“For thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem; break up your ground left uncultivated for a season, so that you may not sow among thorns. Jer 4:3 (Amp)
Every structural engineer understands that the higher you desire to build, the deeper you must be prepared to dig in order to lay a solid foundation that is able to support its weight. It is also a bye-word in farming that if you want maximum productivity from your land, you don’t skimp on preparing it for cultivation. If you do, your mistake will sooner rather than later catch up with you in the rampant growth of weeds and their negative impact on productivity. In other words, if you don’t tackle the weeds before you sow, you cannot reap the maximum that the land can produce.
This simple truth also applies to spiritual matters, for if we are not prepared to pay the price required for God’s move and the renewal it will occasion, how then can we expect to gain the maximum effect from that move? Consequently, God’s warning to the Judeans still ring true for us. We too need to reinvigorate our spiritual relationship that has evidently become fallow due to the pressures of life through seeking God in earnest prayer so that we will be prepared and equipped by God to become all that He intended for us to be.
The primary task of the Church is to seek God as the basis of whatever we do in His name so that He would indeed be with us in our endeavours on His behalf. The fact that this important input is lacking can be seen in the number of half-baked Christians that we are producing who are not able to fulfil their God-given potentials because of our negligence to soak their birth and development in prayer from the beginning. This is the real reason why we multiply and copy programmes, but fail to see the expected results. We work so hard but fail to see a commensurate result. Because we have neglected what we ought to do and are busy doing kingdom work, we have little to show for it. Could it be that that which we think is God’s work is actually the product of our own overworked imaginations and as such is destined to fail? The challenge for us today is that are we working for God or with Him? It is easy to get caught up with working for God so much so that we lose sight of His desire to work with us and in the process exclude Him from our work while also working ourselves to the ground. We are thus guilty of putting the cart before the horse and can only toil in vain.
That we need spiritual renewal is evident to all. How we achieve our desire is the main issue. We will achieve infinitely more and do far more than we thought possible for God by first preparing the ground in earnest prayer so that we can enlist God’s help in the task He has assigned us. Moses understood the importance of cultivating and maintaining the presence of God; hence his refusal to do nothing until God did something. That is the position we need to take today so that God’s name and works will be a modern reality as opposed to being just historically relevant.
Prayer:
Father, as a Church we have individually and collectively often been guilty of running ahead of you. I repent of my sin of impatience today and ask that you give me the grace to patiently wait on you as I pray and ask for your move in my time. Use that time to uproot every weed in my life and also prepare the ground you want me to cultivate so that I can produce maximally for your kingdom in Jesus name. Amen.