As I write this article, we’ve just entered the “-ber” section of the year—the four closing months ending with those letters. The change in the look of the fields of corn and soybeans that surround our town here in West Central Ohio is a marker of this season. For months, those crops have been getting greener, fuller, and taller. However, in the past several days, many of those fields are beginning to tint with yellows and browns, a hint that the growing season is closing and the time of reaping is soon upon us.
That sets the agricultural world in motion in areas like this. Farmers are checking equipment and marshalling transport vehicles, storage facilities are making preparations, and overall, a sense of urgency is developing. Over the next few months, the ripening harvest must be gathered.
Every farmer knows that each week past the optimal harvest date means potential for significant losses. It’s not unusual to see a combine working a field with headlights in the darkness of a fall night, because staying up all night and bringing in the grain is better than waiting too long and losing it all. The sad sight of a broken-down greying field of grain still standing in December is a visual reminder of time lost and opportunities missed.
All this gives context to Jesus’ words in Luke 10.2: “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field.” As I’ve shared in many of your churches, the “harvest” of people around us has never been more plentiful. Even the most conservative statistics suggest that at least one out of every two persons in the United States does not have a saving relationship with Jesus. That means that one out of every two persons in your Walmart, your school, your neighborhood, and your circles of influence are what Ephesians 2.12 describes as “…without hope and without God in the world.”
Jesus tells us to pray for workers, because the harvest is plentiful. More than that, though; he also tells us to prayerfully embrace His heart of urgency to see that harvest reached with the Good News. As Jesus states in John 4.35, “Do you not say, ‘four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”
It is not enough to be aware a harvest exists, or even feel sorry that the harvest has not been reached, or to simply pray for other persons to be harvesters. Indeed, the next word in Luke 10.3 after the Luke 10.2 prayer instruction above is, “Go!” Time is of the essence—we must “make hay while the sun shines.” Jesus put that thought this way in John 9.4: “As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.”
As harvest time approaches in our yearly calendar, may we honor God by seeking his heart to immediately and intentionally engage in sharing His love and hope with those in need of a relationship through and with Jesus. May we never be caught waiting comfortably in the barn hoping that somehow the harvest will find its own way out of the field and into our church gatherings.
Romans 10.14-15 clearly articulates the urgency God wants us to embrace as we consider our part in this work: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’”