God's Farmers, God's Field

Did you know you’re one of God’s farmers?

This comes up in 1 Corinthians chapter 3. Paul’s talking about the different leaders who’ve impacted the church in Corinth, and who’ve unwittingly become the mascots for factions in that congregation. He writes, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” (3:6-7) He’s trying to redirect the Corinthians’ focus to the one Lord they all share.

Farming also comes up in Jesus’s parables, like in Matthew 13:24-30 and 36-43. A man plants wheat in a field, but while everyone’s sleeping his enemy sows weeds among the wheat. When everything starts to grow, the servants ask the master if they should pull up the enemy’s weeds. But he says, ‘No. If you did that, you’d uproot the wheat, too. Let them grow together until harvest time, then I’ll have the reapers separate it all out’. The farmer, Jesus tells the disciples, is God. The field is the world. The good and bad seed are children of the kingdom and of the evil one.

There’s a lot that you can say about these two passages, but what hit me recently is that both want to make clear what our role is as God’s farmers and what God’s role is.

In Paul’s picture, a Christian’s role is to plant seeds and water. In other words, you can create opportunities for the gospel to take root in someone’s life. You can tell a person something about Jesus they never knew or show them something about Christians they’ve never seen. Whereas God is the one who somehow takes your efforts and makes something new and lush and fruitful grow from that. The Lord takes your conversations and acts of love and brings about new beginnings and changed lives.

In Jesus’s parable, we actually learn what our role is not. It’s not your job to weed the field, to “cleanse” the church of people who haven’t got it all right in their minds or all together in their lives. (If that was the standard, you’d have to toss me out of the church, too!) It’s not your job to play the ethical or theological bouncer who refuses certain people entry and enforces the rules. It’s God’s job to decide who’s in and who’s out, who belongs or who doesn’t—and the Lord’s not in any rush to sort that out. That, as they say, will all come out in the wash.

The parable doesn’t get into what your and my jobs are, only what they aren’t. Earlier in the same chapter, though, Jesus gives us the parable of the sower, which ends with a farmer scattering seed that “fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (13:8) This, Jesus explains, represents “someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (13:23) You're a farmer, but you're also the field, the place where, if you hear and understand, the gospel can produce an incredible crop.

According to Jesus, then, your job isn’t to worry about “weeds” in your church but fruit in your own life.

What are your heart, your words, your actions, your relationships producing for God’s Kingdom? Paul reminds us that you can't cause growth in someone else’s life, but what are you doing to make the soil of your own life more fertile and more receptive to what Jesus wants to grow in you?

Plant seeds in others’ lives. Prepare the soil in your own. That is your job.

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