PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE PART THREE

PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE PART THREE Colossians 4:2-4, John 15:6-8 January 13,  2002 Given by Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introductory The student of the Bible can find the imagery of "harvest" all over the New Testament. The apostle Paul wrote to the Romans about how he wanted to come to Rome "so I may have a harvest" (Romans 1:13). When he spoke of having a harvest he meant he would see the results of his preaching and teaching the good news by witnessing people coming to Christ. In 1 Corinthians 3:5-9 where Paul was correcting divisive issues in the Corinthian Church, he again uses the analogy of a harvest to refer to those who come to Christ. He insisted that it wasn't important what part any individual played in the process of the harvest (some plant, some water and some harvest), but the only thing important is that there IS a harvest and that God be glorified in it. Revelation 14 pictures an "end-time" harvest where Jesus and His angels are involved in conducting a harvest of souls. While He ministered on earth, Jesus spoke of the harvest being "ready" and "white", and He told His church to "pray the Lord of the Harvest to send Laborers into his harvest field." (Matthew 9:38) The harvest is the theme in at least five of Jesus' parables. In each of those parables there are three common characters or groups of characters: The farmer/landowner/harvester, symbolizing God the Father, The harvest itself, which represents people who are responding to the Father's invitation to come in faith and belong to His Kingdom and The laborers/harvest workers, who are those who work for the farmer in raising and harvesting the crop. Sometimes angels are the harvesting servants; usually it is you and I who are pictured in this role. In the unfolding drama of this cosmic harvest, I think it is important for us to see our role clearly, to know our part in what God is wanting to accomplish in His world. Consider with me FOUR THINGS WE NEED AS GOD'S CO-LABORERS IN THE HARVEST 1. A Sense of PURPOSE We are here for a purpose. Human beings have a strong need. In them for a sense of meaning in life-what the French call raison d'etre, a reason for being. You have that inner longing to be involved in something important, something bigger than yourself. Sybil Stanton wrote: "Your purpose…has nothing to do with grandiose goals, lofty achievement, or universal fame. It is the quiet confidence that even if you never leave your neighborhood, you will have lived fully." People clamor for happiness trying to do for themselves, to make themselves feel important or at least useful or valuable in someone else's eyes. But the truth is we will never be truly happy until we live for something other that ourselves, something grander than we are, some magnificent obsession. And God has purposed to give us that sense of fulfillment and satisfaction-when we serving His eternal cause. Giving people that sense of belonging to something eternal and significant is part of God's plan. He has graciously condescended to not only save us, but also to involve us in His redemptive purposes. We want to promote that same theme as a church. Our Mission Statement includes the comment that "anyone [who wants to] can find life-giving purpose in serving Christ." Do you want real, satisfying, eternal joy? Serve Him. This is where true happiness is-in serving Jesus. As your pastor, I am not here to make people happy; I am here to make people happy making God happy! A sense of PURPOSE is important in the harvest work. When people find a sense of purpose in serving Jesus, they're happy. Jesus said, "Go and make disciples of all people groups" (Matthew 28:19) 2. PRAYER is the second thing we need as harvest laborers. God set it up such that we would draw on His power and resources to get this harvest work done. We cannot do it on our own strength. Jesus never expected us to. He said, "I am with you always, even to the end of the world" right after He gave that great commission (Matthew 28:20). He said to His co-laborers in the harvest work, "Ask anything of me according to the Father's will, and I will do it." And He promised us His precious Holy Spirit to empower us in the work of witnessing for Him. When we learn to pray for the harvest we begin to overcome our selfish trappings because not only are we asking for His help, but we are also recommitting ourselves to the harvest cause when we pray. Those people who pray know what most around them either don't know or choose to ignore: centering life in the insatiable demands of the ego is the sure path to doom….they know that life confined to the self is a prison, a joy-killing, neurosis-producing, disease-fomenting prison." --Eugene Peterson This is where purpose and prayer meet. When God's people respond to His redemptive, forgiving love for them, they begin to ache for others who don't know that love yet. They are drawn into His desire that no one should perish, but all should come to repentance and life. And they begin to pray in accordance with His will-praying for lost people to come to Christ for salvation. But there is a troublesome element to this harvest praying. We understand that God has determined to give people free will-the right to choose for themselves whether or not they will love and serve Him. So, when we pray that others would come into His Kingdom, are we asking God to overpower them and drag them into the Kingdom against their will? Are we making our request for God to do something He has already decided He won't do? Praying that others come into the Kingdom is not a guarantee that they will choose for God after all. So, does God fail? No, in response to our prayers God arranges in unique ways to make His offer of salvation clear and compelling, but He does not run roughshod over people's free will. He is not interested in forcing anyone to love and serve Him; He doesn't want robots who love and serve Him because they must do so through coercion. Yet, there is a power I will never understand. I know that before I submitted my life to Christ, I did not want to. I felt that I wanted nothing to do with Christ or His church. But others were praying for me, and gradually over the course of time there was an inexplicable change in my thinking. My mind, my heart were changing. God didn't trick me, He didn't manipulate me and He didn't trap me. He drew me, we wooed me, He won me over. Finally I came to the place where I realized I would be more uncomfortable remaining an unbeliever than I would if I gave in to His stubborn love. No one coerced me, and as far as I can remember, no one even convinced me. But, I'll tell you what they did do-they prayed for me. How God moved and gently opened my eyes to His grace I don't know. A woman wrote recently in The Christian Read: "When I was expecting my first baby, a six-year-old neighborhood girl was particularly curious. She wanted to see the baby furniture and hear our list of possible names. When she asked where the baby was, I was a walking show-and-tell even at four months. But then she asked the question that probably had been foremost in her mind: 'How did the baby get in there?' 'I think you'd better ask your mother about that,' I said. 'Oh, I tried that,' she confessed, 'Nobody in my family knows!' You know what? Nobody in the family of God knows exactly how Christ comes into a life, either! What a mysterious way He has of bringing us to agree with Him that we need Him. One old gospel hymn puts it this way: "I know not how the Spirit moves, convincing men of sin, revealing Jesus through the word, creating faith in him…" Our part in the harvesting of a soul is clear-PRAYER. Look at Colossians 4:2-4, and let's see what the apostle Paul has to say about harvest praying. Now he was heavily involved in the harvest as an apostle-missionary. In fact, no one ever did that work quite like the apostle Paul. What was the secret to the success of his harvest ministry? He kept writing to other Christian friends and asking them to pray for him and the harvest of souls! "Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should." Two giant harvest concerns Paul had-that he would have the opportunity to preach the gospel of Christ to those who hadn't yet heard, and that when he did preach he would be able to make the message clear and compelling. He took those concerns to the church and asked for prayer. Paul knew that the power of the harvest ministry was in how much and how well God's people prayed down His power to convict people. Prayer is what we can do, must do, as the "already harvested", believing that God will respond, just as He said He would. He has made us partners with Him in this grand enterprise of His-the harvest. Through prayer and obedience we are "co-laborers" in the harvest. We are working WITH Him! Lloyd Ogilvie wrote: "Without God we can't; without us God won't." I urge you, brothers and sisters, pray for the harvest. Pray for people by name. Lift up the names of individuals in this harvest basket. They are our appointed ministry. God has given us these individuals in our neighborhoods, families, circles of friends, co-workers. Lift them before the Lord, asking Him to draw them (not will-breaking, but loving, revealing Himself, destroying spiritual strongholds that stand against the knowledge of Him, opening blind eyes, working miracles-anything and everything to bring them to faith in Christ. 3. PATIENCE We know that when we are working with people, waiting for them to finally come to that place of surrender to the Lord, we will need patience. These things never happen as quickly as we'd like. I know a dozen people who prayed for Ray Canalejo to come to Christ. They prayed for years! Occasionally they gave up, too! They pleaded with God; they pleaded with Ray, they encouraged him and they interceded before God. Suddenly, it's time! Ray has said yes to Jesus. Harvest ministry takes patience. Author George Chauncey thinks the church should be "community of dates instead of a community of pumpkins. He said you can plant a pumpkin seed and have a harvest of pumpkins in 6 months. But if you want dates, well, you plant your seed and you wait-years. It often takes two generations for the date palm to grow to maturity. Then the tree can finally begin to churn out a harvest of dates, one harvest a year. Gardens have a way of humbling you and teaching you patience. To get the fruit you want, you must plan and work in advance: build up a good soil, plant, cultivate, weed, fertilize Not only that, but you must face the truth that some harvests you will lose. You might lose an entire crop of broccoli to an invasion of moth larvae; cut worms may kill all your tomato plants, rabbits may chew all your peas and beans to nubs for the duration of Spring; and hail may destroy your corn. Sometimes it seems that the church's harvest is slow, even non-existent. Keep on planting seed, keep watering. Sometimes it feels like your best efforts at witnessing to a friend are positively ineffective. Keep being faithful to your harvest ministry, keep praying, keep sharing-you never know when someone's faith will ripen for the harvest. By the way, how long did someone pray for you to come to Christ before you finally did? Our job as co-laborers in the harvest work is to pray and faithfully plant seeds. If you will do that you will bear fruit. I learned a remarkable fact about the cocklebur: its sticky seed pod contains several seeds, not just one. And these seeds germinate in different years. Thus, if seed A fails to sprout next year because of a drought, seed B will be there waiting for year after next, and seed C the year after that, waiting until the right conditions for germination arrive. In the book The Ascent of a Leader, Bruce McNicol and Bill Thrall tell of a woman who has a dream where she wanders into a shop at the mall and finds Jesus behind a counter. Jesus says, 'You can have anything you heart desires.' Astounded, but please, she asks for peace, joy happiness, wisdom, and freedom from fear. Then she adds, 'Not just for me, but for the whole earth." Jesus smiles and says, 'I think you misunderstand me. We don't sell fruits, only seeds.'" PRAY FOR THE HARVEST 4. Persistence The harvest workers need to be persistent. Persistent in prayer, but also persistent in their faith and devotion to Jesus. Let's look at John 15:5-8 and see what Jesus says about the fruit we bear as Christians. "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples." Then look at verse 16 - "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit-fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name." What does it mean for the Christian to bear fruit? Some say it is that we would mature and bear the fruit of the Spirit. A woman wrote in a magazine recently, "Our young daughter was learning the fruits of the Spirit, so I asked her to recite them to me. 'Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and REMOTE CONTROL.'" The Bible certainly does teach that as Christians mature in their faith they will bear the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), but the fruit of one Christian is another Christian. In Genesis 1, the Holy Spirit seems to go out of the way to make a point about the trees and plants that God created. He created them to bear fruit "after their kind". Do you know what that means? It means you can't plant carrot seed and harvest summer squash; nor can you get a bradford pear tree from an acorn. Listen, in His great harvest plan, God has "planted" Christians in His world to be salt and light and to share the good news with others. The fruit He expects to harvest is more Christians! The natural result of you being a believer in this world is that many others will become Christ-followers. This last word the Lord gives us is PERSEVERANCE. How does the Christian persevere in the harvest work? One thing: ABIDE, REMAIN IN HIM. In Ruth Tucker's great book, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, she tells the story of David Brainerd. Taking lines from his journal: "My heart is sunk…It seemed to me I should never have any success among the Indians. My soul was weary of my life; I longed for death, beyond measure." That we the way David Brainerd felt at that point, early in his work as a missionary to Native Americans at the beginning of the 1700's. Things didn't improve much for the first two years, in fact. "He felt his prospects of winning converts 'as dark as midnight'. Three years into the work, though, he finally witnessed a revival among the Indians of Crossweesung in New England, and after another year and a half, the number of converts numbered 150-not much by today's mass evangelistic standards, but profoundly significant in his day. Unfortunately, Brainerd died after only five years on the mission field, at age 29. After Brainerd's death, Jonathan Edwards-whom some consider America's greatest theologian-published Brainerd's journals. These were read widely in America and Europe. In fact, William Carey, the "father of modern missions," the man who ignited the modern Protestant missionary movement, which has been responsible for millions upon millions of conversions worldwide, pointed to Brainerd's journals as a key source of his inspiration to take up the missionary life. Who, then, can judge whether our work is worthwhile? Certainly we cannot when we're in the midst of discouragement.' God has a great, historical plan of harvest. But that can feel almost meaningless until we're convinced He cares for US personally. Jeremiah 29:11 reports how God feels toward you: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you; plans to give you hope and a future."     [Back to Top]