HARVEST TIME

    I’m finding, that as I talk with other Christians, I can tell what sort of teachings they have been raised up on in their Christian walk. You can see what sort of theology they have, which “camp” they are from. For we have all come up through some kind of teachings or other. When we got saved we joined ourselves – or the Lord joined us – with some church or fellowship. Whatever camp they were in, whatever the doctrines of that group were, we absorbed them. We tended to be formed in their image, and to seek to fulfill their image of God and of Jesus.

    Now this is okay, it’s not a bad thing. That’s the way it had to be in the time and season we were in. But it is a new time and a new season. It is time to leave much of this behind us. The seed had to be planted. The stalk and the leaves had to come up and grow. The heads had to be formed on the stalk. But it’s the grain in that full head that is important. At harvest time, the rest of it,  -- the stalks and leaves and husks -- are chaff. It is gathered and burned – gotten rid of. Again, not because it’s bad. It was necessary, absolutely necessary. Without it there would be nothing to harvest! But you can’t make bread out of the chaff. At harvest time, it’s time to separate the grain from the chaff. And we are now in that new season, that new time,  -- harvest time. A time to separate, to leave behind the old.

   Does that mean the end is near? Well, is harvest the end of the matter? It is for the farmer– at least the end of the season. But it’s not the end of the matter for the grain. After it is harvested, it gets gathered into bins and then it gets ground into flour – a grinding, sifting process. (Ouch!) Then it may go into the oven and be baked into bread. (Ouch, again!) It is that bread that is the end of the process. (Almost!) In the bread, all those separate kernels have been merged into one homogeneous loaf. You can’t tell, anymore, which kernel is which, nor which of the different stalks they came from. They are no longer separate entities, they are one  --  one loaf. When the grain was growing, the stalks, the leaves, and the husks kept the kernels separated from each other. That was fine for the time. But if you bring all that stuff along and try to grind it into flour, it’s not going to be fit to make bread out of! What I’m seeing is that all that stuff we grew up in is part of what keeps us separated, keeps us from the unity we long to be in.

     So it is a delight to me when I see signs of the chaff falling away! I’ve noticed, I said, that when talking with other Christians, you can pick up on what sort of teachings they have come thru, what group or denomination they are from. But I’ve also noticed, especially when folks are praying together, that these differences tend to get ignored! They don’t hinder or stop the praying. The unity in the hearts to make contact with the Lord, to seek His will and His help, is what prevails. Glory! I hope we can all come to see what is essential in our walk, and what is not. God wants to bring us past these things that separate us, even if they were necessary for us to get here, to this place.  “For we, being many, are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that bread.” As members, we all contribute to the body of Christ, to make it what it is. We make up the bread, the very same bread which we all need to partake of in the true communion – our fellowship with one another. The more chaff we leave behind, and the more grinding and sifting we submit to, the better that bread will be! [I Cor. 10:17   & I John 1:6 & 7] [In the Greek, the word for communion and the word for fellowship are the same word.]

   At the risk of belaboring this point, let me switch to a different metaphor – but still dealing with what we partake of and what we share with one another, and still talking about maturity.

   This new time, this new season, is a time, I sincerely believe, that God wants us to be weaned from the breast, weaned from milk. Even though it is the sincere milk of the word that has got us this far, it is time, now, to feed on meat. Time to feed on the solid food that belongs to those who are of  full age. [Hebrews 5:12-14, & 1 Cor. 3:1]       What?! Are you saying we should leave behind the word of God?!  No, no, not at all. In fact, just the opposite. Bear with me here, and let’s look at the difference between milk and meat (solid food). I was blessed when someone pointed out that milk is food that has been previously digested. Previously digested by someone, or something else. This comes back to the teachings that we have received so far to date, to what we have absorbed so far. I’m grateful that, one time, the Lord showed me that a lot of my beliefs were just based on things I had heard or read. They weren’t things that He had showed me, not things that I was taught by His Spirit. There can be a difference between hearing something from men, and hearing something from God! When we are babes in Christ, we have not yet learned His voice. So we need to learn from teachers – hopefully ones that have heard His voice! What we learn about God, we get second-hand, from others. (Not all of it, thank God! --  but some of it.) We want to learn more about God, so we read books, listen to tapes, go to seminars, maybe even to Bible school. That’s all good – as far as it goes. It’s the natural way to do things:  to study in the field of your interest, and listen to the experts. But God also has his own way, the way of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit, Jesus said, will teach us all things. If we have been fortunate, the books we have read, tapes we have listened to, etc., etc. have been done by people that had learned to hear from God. Still, all of that stuff is milk – stuff that has been previously eaten (received) by someone else, and then passed on to us. That’s fine, like the stalks and the leaves, for a time. It’s fine for that time when we need teachers. But there comes a time when we ought to be teachers. (That’s what it says!) That doesn’t mean that we should try to get “our teaching ministry” going!  That we should start writing books, making tapes, offering classes.  It just means that we ought to reach a stage in our growth where we can hear God’s voice ourselves. We ought to come into a level of maturity where our relationship with God is a close enough one that there is a direct interchange between His Spirit and ours!

   Returning to I John and the topics of fellowship, and communion, it says there: “truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.”  That’s the place, that place of an intimate relation with the Father and the Son, where we get fully fed, where we get solid food. And that’s the place from which we can feed others, if that’s what the Lord leads us to do.   (Let me say that, yes, we can hear God, and He can speak to us, through others. Amen. But the point still holds that what is important, is that we hear from God Himself. We shouldn’t be content to settle for just being blessed by someone else’s relationship with God.)

  So if God has opened our eyes to see the difference between the wheat and the chaff, let us be willing to let go of the chaff. And let’s not let the chaff that we may see in others distract us from fellowship with the precious seed within. We do need to move on. We do have a very high calling – nothing less than the calling to be members of the Royal Priesthood – to be ruling and reigning with Him. He is getting us ready. Let’s go! Let all things be new, let old things pass away!

Glory!