SOW THE SEED, IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO EXPECT A HARVEST

in many and various ways taught that patience is a spiritual virtue, it involves sitting on the banks of a river with your fishing rod and hook in the waters and waiting for your fish to swim by.  Sometimes the wait is short and sometimes it is long but that is entirely outside the angler’s scope of control, he can only go as far as setting up the rod, the fish and the waters are outside his influence.

The farmer knows he/she can’t harvest without first sowing the seed even though he/she is not responsible for its growth.  First, he/she prepares the soil in the best way he/she knows how, throws the seed into the ground, and leaves the rest to natural forces buried deep in the soil.  The farmer recognizes that he/she is only part of a whole intricate scheme of things that must happen before harvest; in the meantime, he/she must sit and wait because the processes of time are not emotional, just realistic.

When soil lies bare, not many people see the opportunities in it because they don’t scream out, but if you have an eye, you can identify opportunity where others see waste.  When the seed is buried beneath the soil, the surface looks as bare as it is unfarmed, but the reality is there is a lot of activity underneath that the naked eye can’t pick up.  Many people have seen advantage where others have seen nothing.

Opportunity is rare and often surfaces at the most unexpected of places, if we can’t read beyond the obvious we miss it.  No breakthrough is ever possible without learning how to wait and patiently watching the place where the seed was buried, Solomon wrote about wisdom, ^{Pr 8:34(NLT)} “Joyful are those who listen to me, watching for me daily at my gates, waiting for me outside my home.” 

Waiting is futile if we don’t know what we are waiting for or if we are waiting at the wrong place.  If we wait for a door to open, it has to be the right door at the right place, if you want bread you go to the bakery not the butchery.  If we don’t know what we are waiting for we can’t identify it when it comes along, and if we are waiting at the wrong place, what we are waiting for may never come along.  Waiting for what you don’t know or at the wrong place is foolish even if by some accident you end up with what you need.  Waiting for what you know and at the right place is virtuous even if you may never find it; the spiritual processes at work are different.

On the natural, it is better to be foolish with something than be virtuous with nothing.  That is to completely miss the crux of the “Kingdom Imperative” because the focus of the imperative is not on the finding but on the seeking.  The finding is only an effect of the seeking, if you keep looking in the right places you will find what you are looking for.  No seeking is complete until we find, just as no finding is complete unless the processes of waiting purify character.  Shortcuts may deliver an end but they don’t produce the emotional robustness of the process.  Victory, as Samson’s honey is sweeter if found in the carcass of a lion you killed.  If you worm your way through any sort of achievement, you will lack the moral stronghold to sustain it.

IGNORANCE EXPOSED IS IGNORANCE DEPOSED

In both parable and paradox, the objective in the pedagogy of Christ was to expose the gap between awareness and ignorance.  Ignorance exposed, is ignorance deposed.  God’s Word exposes our ignorance, and facilitates new levels of awareness—a paradigm shift from what is known to what is unknown.

The Mat 6:33 Imperative is a call to shift paradigms from self and environment to Christ—an absolute surrender to the authority of God in Christ.  As the journey unfolds, we begin to see us in the context of the Light of God.  It enables the individual to begin a process of breaking down models deeply rooted in environmental limitations, and replacing them with new ones loaded with charged possibilities in the context of the eternal and divine.

Every butterfly must go through certain transformational stages before it flies its own unique fly.  Personal transformation in the Christ-Logos is a metamorphosis of the tensions and contradictions of the dynamic interaction between the Spirit of the divine and the churning of the human spirit.  We are transformed as we experience God in our relationship with the person of Christ as being—very God, and very human.  Christ went through it all, ^{Heb 4:15} “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.”

In all biblical teaching, the Word of God is central and crucial to the transformation of one’s mind, ^{Dt 30:14”} [T]he word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.”  Paul quotes the same scripture in Rom 10:8, and links it with Faith and confession—confess with your mouth, and believe in your heart.  True transformation begins in one’s heart, and ultimately affects one’s language.  The power of confession is not in what you say, but in what you believe; and Christ as Logos is both the substance and object of our faith and confession.

In much of self-help literature, scripture is used as rote recitation and incantation and personal gratification.  To be sure, it idolizes the human mind, and uses biblical scripture as a religious invocation to dispel or invoke a desired result.  If it works, you can safely walk away from it, and perhaps try it the next time you are in trouble.  The problem is relational in that God is used as we would a voodoo charm, but there is often no personal relationship with the Christ of God.

Many of these mental rehearsal incantations are based on “tried and tested” theories of the human mind; and thrive on psychological manipulation.  The challenge of the Mat 6:33 Imperative is to let God transform our minds through God’s word—not us transform God through human theories.  Paul warned, ^{Col 2:8 (NLT)} “Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.”  Scientific theories change with time, but the word of God endures forever.

Human nature being what it is, will always question its own competence to stand above itself, it is always in search of a higher Divine.  Whenever we run into a glitch, we want a more powerful intervention.  St. Augustine confessed (Pusey, 1996:11),  “Oh God!  You created us to praise you; you made us for your own pleasure, and our hearts are ill-at-ease until they find rest in you.”