, “It is appointed once for a person to die, then comes the judgment” (Heb. 9:27). We as Christians are going to Heaven, not into the vast impersonal cosmic consciousness.

Flesh and Spirit
According to the Apostle Paul, we either sow to the Spirit or to the Flesh. Sowing to the Spirit basically means giving of your self for the welfare and benefit of others: building relationships, making converts to the faith, building up one another in the faith, giving to the poor and needy, doing unselfish acts of kindness. These are some of the things that sow into the Spirit. They are things that contribute to building the Kingdom of God. They are done without the hope of reward per se.

By contrast, to sow to the flesh means that you do things from selfish motives, always asking, in effect, “What’s in it for me?!”. To act with this motive is to demand a short- term reward; it must make me immediately happy, distracted or amused. To sow with fleshly motives means to reap fleshly results: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies…and we might also throw in Pride, arrogance and using others for our own gratification (cf. Gal. 5:19-21). These are the results of sowing to the flesh, - in a word, Corruption. If we do things from selfish motives, we receive the sinful reward immediately; we do not reap a heavenly reward.

To sow to the Spirit results in the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self control – the very marks of Humility (Gal. 5:22-23). These are the fruits of Jesus, who although he existed in the form of god did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbled himself, taking upon himself the form a man, and became obedient even to death on the cross (Phil. 2:5-8). As a result he reaped eternal Joy, and the undying praise of every living creature. When we sow to the Spirit, we receive the spiritual reward plus the righteous physical reward.

Just as the farmer sows in anticipation of reaping a crop, there is an expectation of reaping a good reward from our actions. We can legitimately expect that as we follow the Lord in our lives, making him Lord of all, that He will bless us as we seek to put Him first. To some extent this is merely the result of practicing a good stable work ethic. They say that 80% of life is just showing up on time. If you plug along doing your work in a stable, workmanlike manner, you will indeed reap a benefit in time. Again, it’s the universal law at work. Consistent action will bring a reward in itself.

Caveats

But in the kingdom of God it’s not quite so simple. Sometimes we as Christians sow in faith that others may benefit. Indeed, even on a secular level, we can see from the history of our country that often the families who pioneered the westward frontier did not reap nearly as great reward as those who followed in their footsteps. This can perhaps be summed up in the old saying, “Nothing worth doing can be done in one life-time.” Big works inspired by big visions take big amounts of time to bring to fruition. . The cathedral at Canterbury, England took 300 years to build!

In regard to saving souls, there is also a team effort involved. One sows a seed, another waters, and another harvests. Sometimes, we only do part of the total effort needed to see a soul come into the Kingdom. Our vision must be long-term.

Just because we pioneer a new church, does not mean that we will experience all the benefits of attending a mature, fully functioning Church body within our lifetimes. Right now, we are sowing into God’s kingdom, so that we ourselves may enjoy the benefits of an orthodox and spiritually safe Anglican Church. But in many ways, we are building for the next generation of young Anglicans. Just as with the farmer, we don’t harvest first, we sow first, then we water, and tend, and then we reap. It’s the natural cycle of Sowing and Reaping.

This is where we look to the Lord to provide us the reward for our sowing. As Christians, we all look ahead to the time when we stand before God and he says to us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master” (Mt. 25:21). But that’s up ahead in the future. How can we avoid becoming weary in well doing and eventually giving up? Paul tells us that in due season we will reap if we do not give up (Gal. 6:9). The reward will indeed come to us in if we continue to press on. We will see our prayers answered if we do not give up.

For the past 8 and one half months, we have sown into building a faith community. While we don’t enjoy great stability yet or have a beautiful building, we do enjoy the blessings of being able to worship in spirit and in truth, not having to contend with heretical leadership - with Bishops who are enemies of the Faith. That’s a Blessing! It’s a reward to be able to worship with people who actually believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord!

Let’s look at some other specific rewards that are coming to us through our faithful actions. You will, I’m sure remember when we did the reverse offering – in which each person took a $1.00 bill out of the basket and combined it with some other dollars. We held up those dollars in faith believing that we were sowing a seed into God’s Kingdom. What happened? We got a crummy, cursed, run-down building out of it! Seriously folks, we took an initial seed offering of $235 and turned it into the purchase of a $10,000 building. But apart from that crude way of measuring reward, as we have sown into the families of the murdered teens, we have seen healing and reconciliation take place. As we have worked with the Mayor of Huntington and other ministers, we have we have been blessed to begin to see some early fruit from our labors -cooperation among the churches and a partial healing of the City of Huntington in regard to these murders.

No “Giving Back”

Now, another quick clarification: Christians don’t “Give back” to the community or the world, as this is understood popularly. Our giving is “as unto the Lord” (Col. 3:23), knowing that we will receive an inheritance as our reward. . We return thanks to Him from His abundance. We don’t give because we have become successful in our endeavors and now we ‘owe’ something back to the community – like some sort of unwritten civil code of conduct. We give as a regular part of our faith walk to demonstrate our dependence on God as our Creator and to acknowledge his Lordship over all of our lives.

The standard is that everything we have and all that we are belongs to the Lord by right. He has bought us with the Blood of Jesus Christ and now God owns us lock, stock and barrel. Whether or not we acknowledge being owned by God is, of course, another matter.

Overall, the general pattern in this life for being a disciple of Christ is found in Psalm 1. The first part of the pattern is Blessedness for things we do not do: ‘follow not the counsel of the wicked, nor linger in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scorners…”

Rather, we “delight in the Law of the Lord and ponder His Word day and night.” (vv1,2). Then comes the temporal reward: “He shall be like a tree that is planted, beside the flowing waters, that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves will never fade, And all that he does shall prosper…”

As we focus our lives on the stability that results from being a disciple of Jesus, we naturally prosper. John Wesley actually found this to be a problem. When people turned from a life of dissipation to the stability and productive life centered on Christ, financial stability followed – indeed was almost inevitable – even to the point that Wesley lamented that Christians’ newfound prosperity would pull them away from the Gospel.

This is where our financial giving comes in. We give 10% of our income to keep us aware that God is the source of all provision. Our giving goes to God, not to a church or para church ministry per se. Your checks are made out to All Saints Anglican Church, but God is the Recipient. As a church, we will do everything we can do to be financially responsible and to sow into other ministries as well. But again, it’s important to recognize that the recipient of our giving is God not the church, and that the money you give is not yours, but the Lord’s.

We are currently seeking to find an actual sanctuary to worship in.
We have a couple of prospects, but it appears that renting a church will cost more than the $75.00 per week we’ve been paying here for St. Hampton’s. One option would cost $125.00 per week. Are we up to the challenge of sowing more money into a meeting place so that we can perhaps attract more disenfranchised Anglicans? I think we are.

I’d like to challenge you to increase your financial sowing, by encouraging you to give in multiples of $125.00 if possible, thinking of it as sowing into God’s Kingdom one or two or twelve weeks of worship that the Lord is helping you to provide for your brothers and sisters. This sowing is an opportunity for faith building. If you sow generously, we will reap abundantly.

What we’re looking for is found in Psalm 3: The earth has yielded its fruit, for God, our God blesses us. May God still give us His blessing, till the ends of the earth revere Him. Amen.