How to be a nonanxious farmer

While a large crowd was gathering and the people were coming to Jesus from after town, he told this parable: “A farmer went out to sow his seed” Luke 8:4,5, NIV

Did you know that Labour Day is supposed to be the best day of the year to plant a new lawn? And so even though it was raining that September Monday, my daughter Kristin and I headed out to the front yard to do just that in a 10’ x 12’ bare patch of earth that covered a now-buried culvert. We did whatevery farmer from time immemorial has done-we scattered our seed. And sure enough, it turned out just the way Jesus said it would.

Remember His parable? One early morning a farmer traversed his rolling fields, grabbing from his bag of seed fistfuls of potential grain and “broadcasting” them to the right and to the left. It didn’t matter the soil-rocky, trampled, weedy, or rich-the farmer’s solitary mission was simply to keep on hurling his seed. No pausing or fret over the outcome of his sowing, he depends on the Creator for the germination and growth of the seed. He is a nonanxious farmer.

And so must the chosen be, too. Nonanxious. Which is usually what we aren’t, isn’t it, when it comes to the mission of evangelizing and witnessing? I have a young friend who pines because he feels he hasn’t had very much measurable success in sharing the Word of God with his neighbours and colleagues and friends. Ask him, “Well, aren’t you sharing the seed?” and he’ll reply, “Sure I am-everywhere-but nobody ever gets baptized from all the sharing that I’ve done. I can’t seem to get a harvest.” Truth is, he isn’t the only farmer in the church who feels that way, is he? Nonanxious really isn’t how we feel when it comes to witnessing.

But read Jesus’ opening line again: “A farmer went out to sow his seed.” Period. And it’s that period that’s the good news! No paralysis of analysis for that farmer. Because he knows it is his task to sow the seed-and it is God’s task to grow the seed. The farmer sows, God grows. You sow, God grows. It’s not ours to worry about where the seed lands or how the seed grows or when the seed gets harvested. All we farmers must do, who want to be about our Father’s business, is take the seed by the handful and sow it everywhere we go. A handful of gospel pamphlets, some Web site cards for the Discover Bible School (www.discoveronline.org), a gift subscription to Signs of the Times – the sky is the limit, and so are the seeds. So why be anxious? Instead, simply be God’s farmer and go out to sow the seed- today.