Some Of You May Remember The Drop-While-You-Shop ...

Some of you may remember the Drop-While-You-Shop activity that the children did back in the spring. They took plastic cups, lined them with newspaper and put soil inside the newspaper. Then they took different seeds and put them between the newspaper and the side of the cup, so you could see the seed. Then they watered the seed and put the cups on the window sill out in the coatroom.

Now, honestly…do you expect that those seeds would do anything? As I came in to do my regular routine at the church, I would look at those seeds. Days would go by with no change at all, the seeds would look just the same as they did the first day. You might have been tempted to believe that nothing would happen at all. If you had looked at them every morning for 5 mornings in a row, you might not have noticed any change at all. But the water continued to wash the nutrients in the soil through the paper to the seed, and the sun continued to beam down its rays of light. One day, I came in and there was a noticeable difference in the seed…it had sprouted a root.

You might say that this was a bit like a moment of salvation. Sometimes we pray for someone and witness to them and watch them. We give water, fertilizer, and plenty of sunlight in hopes that they will confess their sins and be justified. We watch and pray, and nothing seems to be happening. And yet, when the seed is ripe enough and enough sun and nutrients have reached it, the seed sprouts. It is an instantaneous moment. All the gradual work has gone unnoticed until the precise moment in time when the seed sprouts its roots.

If we took that same seed and put it inside the soil, we would no longer see the seed. Oh, it would continue growing inside the pot, but we wouldn’t see that seed anymore, and wouldn’t know of its growth. That is, until the second crisis moment in the life of a seed, that moment when it’s stem breaks through the surface of the soil into the sunlit air above. In the life of a believer, we might call that moment the beginning of his Entire Sanctification.