Beloved: grace, mercy and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. I rejoice with you as we come into another month of this year, the month of June 2023. My prayer is that God will teach your heart to be steadfast and consistent in trusting Him and in doing His will, so that none of the good things He wants to accomplish in your life will elude you, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
While explaining the parable of the farmer that went out to sow his seed, the Lord Jesus said this about those whose lives will bring forth the fruit of the word of God coming to them: “But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.” (Luke 8:15NIV) What are the things that will make the word of God produce in our lives the results God wants to see, as shown by our Lord Jesus? The first is hearing the word of God.
The bible says faith comes by hearing the word of Christ (Rom 10:17). So, hearing what God has to say or is saying is very important. And until we have heard what He has to say to us about Himself, our lives and the situations of our lives, we cannot be expected to trust Him to take care of us or expected to know what He requires of us. So, if our lives will bring forth the fruit of faith in God and the fruit of what God wants, we must hear words of faith in Him and words showing us His will for our lives. In other words, the seed of faith in Him and the seed of His will must be planted in our hearts. Otherwise, there can be no harvest of what has not been planted.
The second thing that will make the word of God produce results in our hearts is for us to retain it. It is one thing for us to plant some seed on some ground; it is another thing for that ground to retain it. If the condition of that ground does not make room for that seed to survive and go on to yield its crops, it can only die or grow up to be unproductive. In like manner, it is not enough for us to hear the word of God; it is equally important we make room for it to grow and be able to bring forth fruit in our lives. If we do not make room for the word of God to live in us, that is, if we do not accept His word as something we need to work with in our lives, it will not accomplish the results it is meant to accomplish in our lives. It will only go to waste, as is seen evident in the lives of many who have severally heard His word and have remained unchanged by it.
The third thing that will make the word of God produce results in our lives is for us to persevere in acting on it. See, even if we have planted our seed on some good ground, a ground that has everything the seed needs to do well, we must still allow that seed to stay long enough there to grow and bring forth its harvest. As farmers know quite well, every seed has its own time of fruitfulness. So, they have to patiently care for it and also wait for it to be ready. Otherwise, they are going to destroy it before its time and lose their harvest and waste their effort.
In like manner, every seed of God’s word planted in our hearts has its own time of fruitfulness. And if we don’t want to miss it, we have to patiently nurture it until brings forth fruit. In other words, we have to keep acting on and praying about whatever God has said to us about Himself, our lives and the situations of lives until we see results. That we are not yet seeing results of acting on what God says to us does not mean we are not going to see it. The seed of every word spoken to us by God will surely grow in us and bring forth fruit, if we will permit it. But how soon it will bring forth its fruit is not what we may be able to say – it all depends on the character of that seed and the nature of challenges it has to deal with in our lives.
So, if we want God’s word to produce righteousness, healing and prosperity in us, we have to persevere in acting on it until we are seeing His righteousness, health and prosperity fully manifesting in our lives. Naaman, for example, had to wash himself in River Jordan seven times before he was cleansed of his leprosy. And that does not mean that once you too act on what God has said about a certain situation of your life seven times, the problem will be solved. Rather, it means that there are times that acting on God’s word just once or twice about certain situations of our lives is not enough to bring results. We must stay on acting on it for a while before the results we want to see will come.
Now how long we will have to keep acting on what God says in order to see results in certain situations of our lives is not what I can say. But I can say that if we do not faint or throw away our confidence in Him, we will not be put to shame. The results we are looking forward to seeing will come and even surpass our expectations. But if we are epileptic in acting on His word, if we are often taking vacations from acting on His word, we are uprooting the seed of His word from the ground of our hearts. So, there will be no harvest. We will simply have wasted the seed of His word and our own time and commitment. And I pray that an end will come to every waste of the word of God that is going on in our lives right now, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Have a splendid week.
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