Don’t get tired
Galatians 6:7-10
I had a friend in college who used to say, "get behind early, that way you have plenty of time to catch up."
His philosophy was supported by the assumption that nobody could keep up. You might as well fall behind in a way that makes sense.
Right? Maybe.
It does stand to reason that nobody succeeds at everything all the time. We all fail and we all get discouraged. The trick is not in succeeding all the time, but in knowing how to treat our failures.
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.
(Galatians 6:7-10 NIV)
What seed are we sowing?
Paul makes a great point of illustrating the difference between acts of righteousness and acts of wickedness in the former passage. He lists out 15 different kinds of sinful behavior and 9 virtues we call the Fruit of the Spirit. He says:
• Don’t do the sinful stuff
• Do bear the fruit of the Spirit
• If we do the sinful stuff, things that please our flesh, we are sowing seeds of destruction and our spirits will be ravaged
• If we sow fruit of the Spirit we will reap eternal life
Verse 7 warns us of what many call the law of sowing and reaping. When we sow seeds of destruction with the expectation that God will bail us out, we are mocking Him. We are treating Him with contempt. I like the way the New English Translation says this:
Do not be deceived. God will not be made a fool. For a person will reap what he sows, (Gal 6:7)
So we are called to abandon acts that fulfill our sinful inclinations. Instead we are called to invest in the righteous behavior that is described in the Fruit of the Spirit.
When we quit trying to make a fool out of God and do what is right, then we are sowing seeds of eternal life.
Let me be clear, your salvation is bought by Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross, you cannot buy it with good works. However, every time you sow a virtue, you reap a crop of eternal, living value, as certainly as sowing sin does supernatural damage.
Our souls are bought by Christ, but our actions are not irrelevant. There is eternal, living value in the good you do.
• So we must persist
• We must have spiritual and physical stamina
• We must endure
Like the song that Irma sings, Thank You, we never know how much good can grow from the good we sow. It may seem small to us, even pointless, but God has a use for every good work you are called to do.
Paul says don’t give up
It is hard, there is no doubt about that. In Galatians alone, Paul talks about several spiritual hurdles he had to jump in order to persist in the faith.
• He had to patiently wait for his own maturity to develop
• He had to overcome the hypocrisy of the apostles
• He had to counteract the false teachers that were trying to lead the Galatians astray
This letter is one more step in the exercise of the virtues of patience and faithfulness, two of the Fruits of the Spirit.
Paul was able to do this because he had faith that:
in due time we will reap, if we do not give up
No orchard keeper ever planted an apple tree one day expecting to bake a pie the next.
• He had to plant
• He had to weed
• He had to fertilize
• He had to water
• He had to prune
• He had to spray
He had to do a hundred other things that I don’t know about because I don’t have his wisdom. He had to do this for many months. Then he gets his pie.
It takes patience and persistence to see the crop of eternal life grow from the seeds of virtue we plant today. But if we give up, the tree will wither before it has a chance.
Here are a few scenarios
Many of you have decided to attend a Bible discussion group on the Sermon on the Mount this year. One Thursday evening, you are tired and don’t feel like going. There is something on TV you wanted to watch. It’s been a rough week and you deserve a break. But you made a commitment, and you are certain that you will be missed if you aren’t there, and maybe Lloyd would call you and you would have to explain.
You attend. While you are there, another attender says something about the Lord’s Prayer that you never thought of before. How could you have missed that? It seems so right.
If Jesus really said something like that, then you should be following through. Perhaps it isn’t even that hard for you to do, but now that you know, you will make a point of it. Your prayers change. Because of the change in your prayers, your faith is exercised in ways it never was before. God promises to answer prayers, so God works in ways you’ve never seen.
It is potentially life altering, not just for you, but for others too. It affects not only your life, but, because of the change in you, it affects others around you too.
All because you persisted. You got up out of your chair and went to that discussion group.
Perhaps this year you decided to read the Bible through. You’ve never done it before. When you got to Numbers you found the going particularly hard. How much spiritual food can you get out of the counting of the men of the tribes who died in the wilderness.
But then you come upon the story of the daughters of Zelophehad. In that seemingly insignificant story, you learn that this whole thing isn’t about power and the dominance of men, but it is about fairness and the faithfulness of God. You learn that God held the rights of women to be important and inviolate.
Whether you are a man or a woman reading this passage, it changes the way you understand God’s view of women. Because you understand God’s view, your own view changes:
• As a woman you see that you have more value than some suggest
• As a man, you know that women are to be treated as valuable and significant
Either way, you persisted in reading the part of the Bible that is hard to get through and a seed of eternal life was planted in your heart. It will affect not only you, but those around you. It won’t buy salvation, but it will make the significance of your salvation much more clear to you and to others who experience in their relationship that you are saved and that God, through His word, is continuing to save you.
Perhaps you decided to memorize a chapter of the Bible. You get to the third verse and find yourself having trouble. Your mind is not as agile as some people’s minds are. Your partner seems to be able to zip right through, in fact, he is half done with his chapter and you are still struggling along verse 3.
You work with the wording and you struggle with the order of the phrases and ... what difference does it really make anyway?
Then you realize and you write in your notebook, that the more time you spend with this verse, the more it is on your mind. The longer it takes you to memorize it, the more times you have to go over it. Even if the exact wording is struggling to take root, the idea is now a regular and permanent part of your thinking. Your mind is being renewed by the word of God.
Did you ever think of this?
God may not want you to be able to easily memorize that verse, because He needs for it to be in front of you longer. You are going to face something next month that will require the truth of this verse to be more deeply imbedded in your heart than it would be if you could just rattle it off without effort.
The point of reading or discussing or memorizing the Bible is not being able to mindlessly repeat it like a parrot. The point is to replace the rotting timbers of sin that support your heart and actions with the enduring stanchions of God’s thoughts. It is tearing out the weeds of destruction we have sown in the past and replacing them with the nutritious fruit of eternal life.
The point is letting the water of the word soak and scrub and cleanse us from the filth we accumulated in this world and in our life before Jesus.
If you work on it for weeks and never perfectly get it, the work of God is still happening. In some ways it is happening better than if you did quickly get it.
What about the consistency of your walk?
Maybe you decided a couple of weeks ago that enough was enough, and you were going to let your light shine. You were going to let the river of living water flow from your heart into your actions.
Then you stood there and the griping and complaining about another person started. You didn’t quite know what to do. Some of the complaints were legitimate. You have a couple of pet peeves that everyone there knew about and when they came up, some of the people looked at you. They knew what you would say and they were just waiting for it.
What did you do?
Did you go ahead and fulfill their expectations by joining in the roast?
Or did you shock everyone by saying that you are trying to understand that person better and to improve your own attitude.
• Maybe you failed
• Don’t give up
As Winston Churchill says:
Never
Never
Never
Never
Give in!
Nobody succeeds all the time. Maybe you got started on your reading and fell behind. So what! Read the next thing on the schedule and catch up when you can. In the mean time, don’t fall any further behind.
Maybe the section you are reading is hard.
We knew at the beginning that this would not be easy.
Remember, God calls us to difficult things. We deceive ourselves with the idea that because God’s salvation is simple for us, that the entire Christian life will be easy. It isn’t. Shaking ourselves from rest into action is a challenge. But it is in this challenge that we are being made into the image of Jesus.
Perhaps you believe others will think you are strange if you practice your faith, and it is frightening. Change always feels strange, like wearing new shoes, stiff and unfamiliar, but necessary for our health.
Think of it like this. The world believes people cannot change. God insists that He can bring it about. We know plenty of people that should change in one way or another.
If we don’t prove that change can happen in our own lives, how can we convince anyone else that God will change them? A change that doesn’t take place publically on some level is probably not a real change.
All of us need encouragement from time to time as we embark on flooding the flood plain. It is hard work that takes patience and faithfulness to God.
• Peter denied Jesus
• Elijah wanted to die
• Jonah the prophet ran away
• Abraham lied about his wife
Everyone has bad days. Everyone stumbles. Even the best of us fail. What will you do? Do not let your failure define you and your spiritual condition! Allow God to take the next step in your life by picking up the pieces and moving ahead!
Working the flood plain vision takes endurance.
Embracing the change God brings, washing in His word, living consistently with the call on your life are the basic working components of that work.
Finally, as you learn things, as you write things in your notebook, show them to your leader. Let them rejoice with you in the work God is doing in your life!
Even if you are having a hard time
Even if you have already stumbled a little
Don’t get tired
Don’t give up
