Sowing and Reaping | John 4:31-38
Brian Hedges | August 14, 2022
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to John 4. We’re going to be reading verses 31-38.
While you’re turning there, let me tell you the story of a Jewish boy who grew up in a Jewish home and heard very little about Jesus. Religion for him was a matter of reciting prayers, participating in rituals, and celebrating holidays; but for this young man God seemed distant, alien.
During his first year in college he was reading existentialist authors, he was watching Woody Allen movies, he was reading books by people like Kurt Vonnegut, and he was drinking lots and lots of beer. He decided that life was just absurd, life was meaningless; it would never make sense. But, deep inside, he hoped that that was not the case, and he was longing for something transcendent.
So he began searching for that. He sought for it in music; he thought music might be a link to the transcendent. He would go to these wonderful concerts and enjoy the music, but his experience always ended in disappointment. Every concert ended, and he said every noisy subway ride back to his dorm room contrasted rudely with the splendors of Dvorak, Rachmaninoff, and Mozart. “Little did I know, however,” he said, “that I was already on a journey to saving faith.”
This is what had happened. When he was in high school one of his drinking buddies had invited him to the church youth group, because, he said, “the girls are cute.” So he came to church. He heard the gospel, but he dismissed everything that had to do with Jesus as being something that was for the Christians but not something for a Jewish person, because Jews don’t believe in Jesus.
But the people in this youth group had displayed a kind of relationship with God that he found attractive, and they had urged him to read the New Testament and to read a book by this English guy named C.S. Lewis. He did neither.
During his sophomore year in college a friend of his died suddenly in a tragic accident. When he was sitting at the funeral he realized that Woody Allen and Kurt Vonnegut and all the rest could never provide the answers he was looking for, and he wondered, If there’s a God, how can I know him? He went home and he pulled a New Testament out of his boxes, which for some reason he had packed into his boxes that year, and he began reading the New Testament. He checked Mere Christianity out of the library, he read that. Slowly, gradually, he came to saving faith in Jesus Christ.
His name is Randy Newman, and today he is the senior fellow for evangelism and apologetics at the C.S. Lewis Institute in Washington, D.C. He’s written a number of wonderful books about evangelism; I recommend everything that he’s written, and there are several of them on the book table.
His story probably would have seemed unlikely to lead to conversion, if any of us had known him during those beer-drinking college days. Here’s a Jewish person who has no interest in Christianity, basically has embraced existentialism, doesn’t believe life has meaning; and yet here he is today, leading many others in the task of sharing the gospel with unbelievers.
Well, this morning we are continuing our study of what it means to live on mission. We’ve been talking about evangelism, and we’ve been doing that by looking at some of the New Testament metaphors for evangelism—salt of the earth, light of the world; last week was fishers of men. Today we come to another one of these metaphors, in John 4; it’s the metaphor “sowing and reaping.” It’s an agricultural word picture or image, sowing seeds that are planted, and then eventually harvesting them.
I’m drawing this from the words of Jesus in John 4. We should note that it’s right after Jesus himself has a very evangelistic conversation with someone, the woman of Samaria, the woman at the well. Many of you know that story. I would encourage you to read it; there’s a lot to learn from that story in and of itself about how to share the gospel with people. But I want us to look especially at Jesus’ words to his disciples in John 4:31-38. Let me read the text, and then I want to show three things from the passage.
It says,
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
This is God’s word.
Sowing and reaping a harvest; that’s the word picture, that’s the metaphor that we’re looking at this morning. I think this passage suggests three lessons for us about evangelism.
1. Coming to Faith in Christ Usually Involves a Gradual Process
The first one is that coming to faith in Christ usually involves a gradual process. Just think about the word picture here. Every farm knows this: you don’t sow a crop on Monday and then harvest it on Tuesday. Right? You sow during sowing season (spring), and then you harvest during the harvest season, usually in the fall. I know different crops have slightly different seasons, but there’s a season for sowing and there’s a season for reaping, for harvesting.
You see it in verse 35. Jesus says, “Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’?” He’s probably quoting a proverb here. Then he says, “Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.”
In that context, in that day, already there’s been a lot of sowing that has happened. Jesus probably has in mind all of the sowing that has happened through the centuries through prophets and priests and holy men who had written Scripture and preached to Israel and preached to the Samaritans. Now, he says, is the time for harvest; but there is sowing time and there is reaping time.
It’s important for us, I think, to remember that when we’re thinking about evangelism, when we’re thinking about people coming to faith in Christ. Most of the time, people do not come to saving faith in an instant. Now, to be sure, regeneration—that moment in which we receive the Holy Spirit and are born again into eternal life—that happens in a moment. But there is often a very long process that leads up to that moment, and for many of us we can’t pinpoint exactly when the moment was when we became Christians, when we believed in Jesus. It was kind of a sudden dawning realization.
One of my favorite old movies is the movie called Sergeant York. Has anyone ever seen this old movie? Okay, a handful of you have. Some of you must have watched it recently. It’s a wonderful film, a true story about Alvin C. York, who fought during World War I. He was initially a conscientious objector and then eventually did fight for the U.S. in World War I. But the most fascinating part about the story for me is what happens before all of that, and it’s his conversion story. He’s really a rabble-rouser, kind of a drunk and a trouble-maker, at the beginning of the film, and he has a pastor, whose name is Pastor Pyle, who is trying to encourage him to become a Christian, or, in the lingo in the movie, “get religion.” There’s a conversation they have about, “How does a person get religion?” Pastor Pyle: “Sometimes it happens suddenly, like a bolt of lightning; and sometimes it’s very slow, like a sunrise.”
I think for most of us it’s probably more like a sunrise. It’s important for us to understand that when we are sharing the gospel with others, because people are in a process, they’re on a journey, and they may not be yet at the point of decision, but if you are sharing the gospel with people you are a part of that process as you are sowing seeds, gospel seeds that God could then use.
Here’s an illustration, and I got this one from Randy Newman, the guy whose conversion story I just told you. It’s really thinking about people along a spectrum. We might think of the alphabet, A to Z. Think about people along this spectrum in their journey to Christ. There are some people that maybe are at that X, Y, Z point, where they’re just ripe, they’re ready to come to a settled commitment to Christ. But there are a lot of people who are further back, maybe at the A, B, C stage.
You might even think about different kinds of backgrounds that people have and where that would put them in this process. A secular skeptic who doesn’t really believe anything about Christianity, has had very little exposure to Christianity, that person’s probably not going to be at the X, Y, Z point; he’s going to be at the earlier part of that process, the A, B, C.
A lapsed Roman Catholic may be further along, because maybe they’ve been catechized. They have a certain degree of knowledge about at least Christianity and the Christian worldview and maybe a minimal understanding of the Bible. They have at least the concepts of sin and guilt. They’re not fully committed followers of Jesus Christ, but they’re further along. They’re closer to saving faith. Maybe they’re at L, M, N, O, P; somewhere in there.
Someone who maybe grew up in church, someone who grew up in a Christian home, went to church every Sunday, went to AWANA on Wednesday nights or was part of a kids’ program or a youth group—they’ve been evangelized over and over again by parents and by pastors over many years, but they’ve never come to a settled commitment to Jesus Christ—they may be at X, Y, Z, and what they need is just to be urged and exhorted to cross the line and actually commit themselves to faith in Christ, because the knowledge is there.
So we have to discern where people are in this process when we are sharing the gospel with them, because everybody’s at a different point in the process.
Here’s an exercise for you. This is a practical thing that you can go do in application of the message this week. Just begin by reflecting on your own journey to Jesus. What were the steps? How did you come to saving faith in Christ? Some of you spent years without Christ before guilt or grief or addiction or meaninglessness finally brought you to the point of desperately wanting something more, and then at the right moment someone shared the gospel with you and you believed and you came to faith in Christ.
Some of you were raised in church, but it took you years before you really embraced the gospel. You heard it, you knew it. You maybe even believed it with kind of an intellectual, mental assent, but there was no change of heart, there was no transformation of life until, at some point, it all became clear, the lights really came on, and you suddenly saw your need for Christ, and you repented of your sins and you trusted in him.
Some of you had deep intellectual or emotional objections to Christianity, and it was only as you wrestled with those hard questions, maybe through a conversation with someone else, maybe through a class that you took in college, maybe through reading a book like C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity; only when those questions were answered did you come to believe in Jesus and entrust yourself to him.
All of us have a story. Think about your story. Think about the steps that you went through, and let that experience do two things. Let it, number one, remind you of what it’s like not to believe. Even if you were raised in church, you should remember what it’s like not to believe—unless you became a Christian when you were six years old.
I can remember a period of my life when I knew all the answers, I could quote Scripture, but if someone pressed on me the claims of the gospel I just assumed that they were true, but I’d never really deeply repented of sin, I’d never really entrusted myself to Christ. I remember the difference when I began to pray, when I began to have a relationship with God that I did not have before.
So think back and try to remember what it was like before you became a Christian.
Secondly, let that exercise help you empathize with those who do not yet believe, and then adjust your expectations if you’ve had the kind of evangelism training that essentially tells you to expect to be able to share the gospel and lead someone through a sinner’s prayer all in one fell swoop. Now, that may happen, and if it does happen that’s wonderful. But oftentimes that is not how evangelism works. Oftentimes it’s a series of conversations that takes place over weeks or even months or even years. We should not lose hope if that’s the case, if someone is not ready to become a Christian, if someone is even resistant to those initial conversations. Keep praying, stay in the relationship, keep sowing gospel seeds, keep being salt and light, and trust that God in time will work.
A number of years ago, when our kids were much smaller, our little girl Susannah decided that she wanted to plant a cherry tree one day. So she had some seeds, and she took them outside and she planted them in the backyard. She came in, and Holly asked her, “How did it go?” She just wanted to know what the experience was like; you know, did you find a place, and everything. “How did it go?”
Susannah shook her head and said, “It didn’t grow.”
I think sometimes that’s the way we are with evangelism. We’re expecting something to happen immediately, and we forget that there’s a process. When you’ve planted a seed and it hasn’t grown all in the same hour, don’t be discouraged. God is still using you in the process of sowing and reaping.
2. God Uses Different Kinds of People and Gifts in This Process
That leads us to the second point, which is simply this, that God uses different kinds of people and different kinds of gifts in this process. If coming to saving faith in Christ is a gradual process, if conversion is a gradual process that people go through, God uses different kinds of people and different kinds of gifts along the way in that process.
Again, you can see it in John 4. Jesus talks about those who sowed and now those who are reaping. He talks about how you’re reaping from the fruit of somebody else’s labor, but there’s labor. There had been work that had been done prior to this moment.
The apostle Paul actually expands on this word picture in 1 Corinthians 3, and I want to read to you just four verses from 1 Corinthians 3. I want you to see what Paul says. His point here is that nobody should be boasting in any one particular gift. Remember that in the Corinthian church there were factions. Some people were following Paul and some people were following Apollos and some people were following Peter, and so on. So Paul is arguing against that whole mentality, and he’s reminding that all these different people were just different parts of the process, but God is the one who actually was responsible for their salvation.
What he says teaches us something about sowing and reaping. Paul says,
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.
Let’s take that metaphor apart a little bit now and just think about this. There are sowing gifts, there are watering gifts, and there are reaping gifts. There are some people who sow, some people who water, some people who reap—some people, maybe, who do more than one thing.
What would those gifts be like? What would be some examples of those?
Sowing gifts would be things like this: any kind of use of the word, the spoken word, to sow and plant gospel seeds. That could be pre-evangelism conversations, where we are just preparing to share the gospel with someone, we’re getting to know someone. We’re trying to break down some of those initial barriers that would allow for more spiritual conversation. Again, look at John 4 and see how Jesus does this with the woman of Samaria.
It could include apologetics, where we are defending the faith, we are answering objections to Christianity. It could include teaching, whether formally or informally. It could, of course, include preaching the gospel, but also counseling, so one one one, more private, personal conversations. Many of you have a counseling ministry in our church. If you are counseling people, you should regularly be looking at that counseling ministry as an opportunity to share gospel seeds, because the greatest need that anyone has, whatever their personal, practical problems are at any point in their life, the greatest need any person ever has is a deeper faith in Jesus Christ. You may be counseling people who are not yet Christians.
It could include leading evangelistic Bible studies or teaching some kind of an educational class that includes some kinds of gospel content.
Any of these, and many more examples could be given, but any of these could be sowing ministries, ministries of sowing the seed of the word, the seed of the gospel, that God could then later take and use that seed to bring someone to faith in Christ.
What would be examples of watering gifts? Perhaps it would also include the teaching, because Apollos was also a teacher. He was teaching at the church in Corinth. So it would probably include that, but I think we can extend the metaphor a little bit, and we could say it probably also includes things like hospitality, opening your home to a group of people, where you’re sharing a meal with them. Even if you’re not the one who’s teaching the evangelistic Bible study, if you’re hosting that meal, you’re hosting that study, you’re using your home for hospitality, you are part of watering that gospel seed.
In fact, I would say that every interaction, that every single one of us who are regular, committed attenders or members here at Redeemer Church, every interaction you have with any person who walks in the doors of our church is a watering moment. That’s why it’s so important, if you’re a greeter, to be friendly and to smile and to be welcoming. Even if you’re not officially a greeter, it’s important to greet people and to smile and be friendly and welcome people into this building, and to be helpful and to serve them and to try to pay attention to their needs. That’s watering; those are watering gifts.
We might also think of ministries of mercy. Whether it’s helping someone hungry get food, or it’s helping someone in need with some kind of financial need or material need, or it’s serving at a pregnancy care center, LifePlan—anything like that, where it’s a ministry of mercy, that can also be a way of watering those seeds.
Here’s another one that I think is so crucial, and it’s prayer. When we pray, we’re not directly—most of the time—engaging with a person, an unbeliever. But when we pray we are imploring God on behalf of that unbeliever, for the sake of that unbeliever, we are imploring God to work in their heart to bring them to faith in Christ.
I feel sure in saying that more people will be converted and come to faith in Jesus Christ through the answered prayers of saints who pray quietly and silently and maybe without any acclaim at all than through some of the more public ministries of teaching and preaching.
I’ll give you one example. My grandmother, Mozelle Hedges, who went home to be with the Lord almost a year ago, last October, was a very quiet, modest woman. She was a very strong believer, but as far as I know she probably never led a Bible study or taught a Sunday school class or anything like that. But she was a prayer warrior, and at the end of her life she prayed every single day, by name, for every person in her family, and she had five kids, and when you count all the grandkids and great-grandkids, many of which are not believers, there are over 60 people. She prayed every single day, by name, for every one of them. If many of those cousins who are not believers right now, if they come to faith in Christ it will most likely be due more to her prayers than it will be to my preaching and teaching.
It’s a watering gift and it’s essential, so if you have a ministry of prayer, you have a heart for prayer, lean into that. Ask the Lord to work.
Then there are reaping gifts. These would be direct gospel conversations. These would be gentle exhortations. These would be those moments when we actually are asking someone to cross the line and take the step to become a believer in Christ.
Again, you might think of this along the A, B, C scale. The sowing gifts would especially be appropriate for those who are earlier in that process, right, the ABCs, and the watering maybe for the middle, and the reaping gifts for people who are at that moment, that X, Y, Z stage and ready to come to Christ.
Again, let me give you an exercise to take home and put this into practice. Ask yourself this question: What are my natural talents and my spiritual gifts? How am I using them? Ask not only, How am I using them in church? but, How am I using them to help others in the process of coming to faith in Christ? It’s one thing to serve at church, and we want you to do that; you need to do that; that’s a good thing to do. But we should also be using our gifts and our opportunities and our talent, whatever—we use that with an eye to bringing people to faith in Christ.
You might say, “I don’t have a gift for teaching. I don’t feel comfortable. I can’t articulate my thoughts clearly; I have a hard time engaging in a conversation with others.” Okay, that’s fine. Do you have a home? Do you like to cook? Maybe you should start an evangelistic Bible study in your neighborhood where you’re the one who hosts and you ask somebody else to come in and lead that Bible study. They can do the sowing part, but you’re opening your home, you’re creating the opportunity so that there’s opportunity for unbelieving neighbors to meet Christians and hear something about Jesus Christ. That’s just an example.
Think through your own repertoire of gifts, talents, opportunities, and ask, How can I leverage these in order to see people come to faith in Christ? How can I leverage these for evangelism? God uses different kinds of people in the process; that means all of us should be encouraged that we have a part to play. Every single believer has a part to play, whether you have a strong speaking gift or teaching gift or not. But if you can pray, if you can open your home, if you can have a private conversation, if you can teach—whatever the gift is, you can use that for the sake of the gospel and God can use you in the process of bringing others to Christ.
3. Sharing the Gospel with Others Requires Devotion to God’s Will and Dependence on God’s Work
There’s one more thing, one more lesson, and that’s number three, that sharing the gospel with others requires both devotion to God’s will and dependence on God’s work. This is crucial, because everything I’ve told you so far might give the impression that if you will just do certain steps, if you will just follow a certain formula, that you can be effective in evangelism.
Nothing can be further from the truth. We are not sufficient for these things, Paul says, but our sufficiency is of God in Christ. It requires this utter devotion of ourselves to God’s will and a deep dependence upon God himself to work.
We see that again in these passages. Look again at John 4:34. This is the first thing Jesus says, before he gets to the sowing, reaping, and harvest stuff. In verse 34 he says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.”
The disciples have come and have asked him, “Master, do you want anything to eat?”
He says, “I have food you don’t even know about. My food is to do God’s will and accomplish his work.”
They’re kind of mystified. “Did somebody else give him something to eat? Has he had a snack? Did he have a sandwich? What’s going on here?”
But Jesus, again, he’s speaking in word pictures to his disciples, and he’s telling them that “I live on something other than food. My food, my consuming ambition in life, is to do God’s will.” He was completely devoted to what God the Father had called him to do, the theme that we see in the Gospel of John.
It is, of course, a model for us, an example for us. Listen, effective evangelism, effective sharing the gospel with others, really begins with this, that we have to be devoted to God’s will. We have to be devoted to God’s mission. It’s a motivational thing, isn’t it? It’s that our hearts are aligned with God’s purposes, so that we are willing to be obedient to do what God asks us to do, and that means to get out of our comfort zone, it means to start these conversations, it means to go where the fish are (as we saw last week), to build intentional, strategic relationships with unbelievers so that there’s actually an opportunity to share the gospel with others. You see Jesus doing that in John 4. He goes out of his way to speak to this woman of Samaria. He crosses all kinds of cultural, racial, and sexual barriers in order to do that. He’s getting outside of a Jewish person’s comfort zone in order to have a gospel conversation with a woman in need. We have to do that as well.
I’m reminded of this statement from C.S. Lewis, from his book Mere Christianity. He said,
God made us, invented us as a man invents a machine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human race to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way, without bothering about religion. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Let that hit you if you are an unbeliever this morning. The peace and happiness and satisfaction you’re looking for is found in God. You’re made for him, and your heart will be restless until it finds its rest in him.
Let it hit you if you are a believer. Your optimal satisfaction and joy in the Christian life will only be found when you can say, “My good is to do the will of him, my Father, who sends me.” You have to be devoted to God’s will.
I think for many of us when it come to evangelism the single first step we have to take is repentance of our apathy, our indifference, our lack of concern for unbelievers, our disobedience, because we’re simply not taking the opportunities, we’re simply not seeking out opportunities to share the gospel with others.
We must be devoted to God’s will. That’s first.
Secondly, we must be dependent on God’s work. Again, we see this in the passage. It’s implicit in John 4 and I think very clear in 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul says, “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”
God is the one who gives the growth. Now, here’s good news for you that takes some of the pressure off of evangelism if you’re thinking about results. It doesn’t take the pressure off as far as obedience goes. We need to feel that. We need to feel some holy pressure from the Holy Spirit that’s moving us, urging us to obey. But obedience is sowing seed, watering seed. God is the one who gives the growth. So the pressure’s off. It’s not up to us to convert anybody. You can’t convert anybody. You can’t change a heart. You cannot regenerate someone, you cannot cause someone to pass from death into life. You can’t raise the dead; only God can raise the dead. So we depend on him for this work.
What are we depending on him to do? We’re depending on him to prepare the soil of the person’s heart that we’re going to talk to. He does that through the work of his Spirit, conviction of sin, and regeneration, new birth. God is the one who gives the new heart.
We are depending on God to use the power of the seed. There’s power in the seed so that the seed can turn into this great tree. Remember some of Jesus’ parables of the kingdom? It’s a tiny little seed that becomes a great tree.
Listen, a seed is so powerful it can split pavement, right? Have you ever seen a tree grow up through concrete? It’s powerful. The gospel is powerful, the word of God is powerful. Paul says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel [of Jesus Christ], for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”
We need to have confidence in the power of the word. Ultimately, it’s not the power of your testimony, it’s not the power of your example that will bring people to saving in Christ; it is the power of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ who was crucified for our sins and was raised from the dead on the third day to give us eternal life and to change our hearts and lives.
We need to depend on God to change people’s hearts, we need to depend on the power of the word of God, and then finally, we depend on God to guide us in his providence and by his Spirit to lead us into these conversations. God can do that. He will do that. If you ask him and you say, “Lord, would you guide me into opportunities to share the gospel with others?” God will answer that prayer, and you will find yourself in a conversation where you will remember that prayer and you will think, Okay, this is it. This is the moment where I need to start talking about Jesus and sharing the gospel. I need to start sowing seed. Then it will be up to you in that moment to obey. But you know what? If you will pray in that moment, Lord, would you give me the courage? Would you give me the words? Would you help me to obey? Then you take a deep breath and you turn the conversation and you see what happens. God will lead you in that as well.
We have to depend on God, his work, and be devoted to his will.
Final application, and I’m done: let me challenge you with something this week. I’ve given you some practical takeaways. Think about your own journey of how you’ve come to faith in Christ, what were the steps. Think about your gifts, your talents, your opportunities. How can you use those for gospel work?
Here’s the final thing: I want you to go home and I want you to make a list of people you know that are not Christians. Make a list and write it down, okay? You might think about people in your family who are not Christians. You might think about people that you work with who are unbelievers. Maybe people who are in your neighborhood, maybe people that you have some kind of semi-regular social interaction with—the person who cuts your hair or the person that you regularly see at the store you go to, the gym you go to, whatever. Think through the people that you know that, as far as you know, they are not believers in Jesus Christ. Make a list and start praying for opportunities to share the gospel, and see what God will do.
If every single one of us in Redeemer Church made this list—let’s just say that on average we each came up with a list of 20 people. Probably most of us could come up with a list of 50 people or more, but let’s just say on average we came up with a list of 20 people, and there are something like 250 people in our church. Somebody do the math. What is that? How many? Five thousand people. Okay.
Doesn’t that sound like a good thing for us to be doing at Redeemer, to be praying regularly for 5,000 people who are currently not believers in Jesus Christ to come to faith in Christ? What might God do in answer to that prayer? Let’s get to work, folks. Let’s pray, let’s think, let’s look for opportunities, let’s share Christ with others. Let’s pray.
Lord, this is I think a call on every one of us, and one that challenges every one of us. It’s certainly a challenge to me and I think to all of us to think through our relationships and our opportunities and to resolve to be more obedient in taking those opportunities to share Christ with others.
Lord, I just want to pray right now that you would help us in this. It’s not something we can just do in our own strength. We see that, we acknowledge that. It’s not something we can do without your help, so we ask you by your Holy Spirit to infuse us with all of the right and appropriate motivations, to give us the heart transformation we need, so that this will be something we long to do, not just something we feel guilty about, but something we really want to do.
Lord, give us eyes to see the people around us. Help us to love them and care for them and to see their needs. Help us have eyes of faith so that we see the potential of how you could use our feeble efforts to bring people to faith in Christ.
Father, I pray that you would give us praying hearts, so that as we make these lists of people to pray for and to seek out and to share the gospel with, that as we’re bringing them regularly before your throne of grace we will begin to see tangible answers to pray, supernatural answers to prayer, see you working in ways that we’ve only read about in stories of revival, but many of us have never experienced.
Lord, would you do a new thing here in our church? Would you use us for the sake of your kingdom and to bring many to faith in Christ?
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, as we come to eat this bread and drink this juice, may it be for us a reminder of what you’ve called us to: to be completely, fully devoted to your will. Jesus said his food was to do the Father’s will, and that ultimately meant giving his life for ours. So may we feed on Christ this morning by faith, and may we devote ourselves to serving him. Be with us in these moments, and draw near to us through your Holy Spirit. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
