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July 11, 2004
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest
I Samuel 13: 2-15 / I Corinthians 11: 23-33
July 11th, 2004
I stole the subject of this morning’s sermon from my namesake, F.W. Robertson who preached a sermon with this title on December 15th, 1849, at Trinity Chapel, Brighton, England. I believe it’s not plagiarism if you tell your source.
I claim this older source because the topic on which I must speak this morning is vital and hard, and perhaps I’m trying to hide in the trees of good company. I am saying to you what illustrious forbears have told their congregations in every generation. It is the old two-fold principle that Paul announced, that we all know is true.
First, God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.
Second, “He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.”
These two sides of the principle of spiritual harvest are as sure as the principle of natural harvest. If you plant corn, you harvest corn. If you plant little you reap little corn. If you plant much corn you harvest much corn.
Does it seem odd that the one who taught we are saved by grace, not by works, should emphasize that whatever we sow we will reap and if we will reap bountifully we must sow bountifully? It is a law as unflinching as gravity. It works in us all in due time.
I wonder how often you may have thought or said, “She got what’s coming to her.” Or “He got what’s coming to him.” Maybe you even said those cruel words, “I told you so.” So firmly is this idea fixed in our minds that much of the TV entertainment available to us has to do with reminding us—courtroom dramas, cops handcuffing crooks, high speed chases with police cars in hot pursuit. The news has added image after image of Enron executives led off in handcuffs, reaping what they sowed, getting what was coming to them. Enough is enough! I sometimes think.
The Old and New Testament readings this morning have to do with this principle of a spiritual harvest. It is a law that may seem harsh when it happens to us. Sometimes we recognize its inevitability when we see it at work in others. They earned what they got.
How often have you thought, looking at the unfolding of someone's life, that she earned what she got—for good or for ill?
Still we may find it hard to see how King Saul did anything wrong in making a burnt offering even though he was not a priest. Might not you say to the king, “If the preacher is off somewhere, well, why don’t you pray for God’s help?” After all, his forces were far out-numbered by the Philistine forces, and Samuel wasn’t there to ask God’s help. Didn’t Saul do what he could?
But it wasn’t quite this kind of thing. Offering a sacrifice was not like winging a prayer to God from the foxhole. It was a solemn act protected in its sanctity, no matter what. King Saul could pray as King David did in his times of distress. But he simply had no right to offer a sacrifice, no matter what. He knew it. Saul had a character problem. He bent the rules when he wanted to. He had an under-developed sense of consequences. He reaped what he sowed.
I would not doubt that there are some of us here today who think God was unfair to Saul, or Samuel was. Samuel said, “Now your kingdom shall not continue; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart . . . because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.” You say, “You mean his kingdom was stripped from him for offering a sacrifice? Give him a break!” And Samuel replies, “Yes. He’ll reap what he sowed.”
We see in Saul's life story that he reaped what he sowed, losing his kingdom, not in a judicial proceeding, but falling dead after hearing his sons were killed in battle and the Ark of the Covenant was captured by Israel's enemies.
The second reading illustrating this principle comes after the passage you hear every time we take the Lord’s Supper—which we are doing today. After the words of institution you hear me say ("I have received of the Lord what delivered to you . . ."), Paul wrote some other words that I should perhaps remind us all more often. “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord . . . that is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.”
I am very careful not to exclude from the Lord’s Table people I believe Jesus would invite. I make a point of inviting all who have trusted in Jesus to come to this Feast that celebrates how Jesus paid the penalty for our sin.
And this is my duty. But there is another kind of duty that falls on the shoulders of all who come to the Lord’s Supper. I cannot see into your hearts, but you know what’s going on in your life. We are not unworthy if we come to the Lord’s Table as sinners. If this were the case, none of us could take Communion. What is at issue is how we think of our sins. We may protect our sins rather than confess it. Our sins hurt other people. They grieve our Creator. To claim the right to sin—which was the reason for Jesus' death on the cross, while claiming the right to take the Lord's Supper is like crucifying Jesus again, Paul told us.
What was the situation that Paul saw requiring this warning? At first, the Lord’s Supper was celebrated as the Old German Baptist Brethren still do. It was a meal, a full-fledged meal. But this meal as eaten together in Corinth had turned into a tragic reminder that far from being one in Christ, Christians were divided by wealth and social class. They did not eat potluck as we do. Everyone brought his own meal to the Eucharist and did not share it. This meant that rich people ate very well, and poor people ate meagerly as usual.
Thus, the rich would look down on the poor “brothers and sisters,” perhaps making comments about their coarse bread and smelly dried fish. It was anything but a love feast. It was another reminder that the Body of Christ was an ideal rather than a reality.
The Apostle Paul responded to this fiasco in two ways. First, he gave directions that we still follow, by which the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper would be a symbolic meal of which all would partake alike. Second, he warned them about the danger of desecrating the Lord’s Table.
Christians over the centuries have thought a lot about what Paul said in the warning here. “Many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.” The Medieval Church took Paul’s warning as a proof-text for flexing its muscle in pre-emptive church discipline. It would determine beforehand who was unworthy to take the Lord’s Supper. Unworthiness did not have to do with violations of God's laws but with not submitting to the power politics of the Church. Excommunication, being barred from the Lord’s Table became a judicial proceeding of the Church. Why? Was it to keep people from incurring God's punishment for desecrating it? Hardly!
In the power struggles that developed between popes and emperors some of the popes used Excommunication as a power tool. They forbade entire nations to receive the Lord's Supper if they had a grievance with the king. Not only that, they forbade Baptism, marriage, funerals, and every other rite at which priests officiated. Because people then took these Church-administered matters seriously, the Church brought life in entire nations to a stand still.
When Pope Innocent III disagreed with the Archbishop of Canterbury that King John chose in the early 13th century, the pope put a lock on the life of England by denying its priests and bishops the right of offering the Sacraments. Bodies lay unburied for days. Nobody could get married. People lived in fear of hell for dying out of a state of grace.
These were developments most certainly not in Paul's mind when he warned Christians about eating and drinking unworthily. What he had in mind was a spiritual harvest, a natural consequence that takes place, not a punitive system imposed by the Church. The consequences were not meted out by church authorities but by God working in the events of life. Sometimes sickness and even death, if the truth were known, were traceable to causes that began with desecrating the Lord's Table. There is a place for church discipline, but this is not what Paul was referring to here.
The truth is far deeper than we realize, that we reap what we sow.
We apply this principle when it comes to rearing our children. For example, if they are reared hearing much criticism, they learn to be critical in spirit. They come to think ill of themselves. If we plant the idea, 'Do as you please,' they harvest this seed-idea in a life of misery. Don’t plant your children badly. What you sow they will reap.
Let me draw again on the sermon my illustrious forbear, F.W. Robertson preached at Trinity Chapel. He apparently called attention to a current event, some entrepreneur who bent the rules of honesty. “Compute now what price was paid for that. The price that merchant prince paid, perhaps with blood of his own soul, was shame and guilt. The price he is paying now is perpetual dread of detection; or worse still, the hardness which can laugh at detection; or one deep, lower yet, the low and groveling soul which can be satisfied with these things as a Paradise, and ask no higher. He has reaped enjoyment—yes, and he has sown too, the seed of infamy. It is all fair.”
In broadening the application of this principle I find myself banging against the standard stereotypes of conservative and liberal that have found a home in the church as well as in society at large. There is a built-in blindness in conservatives to acknowledging bad seed they may sow. There is a comparable blindness in liberals. Both shout of values. Each harbors strong grievances against the other so that neither is aware of the quality of the seed they are sowing. Both will reap what they sow regardless of what they call their seed. In settings of controversy we loose perspective.
Stanford Professor Terry Karl reminded the graduating class at Stanford this spring of something it is hard for us Americans to admit.
Survey data on your generation as a whole is not very promising. It says that you are primarily interested in acquisition, that you define yourself in terms of possessions rather than ‘goods of the soul.’ You are self-interested and care little for developing a moral code, much less for assuming some type of global political responsibility.
Thus he tried to urge these bright young movers and shakers to sow well. I pray we may be wise to investigate candidly how we are sowing as a nation so that we may reap a rich harvest that blesses the world and not find ourselves with a grim harvest instead. Self-interest first at every level promotes bad sowing and results in a tragic harvest. Pray for wisdom in the ideals you defend.
We come to the Lord’s Supper examining our consciences before hand. It is not just a matter of going through the ritual of repeating the Prayer of Confession. If that prayer is not your prayer, you have not prayed. And if we pray with no intention of trying to live as we pray, God is not deceived.
God sees and, happily, forgives the repentant person. But if you and I come to this Table in a cavalier way, with no spirit of repentance, there are consequences that will come to us. It is a spiritual law of the harvest comparable to the law of nature. Not every sickness you and I may incur, and not everyone that dies suffers as a consequence of taking the Lord’s Supper unworthily. Indeed, I would emphasize this forcefully.
We moderns should not curl our lips at Paul’s teaching that there are actual physical consequences to desecrating the Lord’s Supper.
There are other ill consequences too. Those who treat sacred things in a casual manner become callous to sacred things. People who take God’s name casually on their lips come to think casually of God. It is like becoming tone deaf, unable to enjoy the beauty of music after having your eardrums pounded with loud music. What we sow we reap.
And so we come to this table reverently and soberly. Not because I, or the Session has power to condemn anyone, but because God has so made us so that what we sow we reap.
The second aspect of this law I would remind us, that Paul spoke to the Church in Corinth. It was a wealthy Church, which was part of the problem he addressed in their desecration of the Lord’s Supper. To them he wrote, “He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.”
We see how this principle works in various ways. The student who studies hard invariably gets better grades than the student who sows his study sparingly.
Those of us who watch Purdue football were fascinated some years ago to watch the development of fullback Mike Alstott. He was not a heralded running back coming out of high school in Chicago. He was too slow so he wasn’t highly recruited. But Purdue took a chance and recruited him. During the summer he would tie one end of a rope around his waste, and the other end he tied to several truck tires. And he would run uphill pulling those tires until he developed massive power in his legs. We watched him run over would-be tacklers when he played for us. And he became All-Pro with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, doing the same thing against professional defensive linemen and safeties that he did in the Big Ten. He is often referred to as the ideal of a professional fullback. He sowed what he reaped.
Apply this to your life. It is a law at work in us whether or not we want to acknowledge it in the way we choose to live. We will reap what we are sowing.
Let us apply the same principle to our life together at Faith Church. We too reap what we sow. What are we sowing now? Paul reminded the very gifted church at Corinth, “He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.” And I would remind us here, a congregation rich in many ways, that we will reap what we sow and we are reaping now what was sown in days past. There are some fashions of church life that encourage the leanest kind of sowing.
We are sowing leanly in the discipline of praying together. If our hearts were warm toward God, on Wednesday mornings this place would be full of people in prayer to God. If we would reap a rich spiritual harvest let us plant richly.
I remind you of Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s remark to a person who came to visit Metropolitan Tabernacle in London one Sunday evening. His church overflowed each time the doors were open and the impact of this church of the 19th century endures into the 21st century. He asked this newcomer at the door, “Would you like to see our furnace?” His perplexed guest agreed to see it. So Pastor Spurgeon took him to the church basement that was packed with people praying for God’s work in the service that would soon begin. That church reaped a harvest that still has people noticing. If we will reap richly here, we must plant richly.
If this sanctuary becomes full each Lord’s Day morning with people who during the week are sowing the seed of daily using life as a gift to be offered back to God, we will reap a spiritual harvest.
All of this that I have said you know very well is true. You know that there is a law of spiritual harvest--that we reap what we plant. And we reap in proportion to how much we plant. The mercy of God often gives us better than we planted, in fact. But it is presumptuous to think that it doesn’t matter how we sow because the grace of God gives us better than we deserve.
I ask you to ponder these things not only now as you come to the Lord’s Table, but as you leave this place. I pray it comes to our minds tomorrow morning, and on Friday. We all are sowing, and we all will reap. Let us plant well, for the harvest will surely show what we have planted, and we will reap in proportion to how we sow.
Let us pray: O Lord, we depend on your mercy, and are grateful it is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear you. Give to us a wise heart, to so live as those who are planting good seed liberally, so that we may reap abundantly well. To the praise of Jesus Christ who has saved us by grace for good works that we should walk in them. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at July 11, 2004 09:30 AM