Sowing

John Westendorp. Trowel & Sword, June 2000

Preamble: “Make disciples….” What does this mean? What is our responsibility and how should we go about it? It sounds simple – just like the Nike add used to say: “Just do it”. But what does that really mean? In this article John sets out some of the “do’s” and “dont’s of sharing the gospel message. 

Sowing

Scripture often compares the Word of God to seed that is sown.  This month’s Forum 2000 study is on ‘sowing’ and Rev. Ben Aldridge has provided us with two good studies on this theme.  You’ll find in this month’s lift-out a study of what Paul has to say about sowing, watering and growth in 1 Corinthians 3 and another study on Jesus’ Parable of the Sower. This concept of ‘sowing’ brings home a fascinating truth of Scripture that I want to tease out a little further in these paragraphs.  This: the idea of the Word of God as seed, opens up that profound area of the divine and human interrelationship.

God’s Role

Paul makes abundantly clear that it is God who gives the growth.  That’s an obvious lesson but one which we haven’t always taken to heart.

I still recall when I planted my first veggie patch in our backyard.  I was real keen to see some results and in my youthful enthusiasm lacked patience.  I had planted butter beans and after some days I noticed the ground cracking where I had planted the beans.  The next morning the little loops of the bean shoots were just appearing above the soil so I thought I’d give the Lord a hand and free the beans so that they would grow more quickly.  By the end of the exercise several shoots had broken off and several more were damaged.  That was a good lesson.  There are some things I must leave for the Lord to do.

At a spiritual level we make the same mistake when we think that we need to convert people.  Parents can fall into that trap by badgering their unconverted children with ‘sermons’, exhortations and pressure for them to conform to a Christian way of life.  When there is no change we try harder and apply more pressure.  In the process damage is often done and our sons and daughters rebel against the faith of their parents.  There are some things we must leave for the Lord to do.

Churches can make a similar mistake when they develop sure-fire plans for making converts, or when the latest evangelistic program is touted as the be all and end all of evangelistic endeavour.  When we rigidly apply a certain outreach plan or some new ‘you-beaut’ evangelistic program, as if that in itself will bring about results, then we set ourselves up for failure.  There are some things we must leave for the Lord to do.

As Reformed people we know that only God can change lives.  Faith is a gift.  Conversion is the work of God’s Spirit.  Only He can give life to those who are spiritually dead.  The lesson is that the seed grows of itself.  Here is the miracle of the seed that somehow has new life within the kernel.  However, there is nothing I can do to bring about that life except to entrust that grain of seed to the earth.  I place it prayerfully in a carefully prepared seedbed and wait for God to do His life-giving miracle with the seed.  The remarkable thing is that in due course I am then also privileged to reap a harvest – God indeed gives the growth.

Our Responsibility

Paul also makes abundantly clear that while God gives the growth that does not free us from exercising our responsibility towards the seed.  He speaks of the human element in both the planting and the watering – there is a sowing but also a nurturing of the sown seed.

The beans I bought would never have sprouted in a thousand years if I had merely left them in the cupboard.  I had to place them in the soil.  But I had to do more than that.  I could have planted those beans under half a meter of dirt… or for that matter under a centimetre of hard clay.  Either way the outcome would have been: no harvest.  I needed both to prepare and maintain a garden bed.  It is God who gives the growth, but if I want a harvest then there are some crucial things that I have to do.

Again, some of us have often not learnt that lesson very well either.  Some of the sons and daughters of believers grow up in families where little personal attention is given to faith nurture.  Children are sent to Sunday School in the expectation that a weekly dose of Bible stories is enough for them to embrace the faith of their fathers and mothers.  Teenagers are dragged along to church in the belief that they will grow up Christianly by a process of osmosis.  In all this it is easy for parents to forget that there are some crucial things that they have to do.

As churches we can make the same mistake when we believe that our programs and activities will be a sufficient witness for the cause of Christ.  So we run a soup kitchen, and we join the ‘Jesus March’, we organise a carol evening and we run a men’s breakfast.  We do all that in the hope that people will notice that we are different, that our actions will indeed speak louder than our words.  In all that busyness it is easy to overlook that there are some crucial things we have to do.

As Reformed people we understand that God has called us into partnership with Him.  We call that partnership a covenant.  In that partnership of grace He not only comes to us as our God but He also calls us to be His people to serve Him in this world.  As part of our mandate He has entrusted to us the work of outreach and evangelism, the task of missions and of sowing the seed.  In Romans 10 Paul stresses that faith comes by the hearing the Word.  But that is said in context of the million-dollar question: but how shall they hear without a preacher?  We need to busy ourselves with the sowing of the seed.  We need to do that carefully and thoughtfully so as to maximise the harvest.

Pentecost and Sowing

How then are we to conceive of these two sides coming together?  God gives the growth but we are called to plant and water.  Should we envisage that as a 50/50 partnership?  Half the responsibility is ours – the sowing and the preparation of the ground?  The other half is God’s responsibility – the giving of the growth.  I think that would be an oversimplification.  It’s more like a 100/100 partnership.

On the one hand it is all of God.  The seed of the Word is His.  He not only gives the growth but He also provides fertile soil – hearts that are receptive to the gospel.  He not only gives us opportunities to sow the seed but the very wisdom that is needed for wise sowing is a gift of His grace.

It seems appropriate that we deal with this theme of ‘sowing’ in the month in which we celebrate Pentecost – the outpouring of God’s Spirit upon the Church.  Significantly, we read of no evangelistic endeavours between Jesus’ resurrection and the feast of Pentecost.  The implementing of the Mission Mandate (Acts 1:8) had to wait for the empowering work of God’s Spirit.  Sowing is only possible with God’s enabling.  In stark contrast we suddenly have about 3000 converts on the day of Pentecost.

The recognition that the fruit of the gospel comes only at God’s initiative, at His time and through the working of His Spirit, ought to make us very prayerful about the sowing of the seed.  It will lead us to pray that the seed of the Word will sprout in the hearts of our children.  It will make us prayerful as churches for opportunities to sow the seed in the communities in which God has placed us.

The fact that the harvest of the gospel of Christ comes totally as a work of God is also a tremendously liberating reality.  I no longer need to be anxious whether my methods are effective.  I can be relaxed about the results knowing that God’s Word never returns to Him empty but that it always accomplishes the purpose for which He sends it out (Is.55:11).

At the same time we are also called to do our sowing task with total dedication.  Nor can we be content with some haphazard scattering of the seed.  I will always remember the man who regularly stood on the footpath outside our office in Melbourne during evening rush hour – Bible in hand, he thundered at the passing crowd, none of whom took the slightest notice.  Planting the seed is more than scattering a few throwaway gospel lines at an anonymous crowd.  It also means that I should indeed avail myself of the latest ‘you beaut’ evangelistic program – prayerfully and ensuring that both method and content are Biblically sound.  Planting takes a lot of care and effort and even after growth has begun the watering continues to be our responsibility.

Sowing is something we should all be involved in.  And we can do it!  To deny that is to deny the work of God’s Spirit in our lives.

John Westendorp

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