Knowing Your Seasons And Its Fruit Part 3 Series

Knowing Your Seasons and It’s Fruit Part 3

Scriptures: Galatians 6:7; 5:22; Jeremiah 1:5; 1 Corinthians 3:6-8

Introduction:

This is part three of my series “Knowing Your Seasons and It’s Fruit”. In parts one and two I shared with you that we all go through season, naturally and spiritually. Our natural seasons consists of the four seasons – winter, spring, summer and fall, as well as other seasons that we experience in our life time that are not related to the weather (i.e. Christmas, seasons of a job, etc.) From a spiritual perspective I told you that just as it is in the natural, we also experience spiritual seasons. I gave you two visuals to reflect on – the first week it was the bananas and last week it was popcorn. Each visual was to plant a question in your mind as to where you were spiritually in your seasons as it related to your relationship with Christ.

This morning I will conclude the series by focusing on the fruits of our seasons based on the seeds we sow. I shared with you what Paul said to the Galatians in Galatians 6:7. It reads “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.” If a farmer sows corn, he will reap corn. If he sows wheat, he will reap wheat. Whatever he sows, that is what he will reap. If my wife plants roses in her garden, roses will grow. Whatever we sow, that is what we will reap. One of the keys is to know when and what to plant. There are certain vegetables that you must plant at certain times of the year if you want them to grow. The same applies to flowers. Some flowers you plant once and they come back every year while others are more seasonal and must be re-planted every year. This is how it is spiritually with our sowing seeds. We must recognize the seasons we are in so that when we are sowing seeds, we are sowing the appropriate seeds. Also in conjunction with this, by knowing the seasons we will know what fruits are growing – even if we are not the beneficiaries of the fruit, we recognize that we have fruit out there that someone is benefitting from.

There are two key points that I want to stress to you this morning. The first point is spiritually when we are sowing seeds, we do not always know what fruit will come from those seeds. The second point I want to make is that the seeds we sow will produce fruit, but the fruit may not be solely for our consumption as each of us are truly benefitting from the seeds others have sown within us. Keep these two points in mind as we do through the rest of this message. As a visual aid this morning, I am giving each of you a small bag of seeds. Please do not eat the seeds; they are for your reference point for this message. I will refer to these seeds throughout the message so please keep them close by in case you need to take a quick glance at them from time to time.

I. Understanding How Your Seeds Produce Fruit

If you consider the seeds that I gave you, unless you are someone very familiar with flowers or vegetable seeds, you do not know what will grow from the seeds in your bag. All you know at this point is that you have a bag of seeds. If you look closely at the bag you will notice that not all of the seeds are the same – there is a mixture. The first thing I want you to recognize is even though the seeds are different they have some things in common with each other. The first thing all seeds have in common is their need for fertilization. This is the process that starts the seed into becoming the fruit or plant it was designed to be. Spiritually it could look like this: there is a need for pews in your Church so you sow a special seed offering of $200. Your $200 seed offering is used to purchase a pew. So the seed that was sown was $200 which produced the final fruit of a pew for the Church. You may or may not ever sit on that pew, but someone will so someone is benefitting from the seed you planted that produced that pew.

The second commonality that all seeds share is their viability. Some seeds are viable (able to remain alive and grow into something after separating from the parent) for only a few days like those of a willow tree, while others are able to remain viable for thousands of years like the Oriental lotus. The viability of some seeds is dependent upon when they are sown. Seeds sown after their best time can produce weak plants or not grow at all. This is critical for us spiritually. We must know when the best time it is for us to sow certain seeds because it will have an impact of the final results. If we are in line spiritually with our seasons we will know when and what to plant in order to receive the best fruit because the Spirit of God is directing our efforts.