Alright, tonight's message is
entitled, Lord of the Harvest, and it comes to us from a couple
of different scriptures. This is based on Luke chapter
10 and 1 Corinthians. This is kind of based on our
trip to Yuma. We've been gone for three weeks. And on this little journey down
there, about 1,300 miles, we traveled down to Yuma, Arizona.
And just amazing to see all the things that we observed on the
way and look at them from kind of a spiritual standpoint. And Lord of the Harvest certainly
came to mind while we were there. So in our text verse tonight
in Luke 10, And we find that the Lord had been doing some
things, fed the 5,000, and Transfiguration there in chapter 9, and healed
some folks, and preached the Gospel. And then in Luke 10,
the beginning of Luke 10, verse 1, it says, after these things,
the Lord appointed other 70 more disciples. He had his 12 that
he had originally picked, and then he appointed other 70 also
and sent them two and two before his face into every city and
place where he himself would come. So their mission was to
go to the places where he was about to travel to and preached the gospel to them
in preparation for his coming. In verse 2 he says, Therefore
said he unto them, The harvest truly is great, but the laborers
are few. Pray ye therefore of the Lord
of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his
harvest. So that's kind of the text of
our message tonight. Many times, religion kind of
confuses that into, we need to send people, we need to do this,
we need to do things. We were attending some churches
one time and they were having a little bit of a contest. You
could send out the most missionaries and send them to the farthest
reaches of the earth. They didn't really pay much attention
to that scripture. What they should have done was,
he said, you need to pray that the Lord of the harvest, that
he would send forth labors into his harvest. Sometimes they confuse
that with, they just continue that the harvest and kind of
universalize it and just make it into something that it was
not intended to be. They misapply the fact that he's
the one that sends forth workers into his heart. It's not some
misguided religious person who's trying to outdo others by putting
more missionaries in the field. And one of them even said, well,
if you're not putting out missionaries in the field all the time, there's
something wrong. There's something wrong with you. But you know,
the Lord, He says, He determines who goes. He determines who accomplishes
His work. In Acts 13, chapter 13, verse
2, as they ministered to the Lord and fasted, The Holy Ghost
said, separate me, Barnabas and Saul, for the work whereunto
I have called them. So this Holy Ghost there was
the one that made that selection and directed their steps to where
they should go and what they should do when they got there.
And you know, the Lord of the Harvest doesn't really need or
require assistance aside from what He's declared. And what
He said right here was, Pray. Pray about it. And He would take
care of the rest. And it's kind of the same principle that we
find in salvation. We can't make the Gospel effectual. We can only declare it. We can
only pray about it, but we can't make it effectual. And He is
the One that does that. He is the One that determines
who does what and when. You know, in 1 Corinthians, Paul
was kind of emphasizing this a special task, and certainly
he was a missionary that went a lot of places and did a lot
of things, but he kind of had the correct view about it. He
says in 1 Corinthians 3, verse 6, he says, I've planted Apollo's
water, but God gave the increase. So then, neither is he that planteth
anything, neither he that watereth, but it's God that gives the increase.
Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one, and every man
shall receive his own reward according to his own labor. For
we are all laborers together with God. your God's husbandry,
your God's building. And then he goes on to talk about
some gifts and things in the church here later on. But he
just makes this point that he was appointed to do a specific
thing. And he planted the Gospel. He went many places and preached
the Gospel. And then Apollos came along and
preached that same Gospel. But it was called watering then.
It was watering the seed that had been planted. And then later
on when those people were converted, he'd say, feed my sheep. And it would be the same gospel
that he used to plant, the same gospel that he used to water,
the same gospel would be what was used to feed the sheep and
cause them to grow and mature and bring forth fruit. We certainly see that, and further
on in 1 Corinthians 12, verse 18, Paul wrote that, Now God
has set members, every one of them, in the body, as it hath
pleased Him. He's the one that puts the members
in the body and then he directs what they do. And everyone has
a different task. Everyone has a different gift.
Everyone has something that they contribute. And they're all different,
but they all accomplish what the Lord determines. So, when
we went on our trip to Yuma, we just seen things that emphasizes
truth in many remarkable ways as we were given to see physical
harvest which accurately depicted the spiritual aspect. Here in
our area, we live in an agricultural area here, mostly fruit and wheat
is what they grow here, and those are kind of one crop a year crops. Right now the buds are starting
to come out on the cherry trees and you can see the limbs sprouting
out a little bit and as the sun warms things up and they've had
plenty of moisture and those buds are starting to pop and
the pruners have been out pruning earlier and They've been getting
the irrigation lines ready to go, and there's been a host of
activities. And I'm sure that in the other
areas of agriculture here, those behind-the-scenes things are
going on as well. But in Yuma, it was just so obvious
that everything operated on a much more continuous rapid but yet
very organized paces and there's multiple harvest down there because
the climate is so congenial. Sometimes they get two harvests,
sometimes three or more harvests out of one area. And there's just millions of
acres of truck farms down there where they grow produce and various
kinds of vegetables and fruits and things. And everything is just in a very
organized, pace and very organized operation. It just kind of made
me think of how God operates in salvation. He organizes everything
for his people from before the foundation of the world. Before
the foundation of the world, he chose them in Christ. In time,
when He caused all the circumstances to have them be born wherever
they are, and then in time He organizes everything that arranges
for them to hear the Gospel wherever that might be. He intersects
them with His Gospel. and the Holy Spirit causes them
to believe that He has saved them and that He died for their
sins. And then He sends them where they should go to be some
part of some body somewhere to carry out what He would have
there. And so everywhere we went, there was evidence of a Master
of Harvest, a Lord of the Harvest in spiritual terms, and down
there we would call it maybe a Master of Harvest. and everything
working according to his schedule. There's nothing wasted in time
or resources. While we were kind of helping
cleaning out our mother-in-law's place down there a little bit,
I made several trips to the dump. You know, about once a day I
would go to the dump or once every other day. I would drive
by miles and miles and miles and miles of fields. And I remember this one field,
It had cauliflowers, great big old huge cauliflowers, and they
were ripe. They were ready to pick. And the next time I went
by there, they had this tractor out there, and they had a big,
I don't know what you'd call it, kind of a wing thing that
stuck out on each side, platform stuck out a long ways on each
side. And going along in front of that were a crew of harvesters,
and they were chopping off the cauliflower, and they were handing
it to a person that was in that little wing thing, and there
was just rows and rows and rows and rows and rows of them. And
this thing's moving all the time, and they're picking these cauliflowers
and handing them to that thing, and those people are kind of
cleaning them up, putting them in a box. The box gets full,
it goes out the other side to a platform, and there's a row
of semi-trucks parked out there ready for them to put that cauliflower,
a case of cauliflower on it. And when that truck gets full,
then it goes to wherever he arranged for the purchase of that. And
so that was just the harvest part of it. The next day you
drive by, it's all been harvested. And the next day you drive by
and it's all been tilled under. And the next day you drive by
and there's some people out there putting in rows and they're putting
in ditches and they're putting in all the things to irrigate
it with. And it was interesting that I
read up on it down there a little bit that practically every field
down there has been laser leveled. because they use the irrigation
method. They use sprinklers on some crops
when they get to a certain stage, but mostly they use irrigation
and they have it laser leveled so they get the maximum uniform
coverage of the water that they put out there. Mike probably
knows more about this than I ever did, seeing as how he was kind
of in that line of work. But they do that to maximize
the use of the water and yet prevent water logging. So one
area doesn't get all the water, and one area doesn't get enough.
It's level, so it all flows out uniformly and waters the ground
and the crops. And it was really interesting. They had guys, that's all they
do. Everywhere you go, there'd be like a big lot full of giant
diesel-powered irrigation pumps. And there's companies that just
go around and pump water for this outfit one day, and pump
water for that outfit another day. They have all these people
that are tasked with that, but my point
is that there's got to be a master of the harvest that says, okay,
Thursday we're going to pick, we're going to harvest this.
On Monday we're going to till it. On Wednesday I want the ditch
guys out there. Then the next day, I want the
seeders to go out there and plant the starts or put the seed in
or whatever their crop is that they were going to put in. Then
you had the irrigation guys come in again and make sure that it's
all watered and fertilized. There's steps that have to be
taken. It takes very much an organization
to accomplish all that and get it all in the right order. They
have lots of fields. So it's just not like, well,
I only have to worry about this one field of cauliflowers. Over here
I've got broccoli. Over here I've got onions. Over
here I've got this and corn and this and that. It takes just a huge amount of
planning. Man, it's nothing compared to
what the Lord does in the saving of one soul as He, from the beginning
of the world, plans out this person's heritage that gets them
to where they are supposed to be at the appointed time and
the ground is good. The seed is planted, it's watered,
the Spirit causes it to have life and all those things that
go along with the Lord in salvation. But there it was just kind of
hit you in the face because it was just so rapid and there was
no wasted motions. It seemed to me that one of the
things that was one of my takeaways was that a lot of the things
they do to kind of speed things up, religion does that too. Sometimes
they take little shortcuts and they try to make things more
efficient and leave out the, you know, you're not moving things
along, God. We don't have time for the Holy Spirit to determine
when someone should be saved. We need to have a big tent meeting,
or we need to have a big crowd, and then we need to move them,
because they're not moving to themselves. We're not waiting
for the Holy Spirit. We need to have somebody go out
there and kind of urge them along, and maybe we'll play some emotional
hymns or tell them some weepy story or something. You know,
this is the time of year when a lot of people go to church,
because it's Easter coming up. Only time of year they'll go
to church. and so they can kind of check that box, but no telling
what shenanigans will go on this Sunday to woo people to join
up, and that's just not the way of it. In the harvest down there,
they're always striving to, I was reading that the margins are
pretty thin, and they're always striving Right now there's labor
shortages down there just because of all the COVID and everything.
And so they're having to depend more on machinery, better machinery
to do things that were maybe once done by
hand or by a slower machine or something. They use GPS. They drive their tractors by
GPS, saves them like 10% by not driving over the same turf twice
because it's so precise. The tractor is driven by GPS
and they do that in the wheat fields and corn fields and anything
that involves kind of a long And they say they don't over
seed one stretch, maybe a three foot wide stretch times a million
acres. It's a lot of wasted seed. It's
a lot of wasted time. It's a lot of wasted everything. If they don't go over that twice,
you do that times a thousand times, that amounts to a lot
of increased performance there.
So they do things like that, they have more knowledge. It
was interesting that in Luke chapter 8, talking about the
sower and the sower was sowing seed and some of it fell on stony
ground and some of it the birds came along and and pecked up
the seed and before it had a chance to sprout. Down there, they use
drones to fly around the fields and chase the birds off where
they have a chance to eat their seed. Isn't that interesting
that they've taken drone technology and used it for that? They also
have sensors in drones that can detect the moisture and what's
sprouting, what's not sprouting. They have a whole host of things
that they they can learn from just buzzing a little quick drone
around their field. They use satellite imagery, they
use ground sensors to sense how much moisture is in the soil
and how much water they need to put. They have these big ditches
everywhere and then they just put a siphon hose in it every
so often to suck water out of the main ditch and it just flows
right over into the field and gets dispersed. On our trip, I mentioned earlier
that we went about 1,300 miles, and we must have observed millions
of acres of mile after mile of ground that was so aptly described
in Luke as that stony ground. There was nothing growing out
there but sagebrush, and the further south you went, maybe
some more desert-type flora like Joshua trees. Ocotillo and kinds
of cactus and stuff, but just rocky soil. Mostly mining is what they've
been doing down there. There's just mine tailings all
over the place. You go through a town and there'd
be just old junk mining equipment and a bunch of wrecked houses,
a bunch of wrecked cars, a bunch of old buildings that used to
be a business. cafes and stores and shops and
machinery repair places, and now it's just all junk. And right
in the middle of it would be a little Baptist church, about
the size of this fellowship hall, closed up, all boarded up. Not
much of the people all left. But no good ground there, no
water, very extremes of climate. And so it just kind of reminded
me that some seed went out there, but who knows? Probably not much of it sprouted
there. And then You know, according to his purpose,
the ground around Yuma is, from a physical aspect, really good
ground for physical, actual plant growing and harvest. Much the
same as it is here, it's really good ground. Out at our place,
where we live right by the cherry orchard, you could probably dig
down 100 feet and not hit a rock. It's just clay and soil and good for growing stuff. Spiritually, there's good ground
comprised of those whom God elected and gave to His Son to redeem
in the covenant of grace. And the Lord of the harvest makes
sure the good ground is prepared. He provides the ground in the
first place, and then he makes sure it's prepared, and he makes
sure that it's where it needs to be, and he makes sure that
somewhere that good ground comes in contact with the Gospel. He
either sends someone with the Gospel to that good ground, or
he sends that good ground somewhere where there is the Gospel, and
there's no getting around that. down in Yuma, there's just thousands
of acres in cycle all the time. There's no lack of moisture. The water of the word is displayed. The water is just everywhere,
going in canals and ditches and some sprinklers and pumps and
siphons. Water managers were all over
the place You'd see their pickup parked there and they'd be out
hopping over the little ditches and making sure the water was
going where it was supposed to go. So all this movement, every activity
showed the timing and the direction of a harvest master down there
and how much more so do we see the hand of the lord of the harvest
as he directs millions of people, and where they go, and what they
do, and make sure that the gospel gets to them, and everything's exact. There's nothing
left to chance with him. He is successful. He's a successful Lord of the
Harvest. Again, our text verses brought
to mind that Seems like the harvest is great, but the laborers are
few. And where we see so often that men
get together and say, we need to send out missions. We supported
a lot of missionaries up while we were in Alaska, and it turned
out not many of them was. It didn't turn out many of them
were true missionaries, but after we met a few true ones, then
it put things into perspective. And we thought, man, we're sorry
we did that. They went out there and came
up with something other than the gospel, I think. And then
they said, well, we had to leave because we weren't successful. No one would listen to us. But
if the Lord was involved, they would be where they were supposed
to be, if they were supposed to be there. They would plant,
another would water, and God would give the increase. And
that was just so typified there. And what goes on in our own area,
I know there's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes
here. As Mike was busy in the water, taking the water from
down there and shoving it up to the top of the hill and then
letting it come back down and water all the trees and various
farms and things, there's so much planning that went on year-round
to make that happen. You just couldn't just sit there
and do nothing. all year and then wait till the last second
and then flip a switch and expect water to come out of the pipe.
It took a lot of planning and you had to have your spare parts
and you had to have your ducks in a row and all the things that
were necessary for that to work. And then there's so many people
count on it that it can't be caught. being behind the eight
ball there. The sower just has no ability
though to cause a seed to sprout. You can put that seed in the
ground, but you can't make it sprout.
That's a thing that only God can do. It's God that gives the
increase, as Paul said, and we're nothing. I planted, Paul's watered,
but he that planteth nothing, he that watereth is nothing.
It's God that gives the increase. And that's just something we
always need to keep in mind and trust in Him, the Lord of the
harvest, who causes seed to be planted, causes seed to be in
the first place, causes it to be watered with the living water
of the Word, the very Gospel of His own Son. that He has determined to bring
life to His seed by the same preaching of the Gospel. It's
just amazing to me that the Lord of the Harvest causes the very
light of life to shine on His seed. Without that, none of it
would sprout. Down there we had a lot warmer
light than we have here. But it was sure interesting to
note the sharp contrast of things as we left there and came north
and things became more bleak, I guess you'd say, as
we traveled north and the weather got bad. The ground was not good, lots
of gravel and sand. Even then, when it does get moisture,
it runs off in violent torrents. You can just see where it doesn't
have a chance to soak in. It just runs off and cuts through
the land and causes these big gullies and crevices. They've
got runoff places all over the place. A big sign that says,
if you have a flash flood, don't drive through here. And so good ground, preparation of the
Lord, the gospel preached, the spirit breathing life into it,
the Lord and the harvest must and does ensure that all the
necessary aspects which are required for the harvest are provided
on time and in the proper sequence and in the right amount. never
anything out of place or out of time or out of sequence, and
just the right word that's needed. You know, sometimes you bring
a message and someone will come up to you and say, well, I really
enjoyed this part here. It really spoke to my heart.
And that wasn't really what you were maybe thinking about when
you brought the message. And then somebody else may come
along and say, well, this part over here is what addressed me. And so you just never know. The gospel is... fitting for
everyone, and there's a piece for everyone. At different times,
the different portions of it apply. But according to the Lord,
it's always the right word at the right time. And unless the
Lord is involved in every aspect of it, And the Holy Spirit and
the gospel, it's just not going to succeed. And as we found in
Hebrews chapter 4 verse 2 says, for unto us was the gospel preached
as well as unto them. But the word preached did not
profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard
it. Speaking of those that were being
brought out of Egypt there, and he makes the same application
that we should be aware of that same issue there, that the gospel
must be mixed with faith, and that faith is supplied by God
himself. Back to our text verse in Luke.
He tells them to pray. Here's what you do. You pray the Lord of the harvest
that He will send labors into his harvest. And, you know, Paul
wrote in Romans, we don't even know what we ought to pray. Isn't
it good of God to, he knows what he wants done and he causes his
people to have a burden to pray about a specific thing that he
wants them to pray about that's in line according to his purpose. And even that model prayer that
gets repeated all the time our Father which art in heaven, thy
will be done on earth, that we're to align our wills with his will
in accomplishing what he has determined will be done. And
each of us as laborers in God's harvest, some of us plow, some
of us plant, some of us water, some of us do a million other
things, some of us play the piano, some of us take care of things. There's a million things." And
he says, they're all important. And none is more important than
the other in the eyes of God. He says, does the eye think that
it's more important than the finger and all those examples
that we have. So we all have what purpose is
to do and maybe somebody who's an electronic whiz and they help
put together Zoom or sermon or something so we can all take
advantage of that. That's a big plus there. So anyway, that's our message
for tonight. Lord of the harvest, pray that
he would send laborers into his harvest. So thank you for your
attention. Be free.