Seeds of Potential
Being confined to our houses during this time of COVID-19, Maddie and I have been longing to have a garden on our property to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for our home—and for our neighbors’ homes! Something about being able to walk outside to a garden full of fresh, homegrown vegetables just sounds incredible, especially in a time such as this.
I can also just feel this connection to the original calling of man and woman from God, to work the ground and keep the garden He prepared for them.
Reluctantly, I decided to drive to our local nursery and pick up a few seeds and bags of dirt (socially distant from others of course). I figured a nursery would be a place that is naturally a little more spread out anyway.
I stood before a giant wall of seeds, hunting for fruits and vegetables for our little garden. We had put together a rough plan ahead of time, so I had a few in mind I was looking for: cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, peppers, and a few others. I gathered up my items, paid, and headed back home (not before a nice dousing of hand sanitizer, of course).
While the kids were down for naps, Madeline and I worked diligently to sow carefully the seeds we had purchased. We worked the soil, mixed in the manure, and readied the earth for seeds of great potential.
It was hard work. We soon realized our hands were not quite trained for that kind of toil, but we pushed through and finished the job. We put up a small fence, watered our freshly sewn seeds, and stretched blistered hands over the earth and prayed that God would bless our labor.
It was later the next morning, as I was sitting in my living room, listening to a live, Sunday, quarantined sermon, that I was reminded of that giant wall of seeds at the nursery.
There had to have been a couple of hundred different kinds of seeds, and at least 10 to 20 packs of each variety. Wow! Just ponder the potential of that wall for a minute.
In the hands of a skilled farmer (which is not me), that would be enough food to feed hundreds of people—maybe more!
All just little tiny seeds.
And I felt the Lord telling me, this is the way God looks at His children. This is the way God looks at the words of His children.
Look at 2 Corinthians 9:
“This most generous God who gives seed to the farmer that becomes bread for your meals is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God.”
How amazing! God gives the seed. He supplies the potential for life—for way more than hundreds or thousands. And not just plain-old life (if that’s a thing…) God’s word says, rich, full-formed, abundant life!
So what is this “seed”? Jesus in his ministry actually mentioned seeds quite a bit, and he spoke very plainly one day with his disciples explaining, “The seed is the Word of God.”
Not too many ways to mix that message up. Clear and concise.
Seeds = Word of God.
As God’s people, we should look at the Scriptures as a gigantic, never-ending wall of seeds chock full of potential to bring life and abundance to the people of this world!
So in this season of scarcity, worry, and uncertainty—of sickness, death, and brokenness—we must be reminded, there is a source of life beyond this world we see around us. Let us be sowers of seeds—and not just cucumbers and okra—but seeds that will produce eternal life.
“For God so loved the world, He sent His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But however does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”