Always Sow, Always Reap

In our devotion to duty, we can trudge on and on, always doing the same things in God day after day, and always waiting for Him to see our faithfulness and to promote us into greater responsibility.

Or in our hunger for God, we can fall into the trap of always reaching for something new that we have never done before, while failing to be faithful to use what God has already given us.

But God has something better for us:  to reap one thing while we sow into another.  This is what Amos 9:13 means when it says the plowman will catch up with the reaper.  If we want to be fruitful, we need to learn to engage in both activities at once.  Here are a few examples of what this can look like.

You have a youth ministry, but you want to become more prophetic. Continue to serve the youth, as faithfully as you can.  Focus on meeting their needs, not your own spiritual aspirations.  Reap the ministry opportunities God has already given you; don’t waste them.

But sow into the prophetic.  Pray that God will add this ingredient to your life; spend time soaking and listening for His voice.

Then edify, exhort, or comfort twenty people outside the youth group every month.  It may or may not be very prophetic in the beginning, but conform your motives to the motives of the Holy Spirit.  As you persist in prayer and ministry month after month, you will grow into the prophetic.

You already have a prophetic gift, but you want to grow into evangelism. Continue to use your prophetic gift in the church.  God has invested in you in this area, and He has the right to reap the fruit of His investment as you continue to serve faithfully.

But as you soak 10-15 times a month and encourage or appreciate 20 people a month, ask God to lead you and anoint you.  And make sure that as you minister to others, at least a few are people outside the church.

As you pray for God to lead you to people who are hungry for Him, He will do it.  Sooner or later you’ll meet someone who will ask question after questing, drawing the word of God out of you.  You won’t have to force them to listen to your evangelistic spiel; it will truly be a Spirit-led ministry time.

But when it doesn’t go very far – all you get to do is tell a stranger something affirming – you are stretching yourself and becoming more comfortable talking to people outside the church.  This too is important.  When God sends you to someone hungry, you won’t be tongue-tied.  You’ll be relaxed, which is a key to the flow of the Holy Spirit.

You already have this, but you want that. Fill in the blanks here.  From the two examples above, you see the principle.  Keep being faithful in what God has already given you to do; this is your reaping.  But reach into new areas in which you want to flow; this is your sowing.

Spiritual gifts overlap.  It is a small step from discerning of spirits to healing, from healing to evangelism, from evangelism to prophecy.  Though each gift works a little differently, the same Holy Spirit gives them all.

Reach wisely into the new thing.  Leave room for mistakes.  Ask God for wisdom, and He will show you how to conduct yourself in a way in which you will not embarrass yourself or cause offense to others if you make a mistake.  For instance, your first prophecies might begin, “This is what comes to me; does it mean anything to you?”  They don’t have to say, “Thus says the Lord…”

And keep reaching.  The key to growth is persistence.

Stan Smith  ::  © 2008, GospelSmith  ::  http://www.gospelsmith.com

Strength In Weakness

A core theme in the new covenant is that God’s “strength is made perfect in weakness.”  Christ is righteousness for the unrighteous, wisdom for the foolish, power for the weak.  God will use us to bring these reversals into the lives of people around us, but first we need to receive them ourselves.

Our first step is to put the needy areas of our lives on the altar.  Give them to God.  He isn’t put off by the fact that you are weak, you lack wisdom, or you struggle to overcome sin.  He knows that His grace can transform you.  But the first step is to give it all to Him.

Why is this surrender so important?  Because Satan will try to take advantage of your weakness—using your depression to keep you from rising to fulfill your destiny in God, or your shyness to keep you from ministering to others.  But if you give your weaknesses to God, He will pour His power into you and enable you to overcome.

Weaknesses can arm us with desperation – we know we simply have to move in God, or we’ll go under.  Desperation can be very positive if we point it in the right direction.

Often our weaknesses accompany a God-given trait that has been misdirected.  People who tend to isolate themselves often have a call to prayer and intercession; the same solitude that leads to social awkwardness can become a godly trait as you learn to get alone with Him in prayer.  People who fall into the party lifestyle often have an evangelistic or pastoral calling, and your capacity to have fun with people is a God-given trait that will serve you well as you move into your destiny.

It takes time to overcome.  Though God can and sometimes does deliver people from sin instantly, most of us find that there is at least one area in which we seem to take two steps forward and one back as we find grace to overcome.
Stick with it until the job is done.  As you do, something wonderful will happen:  while you are still under construction, God will use you to help others.

Jesus sent the twelve out to minister in His power while they still needed much transformation – see Matthew 10 and Luke 9.  He did not wait for them to be perfect before He began to use them.

In II Corinthians 4:7, Paul echoes the theme:  “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”  Our earthen vessels are flawed:  weak, foolish, and sometimes even struggling with sin.  But if we have asked Jesus to come into our hearts, His life within us will overcome our earthenness and conform us to His image.

The more we let His life in us overcome our flaws and failures, the more authority we will have as we minister to others.

So here’s the point:  whether it’s your own life or the life of someone you minister to, man’s weakness is never the last word.  Wherever God sees weakness, He is ready to pour in power.

And while many are destroyed for lack of knowledge, God is ready to give wisdom and knowledge to those who ask for it.

As you minister to people, proclaim transformation.  Man’s need is an opportunity for God to put His transforming grace on display.  Proclaim it for others, and let it work in your own life.  As Paul said in Romans 1:16, ”I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes…”

Stan Smith  ::  © 2008, GospelSmith  ::  http://www.gospelsmith.com

The Holy Spirit Knows

God knows things we don’t know.  This is why He has given us His Holy Spirit.  He knows we will build our future through prayer, but we don’t know what to ask for or how to ask.  So the Holy Spirit searches God’s deepest desires for us and helps us pray into them, and this secures a more fruitful tomorrow than we could ever gain on our own.

The important thing therefore is not just to learn a few good things and to pray them – this all comes from the mind – but instead to pray in the Spirit.

One way to do this is to pray in tongues.  We choose whether to pray and how long we will continue.  The Holy Spirit then creates prayers that our minds don’t understand.  He cannot pray these prayers unless we choose to open our mouths and speak; we can’t pray them unless we give Him the reins and let Him decide what to ask for.

On our end, it is an exercise in trust.   We have no idea what He is choosing to pray through us.  But it is God who gives us words, the same God of whom Romans 8:31 says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

I Corinthians 14 teaches us about praying in tongues.  It says we speak mysteries nobody else can understand (verse 2), we build ourselves up (verse 4), it is a prayer from our spirit but it leaves our understanding unfruitful (verse 14), and if we want to build up the church, we should ask God for interpretation so we can speak something the church will understand (verses 12-13)

Prayer in the Spirit doesn’t have to be in tongues.  The Holy Spirit can give us an understanding of what to pray, and this is what happens when we receive the interpretation of tongues.

This means that even when you feel dry, you can choose to pray in tongues.  As you pray, the Holy Spirit will address issues in your heart, adjusting you so you will be able to hear from God.  Then understanding comes.  It may appear gradually, like dew forming on the grass; it can come suddenly, like a detailed vision that pops into view.

And sometimes we don’t even have to pray in tongues.  Revelation comes, slowly or suddenly.  The important thing to understand about this revelation is this:  though we may have a level of understanding of what we have seen, it is still something given by the Spirit and it is more profound and more needed than we realize.

Example:  I am on a three-week ministry trip with stops in four states.  A friend gave me a prophecy before I left:  “Send the bee before you.  Exodus 23:28 says God sent the bee before the people of Israel to help drive out the enemy.  Be sure you pray this; you’re going to need it.”

My mind had no trouble understanding what he was telling me.  The principle made sense.  But my mind did argue a little bit.  “Why do I need to pray about this?   Everything is planned; what could go wrong?”

But if God speaks something, it’s because He sees something we don’t see.  If you want a better future, agree with what God tells you and put that agreement into words.

I prayed and sent the bee.  Since then, I have saved $375 on my rental car and narrowly missed a crippling snowstorm that would have forced our meetings to shut down.  If someone is convinced this was only coincidence, I’ll never be able to prove otherwise.  But I’m glad I prayed and sent the bee.

Who knows what you need to pray to take giant steps forward into the things of the Spirit?  The Holy Spirit knows.  We can tap into this by praying in tongues; we can pray in agreement with the interpretation of tongues or a prophecy or a vision.

My trip isn’t over yet.  I’m going to pray again for God to send the bee…

Stan Smith  ::  © 2008, GospelSmith  ::  http://www.gospelsmith.com

What To Sow

If we want to move in new gifts of the Spirit, how do we pray into it?

Over the years, I have found a simple prayer discipline to be very effective:  I pray every day about upcoming ministry appointments, and slowly but surely begin to hear from God about what to do when I get there.

Soaking is a good way to listen to God, but so is prayer if we keep our ears open.   Jesus said that if we believe in Him, rivers of the Holy Spirit will pour out of us.  Sometimes this river flows as a stream of words, and if it happens during our prayer times it will cause the word of God to pour out of our mouths.

Here’s how it works. I’m leaving for a 25-day trip to the Great Lakes region, where I have meetings in four states.  So my first step is to pray every day about each place where I will minister.  As I pray, I will do everything I can think of to stir up the gifts in my life.

Typically, the first day of prayer doesn’t seem to get very far.  In my prayers over the Great Lakes trip, I prayed about several ministries and heard from God about two.  But I had a rich time exploring a word someone had given me about the trip, and several scriptures came to mind, providing a sense of God’s promise for each stop I will make.  It included a conviction that more doors will open at the last minute.

With the second day’s prayers, I always rehearse what God has already spoken.  As I do, He always gives more.
Within a few days, I almost always know something God will do at each stop.  Often I arrive with a list of words of knowledge that guide the ministry times.  And if I know what God wants to do, I preach or teach a word that will facilitate it.

This is how I sow into a ministry trip, but the same principles work in the context of an outreach or a home meeting.  Pray about the upcoming event every day for a week, and sooner or later God is sure to give a simple thought that will bear fruit.

It doesn’t take long prayers, nor do they have to be intense. The important thing is to enjoy friendship with God, and in a friendly way to talk about what your plans.

How accurately do I hear from God?  These prayers are a good school.  Sometimes I think I’ve heard but it was only my imagination – I can tell this is so if I’m looking for a dark haired man in a red shirt and he doesn’t show up.  So how should I handle the things I think I’ve seen or heard?

It’s good to start with the assumption that I can make mistakes.  This means I need to handle revelations carefully so they won’t hurt anything if I make a mistake, but they have room to get the job done if God truly gave them.

As to a word for a church or for a person, the more I can anchor it in scripture, the more solid it will be.  It’s the word of God not because I heard a voice, but because it’s written.

Specific words are either real or they are not.  The only way to test them is to speak them and see if they connect.  Handle them with humility and love, and your mistakes, if any, will not matter.

“Faith without works is dead.”  If God shows you that someone in your home group needs ministry – for a sinus problem, or for sleeplessness, or for depression – it doesn’t matter how sure you are that you have heard from God.

If you are very sure you’ve heard but don’t speak up, the ministry time won’t happen.  If you’re not sure whether you’re making a mistake but you say, “I’m wondering if someone here is battling depression…” the ministry time will happen and God will do what He wants to do.

We sow as we pray and listen in secret.  We reap when we act on His words with other people.

Stan Smith  ::  © 2008, GospelSmith  ::  http://www.gospelsmith.com