To get some background on this blog, click here and read my description of our ministry in Romania.
My favorite part of our limited labor in Romania was that we got to plant the beginnings of an orchard! By the grace of God, we had two days back-to-back that allowed us to dig holes in the morning and do the planting in the afternoon. I liked this task the most for several reasons, but mostly because it was really good, hard labor and actually felt like doing something we were sent there to do; plus we were able to see the results of our labor, as 30 new trees stood now in two neat rows where just grass used to be. I also enjoyed it because we had some girls with us, specifically Raychel and Lynette, who are from the city and didn’t really know how to dig holes, so I kind of got to teach them. It’s not that I’m from a farming family or anything, but being from the country you just learn these things. It was good entertainment.
On the first afternoon, we asked our contact, Mehigh (this is just the phonetic spelling-I don’t know the real way), how long it would take for the apples, plums, and cherries to grow from the trees. He said, “Come back in five years and you can eat the fruit from the trees you planted.”
FIVE YEARS?! That seems like entirely too long of a time to wait on fruit.
But wait, what if that’s the way the we viewed seeing our fruit in the Kingdom? What if we weren’t willing to wait to see the fruits of our ministries and expected to see it immediately?
In Psalm 1, David writes about those who do not walk in the ways of the wicked, but delight in the Lord and he says in verse 3,
3He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
Read that again: a tree which yields its fruit in season. Think about the trees of the Earth: they have seasons of bloom, or fruit producing, and seasons where they are seemingly dead, but just lying dormant until the season of bloom and fruit returns. Looking back to Psalm 1, that sounds to me like we won’t always be feeling like our lives or our ministries are producing fruit, or at least we may not see it. It may feel like our ministries are dead, when really it’s just not our season for visible productivity.
The difficult part is that we don’t get to decide when our seasons are:
5What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe-as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. 7So neither he who plants nor he who waters is it anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. 9For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.
–1 Corinthians 3:5-8
We are not in control. We are merely servants of the Most High God. By His grace, the Lord allows us to play a part in His Kingdom, and we serve that purpose by planting or watering seeds at anytime, but we aren’t the ones who choose which seeds grow. We aren’t the ones who decide what will be our season of apparent, abundant fruit and which will not. He is. That takes a whole lot of pressure off of us, especially because in Psalm 1 God says through David that “whatever he does prospers”, speaking of the man who delights in the Lord. He doesn’t say that it will immediately prosper or that we are guaranteed to see the prosperity, but He does promise that it will be there. And one day we will be rewarded according to our labor for the Kingdom, not by our own perception, but by the observations of our omnipotent and omniscient God.
What if you knew that, like the trees we planted in Sistarovat, you wouldn’t see fruit from a certain ministry, whether witnessing to your stubborn neighbor, starting a Bible study, or planting a church, for at least five years? Would you still listen to the Lord and press on doing it?
Maybe you’re in that position now. Maybe you feel as though you’ve been toiling in a laborious, seemingly unsuccessful task for the Kingdom, no matter how big or small, for entirely too long and you’re thinking of giving up. My encouragement to you is simple: don’t. Unless you hear straight from the Lord that this is no longer your calling, do not give up on the mission He has set before you. Keep befriending your neighbor who is rude and unkind even if you think there’s no way God is working in their heart. Keep inviting people to your Bible study even if only the same three are coming every week. Keep trying to plant that church even if funds are dwindling. Ultimately it all comes down to trusting in the Lord that He is faithful to keep His promise that if your delight is in Him, whatever you do will prosper. Stop worrying and start rejoicing that it’s not our duty to make seeds grow, as long as we are faithful to plant and water the seeds He sets before us.
