The Harvest You Can’t See Yet
There are seasons in life when nothing seems to be working. Efforts that should have produced fruit haven’t. Prayers prayed for years still haven’t been answered. People poured into have walked away. In those seasons, it’s easy to wonder whether any of it is making a difference.
Paul, writing to the churches in Galatia, offers a different way to read that silence: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up,” (Galatians 6:9, NIV).
Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say the harvest might come, or that it usually comes. He says it will come, at the proper time, to those who don’t give up.
Oswald Chambers understood something about this tension. In My Utmost for His Highest, he wrote: “God does not give us overcoming life; He gives us life as we overcome.”
The harvest isn’t something handed to us. It grows out of the faithful, unglamorous work of not giving up. The weariness is real. But so is the promise.
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”
2 Corinthians 4:16-17, NIV
Seeking the harvest,
Tom Harper
Founder, BiblicalLeadership.com
LinkedIn profile | My books
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