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The Law Of Sowing And Reaping Series
Contributed by Mark Baker on Mar 13, 2005 (message contributor)
Summary: God’s law concerning sowing and reaping.
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Galatians 6:7 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.
The Living Bible says it like this…
Galatians 6:7 Don’t be misled; remember that you can’t ignore God and get away with it: a man will always reap just the kind of crop he sows!
Through out God’s Word there is much said about sowing and reaping. This is a spiritual law that can’t be negated. The Living Bible says it so simply, a man will always reap just the kind of crop he sows. The analogy here of spiritual sowing is being compared to sowing seed for a crop. This is not so hard for farmers or gardeners to understand. In the natural you know that if you sow corn you are not going to get pumpkins. Why is this so hard for us to equate in the spiritual realm? We are going to look at this law and learn what God’s Word has to say about it and begin to apply these truths to our lives.
One of the first things we should look at is what exactly is sowing in the spiritual realm. In the natural realm it is easy, you take some type of seed and you dig a hole in the ground and place the seed in the hold at a predetermined depth. You also have to water it and so on, however the seed itself does the work. Because there is life already in the seed, the seed germinates and grows into the type of plant that produced the seed in the first place doesn’t it? We see this law being put into place by God in the very first chapter of Genesis, let’s take a look.
Genesis 1:11 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth’’; and it was so. 12. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
We can see that God designed all the many plants to produce after their own kind, and He declared that the seed would be in itself. In other words the plant would produce the seed that would in turn produce another plant and so on forever. My point being the seed has a specific purpose, that being to reproduce according to the life that God placed in it.
That is a very incredible thing to consider.
God has given us seed to sow, yet most of us don’t understand this principle and use the seed for our own pleasures. We consume the seed instead of planting it. We may plant a certain amount of seed. We sow a little here and a little there. However we are not sowing the seed for the purpose of harvesting. I am not pointing my finger at anyone to criticize them, only pointing out an observation here. I am learning just like we all are. The purpose of planting seed is to reproduce the parent plant. Farmers practice this on a large scale and gardeners do it on a smaller scale. You harvest what you have planted. You sow for the specific purpose of harvesting. You don’t sow because you have nothing better to do. When harvest time comes and it will, you reap the harvest. If you didn’t want a harvest you wouldn’t have sown in the first place, would you? I have said all of this to make the point that if we want a spiritual harvest we have to sow.
There are also other consideration we should look at as well. There is a time to sow. You would not sow certain types of seed in the middle of the winter, as they are summer crops, and you would not plant winter crops in the heat of the summer. The temperature of the soil is vital to the germination and growth of the seed into a mature plant. God has a time for spiritual sowing as well. I have found He will lead you at certain times to sow into very specific ministries. He wants you to sow your seed at a very specific time. The spiritual temperature will be just right for that seed to germinate and grow into a mature plant. The mature plant is the plant that produces the harvest. An immature plant might start to produce but then not yield a crop because it is not capable or mature enough to do so.
If you plant your seed at the wrong time, you can not expect the seed to germinate properly, and grow, and mature, and produce a crop. This after all is the whole purpose of sowing the seed in the first place, is it not? We sow seed for the purpose of reaping.