Harvest Laws for Holy Living - 9 - The Law of Persevering (2)

The story is told about a father and two children, a boy of eight and a girl of ten years, all good swimmers, who entered the waters of the Atlantic at a New Jersey seashore resort a few summers ago. When some distance from shore, they became separated and the father realized they were being carried out to sea by the tide. He called out to the little girl: “Mary, I am going to shore for help. If you get tired, turn on your back. You can float all day on your back. I’ll come back for you.”

Before long, many searchers in boats were scurrying over the surface of the Atlantic Ocean hunting for one small girl, while hundreds of people to whom the news had spread waited anxiously on shore. It was four hours before they found her, far from land. She was calmly swimming on her back and was not at all frightened. Cheers and tears of joy and relief greeted the rescuers with their precious burden as they came to land.

The child took it calmly. She said, “Daddy said he would come for me, and that I could float all day, so I swam and floated, because I knew he would come.” She persevered in hope.

May I remind you of the laws of the harvest we have discussed so far in this series on “Harvest Laws for Holy Living.”

This law is based on Gal. 6:9-10. To draw our attention to the need and the problem we face, Paul used two words to warn and encourage us against giving up in favor of perseverance.

“Weary” (“Let us not lose heart”)

This word means “to act or treat badly, wrongly,” and then “to cease, give up, lose heart, despair.” It is used:

In 2 Corinthians 4:1 of not fainting in the pressures of life because of the hope of experiencing Christ formed in us by the HS as we behold Him in the Word (cf. 3:18).

In 2 Corinthians 4:16 of not fainting as the consequence of a biblical perspective of life kept alive by daily renewal and a biblical focus on the certainty of the future.

And in 2 Thess. 3:13 to exhort the Thessalonian believers against growing weary in doing good.

This word stresses the idea of discouragement, a failure of the will.

“Faint” (“If we do not grow weary”)

This word is used only in the passive voice in the NT, which points to the impact of something on one’s life which causes them to give up. This word was used in nonbiblical literature of:

The unloosening of a bow string, making the bow, archer useless.

Becoming faint of soul, weary or slack, give out, lose moral courage. cf. Heb. 12:3, 5

Growing physically weary or faint from hunger (Mark 8:3).

The second word stresses failure in spiritual strength.

“For in due season” is lit. “in its own time.” This is the harvest time. Harvest time has its own time. This is God’s appointment, and can neither be hastened nor delayed by the act of any of His creatures. The reference is to a fixed relation between seed-time and harvest.

“In due season” refers to a right, proper, or a favorable time. Note the contrast in the use of the Greek word. In verse 9 it is used of the season for harvest, and in verse 10 where it is translated “oppor- tunity,” it is used of the season for sowing. To miss or fail in one is to miss or fail in the other.

The apostle also stresses the importance and nature of sowing by the use of different terms for doing good.

(1) “In well doing” (vs. 9) is a combination of one word for “doing, executing, producing,” and another word which means “good.” Literally it is “doing what is beautiful, helpful, beneficial.”

(2) “Do good” (vs. 10) combines two different sets of words, synonyms, to drive home the point. The verb means “be active, work effectively, accomplish, carry out,” and the noun used refers to what is intrinsically good, valuable, fit, useful.

In considering the Laws of the Harvest, we’ve tried to stress their absoluteness. These laws contain no exceptions. There are two things that God will not do: He will not ignore the rebellion that we sow in our lives, nor will He ignore the righteousness that we sow. They both have their unique rewards, and they both come to harvest eventually.

Again, let me remind you that the Law of Persevering instructs us that we’ll reap a full, fruitful harvest of the good that we sow as we persevere, but the evil part of the harvest comes all on its own.

We noted in our last message that sometimes, “we must persevere through delays.” That’s tough to do at times, all of us would agree...given the hustle/bustle world we live in. But in the long run, we need to come to appreciate those divine delays God blesses us with.

Joseph experienced them; Moses experienced them; Paul experienced them; we need to experience them too!

There are a couple of other methods that God assists us with in the cultivating of our spiritual gardens, in order to teach us perseverance.

  1. We must persevere through drawbacks

In all candor, we all make mistakes. None of us are blunder-proof. It’s one thing to adjust ourselves to things that come into our lives over which we have no control, but it’s quite another thing to have the right reaction, or response to mistakes we make because of our sometimes silly, laughable blunders.

And if you’re anything like me, you can make some dillies of mistakes sometimes...spiritually and otherwise.

If we could, only would use those blunders as teachers...learn to use them constructively so we don’t repeat the error again, then we could persevere through our drawbacks and be all the wiser for having had the experience.

But our tendency is to allow our mistakes to so overwhelm us that we get to the point of defeat, want to give up. It’s easy to get to the place where we don’t care, no longer try to overcome. If that happens, we’ll neither persevere or reap the harvest of blessings God desires that we enjoy.

How many of us, the first time we sat down at a computer keyboard or typewriter were able to type without making mistakes? It took hours of patient, persistent practice to hit the right keys rapidly, accurately...and even then, the best typists still make mistakes.

If we let our blunders defeat us, we’re slaves to those blunders, rather than their master. Just because you hoe up a potato plant in your garden by mistake doesn’t mean that you get so frustrated that you take the hoe to the entire garden and destroy it all!

Instead, you learn from the mistake, because later in life the knowledge you gained from that blunder could very well save you from far greater mistakes.

I have good news for you today. We can transform our blunders into blessings. That’s right. And the secret to doing it is really no secret at all. Every believer knows the way, if we’ll walk in it. The key is Spirit-control. cf. Eph. 5:18.

Let me give you a couple of practical principles regarding Spirit-controlled living that I believe will encourage you, help us all to learn from our mistakes.

Realize that each of us has what we could call good and bad character traits, and the HS wants to do something about them, if we’ll let Him. Here’s the two principles:

We all have aspects of character that have been with us, grown with us all of our lives that are beneficial. The Holy Spirit wants to refine, rework these for God’s glory. Factors like leadership, will power, persistence, boldness, conviction, courage, to name a few. The Holy Spirit wants to channel these things into useful spiritual resources.

Quite frankly, we’ve all got areas in our personalities that are worthless to the Lord, not worth retaining. We must not hinder the Holy Spirit from eliminating them. And what He removes He replaces with something better, for He operates on the Biblical principle of replacement.

He wants to replace our anger with love, endurance; our bitterness with forgiveness, peace; our brash- ness, roughness with gentleness; our pride, arrogance with humility, meekness...etc.

We don’t need to look any further for a Biblical example of this kind of transformed temperament than Paul himself. cf. I Cor. 15:8-11. (See John Newton poem at bottom of Interlinear).

There is a great need for perseverance in sowing. It’s seldom easy, and sometimes we don’t see the fruit of our labors in this life. Hebrews 11:33-39 speaks of those who were severely persecuted for their faith, but they persevered because they looked for eternal rewards as sojourners and pilgrims (see Heb. 11:13-16).

These, we are then told, “having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised,” that is, in this life. A wonderful illustration of this truth is found in the life of John Wycliffe.

You and I have an English Bible in our possession largely because of a man named John Wycliffe. He was known not only as a builder, producing the first English text of the Bible, but also as a fighter. What a leader! When he died, his enemies burned him at the stake and took the ashes of his body and sprinkled them over the Thames River in London. “Forever, we’re rid of Wycliffe!” his enemies must have thought. They were wrong. The product of his labors, the English Bible, is with us today because he did more than fight. He stayed at the task.

Wycliffe never saw the fruit of his sowing, but he persevered in faith and we today enjoy the product of his labors. But where does perseverance come from? It comes from knowing God through the Word and leaning on His promises by faith. It ultimately boils down to faith and staying focused on the Lord and His person, plan, promises, and purposes as given to us in Scripture.

Close with Romans 15:4; 1 Corinthians 15:58; James 1:2-4; Psalm 138:8.