Sowing

Sowing

Introduction

Last week we took up a seed offering for our guest speaker. When I told the guests who came to hear him that they did not have to give in the regular offerings, they looked at me as if I was crazy. Most people plan to give once when they come to Church and I wanted that to go to the minister that they came to hear, to sow a seed into his ministry. Sowing and Reaping. Today I want to talk about the sowing part and next week we will deal with the seeds. If the Lord wills, we will complete this series with reaping.

Have you ever tried to plant something – watch it grow into something else? Maybe you had to plant something in a cup at school – growing peas or something. I have never been big on gardening – although I love to eat what is being produced. I would classify myself as Oliver on the Green Acres show. Remember, no matter what he did, the things he planted just did not turn out right – that would be me. Now Nikki, as well as Aunt Mae, on the other hand have what some people would call a green thumb. She takes growing her flowers and veggies extremely seriously. Sometimes she cannot understand my lack of interest in her love. Gardening and being out in the yard is like high heaven for her, going to a Christian bookstore to stock up resource materials is that for me. But Nikki knows how to grow things. She knows the soil, what plants will do well in what type of lighting, etc. This is all Greek to me, so when it comes to growing things, I yield to her. I cannot tell you the number of times that I have mowed down her flowers thinking it was a weed.

Anyway, my point to all of this is this – when you plant something, you expect it to grow into what you planted. You do not plant tomatoes and expect cucumbers to grow. You do not plan roses and expect monkey grass to grow. What you plant is what should grow – if you do not kill it during the process. A seed can only produce what it was intended to produce, nothing more, nothing less. But lets look at the best case scenario, what is planted, when it grows, it is what you want.

A lot of times we look at sowing and reaping primarily as it pertains to giving offerings and tithes to the Church or doing some charity work. I want to broaden your thought patterns this morning and talk about this not just as it pertains to money, but how it affect most areas of our lives.

This morning I want to look at the whole process of sowing and reaping. We talk all the time about a person will reap what he sows; that they will get what is coming to them, everything that goes around comes around. All of these sayings mean the same thing – what you give out will come back to you – otherwise, you will reap what you sow. So I want to talk about sowing and reaping, because it is a foundational principle that we cannot change. This principle works regardless if you have faith, whether you believe in it or not, or whether you are saved or not. The scriptures make it clear that you will reap what you sow. As a means of an analogy, I want to take the process of planting a garden and show you how this process works in our lives – even if sometimes we are not aware of the fact that it is working. Sowing and Reaping.

There are several steps that you will go through when planting a garden:

• You must choose your site or you choose what you want to grow. You must know what it is you want to grow in order to know where you will plant it and vice versa. You must understand the soil that you will be dealing with.

• The next step is to know when it should be planted – the seed’s peak time for growth. If you plant the seed at the wrong time it will not grow – but if you plant it when it is its season, then a crop will grow.

• Next you must know how to plant, some seeds are planted deeper than others, you need to understand the depth requirements and the soil.

• Next you must prepare the soil for receiving the seed – till the soil, etc.

• Now you are ready to plant. After planting you must take good care of it and make sure that the bugs or animals do not eat what is growing.