Reaping your Harvest in Due Season
Planting seasons always precede harvest seasons. Planting seasons are periods when you put in a lot of hard work without immediate obvious results.
Every act of obedience to God is a seed you plant towards a blessed future. To consolidate your future you must plant good seeds in your present.
A man who does not plant good seeds in his present, will arrive in his future and have nothing. The life you are living now is a harvest of seeds you planted in the past. Every seed is smaller than its harvest, so resist the temptation to despise the small size of your seed. This means every act of obedience to God, no matter how seemingly small, has significant implications for your future.
So let’s not get tired of doing what is good.
At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.
Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity,
we should do good to everyone—especially to those in the family of faith.
Galatians 6:9-10 NLT
You can get tired and want to give up even when you are doing good in the perfect will of God. The sure promise of a harvest in God’s due season and the strength of the Holy Spirit will help you persist in doing God’s perfect will. During the harvest there are a lot of visible good results, but there is also a lot of hard work to manage those results. We need to also pray for God’s grace to be faithful stewards of His harvest otherwise the crop goes bad.
As long as the earth remains,
there will be planting and harvest,
cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.”
Genesis 8:22 NLT
Consider the barren woman who for many years seeks God faithfully for a child. One day with great joy she realizes she is pregnant and finally delivers her baby. That pregnancy and delivery of the baby, though an answer to prayer, may also involve morning sickness, stretch marks, sleepless nights, changing diapers and a crying, noisy child. If her friends hear her complaining and see her neglecting the child, they would think of her as very ungrateful. She now needs to trust God for the grace to successfully manage the harvest He gave her by bringing up her child the right way.
Be encouraged to persist in obedience to Him even when you do not see immediate results, the seeds are growing up to produce a harvest at just the right time. Do not also be tempted to despise your good seed however small, it’s is growing into a mighty harvest as you remain faithful to Him.
Receive God’s grace to successfully manage your harvest so all the glory will go to Him in the end.