Harvest Christian Quotes

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembered, in this context, that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst. Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings.

What are you planting today to harvest tomorrow?

This is a door that the Lord holds open for you. Walk through it. He who has called shall also equip. Everything you lack shall be provided.

The root problem with Christianity is that their god is supposed to be all-powerful and benevolent. It sounds like an easy sell, but when life turns completely to shit, you have to come up with all kinds of whacked-out reasons for why kindly old Jehovah saw fit to run over little Timmy with a combine harvester and leave him in a state of vegetative, limbless agony for eighteen years.

It's not your schedule that keeps you from praying, it's your failure to realize the importance of prayer.

If you go through life making every decision based on what is safest, you will look back one day and discover that you have missed out on the best. Allowing fear to run your life will only rob you of your future.

Blessed are you who sow. Every seed you so plant, will grow into bountiful crops for great harvest.

What do you think destiny is? A smooth path that never jostles you? No. When you walk in your destiny, you will crash and fall more times than you can count. But the secret is to hold on to God’s vision for your life — and for the lives of those He puts under your charge. No matter how many times you fall, crash, and fail, you get up. You get up and face your obstacles.

I want to grow old with you. I want your face to be the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. I want to feel my children growing inside you. Sarah, my love. I want to worship the Lord with you, and hear your laughter until the day I die.

Plant in tears, harvest with joy.

As we plant in tears, we shall harvest with joy.

When you don’t understand what is happening, you need to wait, trust God, and rest in His care. He is always faithful to His own.

If you are enduring a cold season, don't underestimate Christ can plant you right where you are at no matter how dirty, beat up, or worthless you may feel. Rest assured, He has strategically placed you in the precise place on earth for such a time as this.

The fullness of life is wrapped in all sacred times: plenty and scarcity; happiness and sadness; planting and harvesting; sunrise and sunset; winter and springtime; summer and autumn; beginning and finishing; birth and death…!

Your impact on the lives of others--your family, the people at your church, your workmates--is cultivated with each decision you make, no matter how small.

Love may start out as a good feeling, but to love someone long-term is an act of the will.

A powerful truth is that if we love the Lord, love His Word, love His people, and love one another, we won’t want to gossip.

Yielding your inner life to God will empower you to live the kind of outer life that honors the Lord and blesses others.

The more you manifest a servant’s heart in all you do, the more of an impact you’ll have on people’s lives.

Some Christians sow to the flesh every day and wonder why they do not reap holiness. Holiness is a harvest; whether we reap it or not depends almost entirely on what and where we sow.

The truth is that each of us fall short of loving unconditionally. We don't love others the way God loves us. Yet Jesus extended perfect love by living and dying for all of our sins. In spite of our failures, weaknesses, and selfishness, He sacrificed His own life so we could have eternal life.

What an abundant harvest has been collected in autumn! The earth has now fulfilled its design for this year, and is going to repose for a short time. Thus nature is continually employed during the greatest part of the year: even in her rest she is active: and in silence prepares a new creation.

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one. In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis... In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch. Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.

Conversion can also occur among those who already have the faith. Christians will become real Christians, with less façade and more foundation. Catastrophe will divide them from the world, force them to declare their basic loyalties; it will revive shepherds who shepherd rather than administrate, reverse the proportion of saints and scholars in favor of saints, create more reapers for the harvest, more pillars of fire for the lukewarm; it will make the rich see that real wealth is in the service of the needy; and, above all else, it will make the glory of Christ’s Cross shine out in a love of the brethren for one another as true and loyal sons of God.

Time is redeemed when you make the most of your life by fulfilling God's purposes.

God doesn’t promise us escape from suffering or pain. Rather, He promises to miraculously use even bad situations for your ultimate good.

When you yield yourself in complete and wholehearted obedience to God, He can do great things through you.

Home is the best place to teach young men and women about God’s kind of love.

Be patient and wait for the due harvest.

A church leadership that cannot provide members with business ideas should stop demanding tithe from them. Plant greatness in the members and they pay greatly; Plant zero in them and they pay in negatives!

CRUEL HARVEST by Fran Elizabeth Grubb is a compelling, riveting, unforgetable memoir that will keep you turning the pages. Published by Thomas Nelson and due for release August 2012. Kidnapped from an orphanage Frances is dragged across the country working in the fields. Youtubefrangrubb to see video book trailer.

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." Ladies and gentlemen, this is what Christianity is all about. God never intended for us to walk this world alone, and Christ did not die for us to keep His love all to ourselves.

If you're facing a season of trials, don't allow the enemy to have a field day by putting negative thoughts in your mind. Let go of stinking thinking. Instead of turning away from God in anger or confusion, run into His loving arms where He will comfort you.

Long before there was ever a King James Version of our Bible, there was a gospel truth...and long before doctrines and denominations, the preeminence of the gospel was already ripe to harvest. Before man had ever thought about creating symbols to represent spiritual things...there was a gospel.

Amid the joy of raising children will be some of the hardest work you’ll ever do.

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

As we receive, we give.

When you are obedient to God, He fills you with His Spirit and empowers you to do all He asks of you.

When you submit yourself to God and obey Him, you allow Him to do what He desires in your life. You make it possible for Him to lead you wherever He wants to use you.

Although we may encounter dark seasons, when we're filled with joy we'll have confident expectations that the sun will soon return and dark clouds will pass.

You see, God didn't create us to merely survive. He created us to thrive! We were made for abundant life.

Have you ever considered that for some people in your life, you might be the only Christian they know?

The beauty of obedience is that what God expects you to do, He also enables you to do.

The Christian up to his eyes in trouble can take comfort from the knowledge that in God’s kindly plan it all has a positive purpose, to further his sanctification. In this world, royal children have to undergo extra training and discipline which other children escape, in order to fit them for their high destiny. It is the same with the children of the King of kings. The clue to understanding all his dealings with them is to remember that throughout their lives he is training them for what awaits them, and chiseling them into the image of Christ. Sometimes the chiseling process is painful and the discipline irksome, but then the Scripture reminds us: “The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons . . . No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Heb 12:6-7,11). Only the person who has grasped this can make sense of Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God” (KJV); equally, only he can maintain his assurance of sonship against satanic assault as things go wrong. But he who has mastered the truth of adoption both retains assurance and receives blessing in the day of trouble: this is one aspect of faith’s victory over the world. Meanwhile, however, the point stands that the Christian’s primary motive for holy living is not negative, the hope (vain!) that hereby he may avoid chastening, but positive, the impulse to show his love and gratitude to his adopting God by identifying himself with the Father’s will for him.

His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement.

The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. Christianity, by its very nature, demands such a revolution. If Christians would all live up to what they profess to believe, the revolution would happen.

It is easy to see how the myths and legends which built up around the Goddess Bride became entwined with Christian doctrine, and there is one source which tells of St Brigid’s ale harvest being so abundant that enough ale was made to serve seventeen churches!

Spiritually immature people wear themselves (and their friends) out with their foolish choices and words. If you cultivate close relationships with them, you will harvest truckloads of trouble, such as repeatedly being lied to, taken advantage of, and disrespected.

That's the Christian life: a long journey in the same direction. It's about perseverance. Obedience. And a whole lot of grace. The hand of the master winemaker, forever pruning, producing fruit, and then making something profound and lovely out of our meager harvest.

Happiness is an emotion based on positive circumstances within our lives. The origin of the word “happiness” was derived from the same root “hap”, similar to the word “happening.” Depending on what's happening in our lives, we're either happy or sad. It's based on pure luck and good fortune.

One of the greatest acts of faith is to believe that the few years we live on this earth are like a little seed planted in a very rich soil. For this seed to bear fruit, it must die. We often see or feel only the dying, but the harvest will be abundant even when we ourselves are not the harvesters.

The truth is real change begins with your willingness and courage to take the first step forward. Usually, the first step is the most difficult one to take. All resistances and old habits must be eliminated. Deep within you there must be determination to overcome your obstacles. To believe God has something better for you and lean on Him as you persevere.

At the harvest, in the vineyard, wherever men must labour hard, they begin with songs whose words express their joy. But when their joy brims over and words are not enough, they abandon even this coherence and give themselves up to the sheer sound of singing. What is this jubilation? It is the melody that means our hearts are bursting with feelings words cannot express.

Three postcards await our perusal, yea, three visions of a world. One: I see a theme park where there are lots of rides, but there is nobody who can control them and nobody who knows how the rides end. Grief counseling, however, is included in the price of admission. Two: I see an accident. An explosion of some kind inhabited by happenstantial life forms. A milk spill gone bacterial, only with more flame. It has no meaning or purpose or master. It simply is. Three: I see a stage, a world where every scene is crafted. Where men act out their lives within a tapestry, where meaning and beauty exist, where right and wrong are more than imagined constructs. There is evil. There is darkness. There is the Winter of tragedy, every life ending, churned back into the soil. But the tragedy leads to Spring. The story does not end in frozen death. The fields are sown in grief. The harvest will be reaped in joy. I see a Master's painting. I listen to a Master's prose. When darkness falls on me, when I stand on my corner of the stage and hear my cue, when I know my final scene has come and I must exit, I will go into the ground like corn, waiting for the Son.

All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.

Blessed be the stone masons, for they shall lay bricks of gold on the streets of heaven for their wives to walk upon. Blessed are the sowers and harvesters, for they shall live again in the Garden of Eden. Blessed are the bartenders, for Jesus will serve them. Blessed are the prostitutes, for Jesus will embrace them. Woe unto the pastors who preach hate, for they shall live in eternal hate. Woe unto the pastors who become brutes, for their flocks shall be scattered. Woe unto the Inquisitors, for Jesus will inquire unto them.

In addition to legal assemblies such as the one at Thingvellir, major public rituals were part of the celebration of the three big festivals around which the Viking calendar turned. One of these was Winter Nights, which was held over several days during our month of October, which the Vikings considered to be the beginning of winter and of the new year generally. The boundary between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead was thin, and all sorts of uncanny things were bound to happen. At this festival, the divine powers were petitioned for the general prosperity of the people. The second critical festival was Yule at midwinter - late December and early January - Which, with the arrival of Christianity, was converted into Christmas. Offerings were made to the gods in hopes of being granted bountiful harvests in the coming growing season in return. The third major festival was called "Summer Time" (Sumarmál), and was held in April, which the Vikings considered to be the beginning of summer. When the deities were contacted during this festival, they were asked for success in the coming season's battles, raids, and trading expeditions. The exact time of these festivals differed between communities.

Christianity in its fullness and truth has been restored to the earth by direct revelation. The restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the most significant fact since the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What was restored? In a very real sense, the true Law of the Harvest was restored – the law of justice, the law of mercy, the law of love. It was restored in a free country under the influence of a God-inspired Constitution which created a climate of freedom, opportunity and prosperity. The basic virtues of thrift, self-reliance, independence, enterprise, diligence, integrity, morality, faith in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ, were the principles upon which this, the greatest nation in the world, has been built. We must not sell this priceless, divine heritage which was largely paid for by the blood of patriots and prophets for a mess of pottage, for a counterfeit, a false doctrine parading under the cloak of love and compassion, of humanitarianism, even of Christianity.

The God to whom I was introduced as a child was basically a Jewish one: male, fatherly, Anglo-European, bearded, angrily loving, judgmental, righteously indignant,mand frighteningly powerful, not to mention present everywhere and all-knowing. In trying to make sense of this God, man has continued to manufacture and manipulate images of this perceived deity. The images have changed over the centuries, based on the mood of the times. During kind times when harvests were abundant and peace reigned (admittedly rare in the ancient world), God was benevolent. When plpague and famine killed millions, God was portrayed as enraged and vengeful. To this day, this emotionally infantile God remains in power, a fear-based aberration produced by fevered imaginations, promoted by those who understand how such a deity can be used to gain and consolidate power over believers, and protected by flocks of billions who refuse to question their damning God for fear of their own damnation -- or out of an even greater immediate terror of social and cultural isolation. But I argue that it is PRECISELY this image of God -- an infantile, simplistic, ridiculous notion of the sublime power that underlies the world -- that is destroying civil religion, fueling the rage of the "angry atheist" movement, and pitting science against the spiritual at a time when we should be using every tool within reach to discover what it means to be human -- and divinely human at that.

Remember the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:24–30) they must grow together, Jesus said, until the harvest. We cannot remove the tares without destroying the wheat. Evil, like the tares, is part of the Ground of Being, the nature of reality, the meaning of God. My being is always light and darkness, love and hate, God and Satan, life and death, being and nonbeing—all in dynamic tension. I cannot split off part of who I am, confess it, be absolved of it, and seek to try again. I cannot pretend that I am made in God’s image until I own as part of my being the shadow side of my life, which reflects the shadow side of God. That is why evil is always present in the holy; that is why evil is perceived as relentless and inescapable; that is why Jesus and Judas have been symbolically bound together since the dawn of time. The Johannine myth was not wrong in suggesting that Jesus was the preexisting word of God who was enfleshed into human history. That is a very accurate conception of an ultimate truth. But it is not complete. Judas Iscariot was also mythically present in God at the dawn of creation, and he too was enfleshed in the drama played out in Judea in the first century. The mythical themes are woven together time after time. God and Satan, life and death, good and evil, sacrifice and freedom, light and darkness, Jesus and Judas—are all inextricably bound up with one another. I cannot finally step into the new being without bringing my own dark shadow with me.

Sending out the Disciples Luke 10 1: AFTER THESE THINGS THE LORD APPOINTED OTHER SEVENTY DISCIPLES AND HE SENT THEM TWO AND TWO BEFORE HIS FACE INTO EVERY CITY AND PLACE; WHITHER HE HIMSELF WOULD COME God is here and now. God is not something outside you, God is within you. God is the innermost core of existence. That is what Jesus means with: "Repent, for the kingdom of God is near". God is not separate from the creation. He is one with the creation. When you understand this, your life becomes a prayer. When you understand this, you will understand that existence is a family. You will understand that life is togetherness. When we discover our authentic inner being, the kingdom of God, we understand that everybody is a messenger. We discover that the divine source expands, and we spread love to all with whom we interact. Jesus sent out his disciples two and two, so that they did not have to go alone. They went two and two in friendship, in love, in trust, so that they could help each other. THEREFORE SAID HE UNTO THEM, THE HARVEST TRULY IS GREAT, BUT THE LABORERS ARE FEW The harvest is great, but there are not many laborers. People are deaf and blind. Somebody like Jesus comes, and you do not want to listen. It has always been like this. Rather than listening to Jesus, people get so jealous of Jesus, that they crucified him. Only very aware and understanding people will listen to Jesus. GO YOUR WAYS: BEHOLD I SEND YOU FORTH AS LAMBS AMONG THE WOLVES Jesus knows that he is sending his disciples into a dangerous world. People will not understand what they say, they do not want to listen, and they cling to their ideas and their tradition. Jesus knows that trust is to be attacked. He knows that love is to be attacked. CARRY NEITHER PURSE, NOR SHOES, AND SALUTE NO MAN BY THE WAY AND INTO WHATSOVER HOUSE YE ENTER, FIRST SAY, PEACE BE TO THIS HOUSE Jesus says that the love and the truth can create troubles for you. "Do not carry purse, do not wear shoes, go barefoot. Do not salute no man on the road". Be ordinary, be simple, be egoless. Jesus says bring peace to the house, because only in that peaceful milieu can the message can delievered. Create a spiritual vibration of peace, spread the feeling of peace, and if you are really feeling it, it will spread. When somebody comes to see you, settle within yourself, Become silent. And you will see a change in the man. We are joined together by our hearts. We exist as parts of one heart. That heart is God. If you create a feeling of peace, it will spread around you. If your gift of peace is accepted, it will be good. If it is not accepted, if you gift is rejcted, it is also good. The peace will still shower on you. HE THAT HEARETH YOU, HEARETH ME, AND HE THAT DESPISETH YOU, DESPISETH ME: AND HE THAT DESPISETH ME DESPISETH HIM THAT SENT ME Jesus says: If people hear you, they hear me. And if they hear me, they hear the one who has sent me.

When you yield yourself in complete and whole-hearted obedience to God, He can do great things through you.

Obedience leads to a powerful, confident life.

God’s strength will come to you when you faithfully read His Word.

Psalm 1, which compares us to trees planted by streams of water, suggests that our growth has different “seasons.” Some seasons are for planting (spring), some for nourishing (summer), some for harvesting (fall), and some for dying (winter). Some Christians want every day to be harvest time. Therapists are often asked, “Why does it take so long for someone to get better?

The relations of Peter Waldo with the Waldenses were so intimate that many called him the founder of a sect of that name, though others derive the name from the Alpine valleys, Vallenses, in which so many of those believers lived. It is true that Waldo was highly esteemed among them, but not possible that he should have been their founder, since they founded their faith and practice on the Scriptures and were followers of those who from the earliest times had done the same. For outsiders to give them the name of a man prominent among them was only to follow the usual habit of their opponents, who did not like to admit their right to call themselves, as they did, “Christians” or “brethren”. Peter Waldo continued his travels and eventually reached Bohemia, where he died (1217), having laboured there for years and sown much seed, the fruit of which was seen in the spiritual harvest in that country at the time of Huss and later.

They denied the obvious with the same boldness because all of them believed that harvesting rubber and making money was a Christian ideal that justified the worst atrocities against pagans who, of course, were always cannibals and killers of their own children. When

what both Jesus and Paul were saying is this: If you want to have a bountiful harvest, you have to plant. And if you want to plant, before you do anything you have to first have good soil. And even the best soil needs to be cultivated first. Our spiritual lives are the soil onto which God’s blessings are poured. The good news is that none of us is created with a bad soul, or bad soil. In fact, we are all created, as Genesis tells us, “very good,” and we possess within ourselves ground in which God’s Holy Spirit can move and create new life.

The church was planted in Asia, nurtured in Africa and harvested worldwide.

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter's public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club's organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their "mission field" and our children as "the harvest." ... As I researched the group behind these kindergarten missionaries, I saw that they were part of a national network of clubs. I soon discovered that this network was itself just one of many initiatives to insert reactionary religion into public schools across the country. Then I realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort not merely to convert other people's children in the classroom but to undermine public education altogether. Belatedly, I understood that the conflict they provoked in our local community- -I was hardly the only parent who found their presence in the public school alarming was not an unintended consequence of their activity. It was of a piece with their plan to destroy confidence in our system of education and make way for a system of religious education more to their liking.

Before the coming of Christianity, the Norse had worshipped a pantheon of gods, headed by Thor, the powerful deity who ruled the sky and controlled thunder, wind, rain, and the harvest. Other important deities were Freya, the powerful goddess of fertility, and Odin, the god of war.

My God, this is staggering, Woah! Immense. This epiphany quivers me as I write. How powerful, nonpareil, & superordinary is your Word. The BEATITUDES for instance, is a saintly archetype of direct investment, --seed planting & a sure-way harvest. May I liken it a bit to a spiritual trading --one in which, to get this-- you do this. Simple, practical & yet so effective. The only ingredient required for this is aBsOluTe OBEDIENCE. Meanwhile, all of humanity-- everyone actively, passively, knowingly or otherwise is a trader at this heavenly market of life. --©Bright Heaven's

BEATITUDES My God, this is staggering, Woah! Immense. This epiphany quivers me as I write. How powerful, nonpareil, & superordinary is your Word. The BEATITUDES for instance, is a saintly archetype of direct investment, --seed planting & a sure-way harvest. May I liken it a bit to a spiritual trading --one in which, to get this-- you do this. Simple, practical & yet so effective. The only ingredient required for this is aBsOluTe OBEDIENCE. Meanwhile, all of humanity-- everyone actively, passively, knowingly or otherwise is a trader at this heavenly market of life. --©Bright Heaven's

I believe the world will never be completely converted to Christianity by any existing agency before the end comes. Despite all that can be done by ministers, churches, schools, and missions, the wheat and the tares will grow together until the harvest, and when the end comes, the earth will be in much the same state that it was when the flood came in the days of Noah (Matthew 13:24-30; 24:37-39).

So it is surely licit to ask what Thomas Aquinas would do if he were alive today; but we have to answer that, in any case, he would not write another Summa Theologica. He would come to terms with Marxism, with the physics of relativity, with formal logic, with existentialism and phenomenology. He would comment not on Aristotle, but on Marx and Freud. Then he would change his method of argumentation, which would become a bit less harmonious and conciliatory. And finally he would realize that one cannot and must not work out a definitive, concluded system, like a piece of architecture, but a sort of mobile system, a loose-leaf Summa, because in his encyclopedia of the sciences the notion of historical temporariness would have entered. I can’t say whether he would still be a Christian. But let’s say he would be. I know for sure that he would take part in the celebrations of his anniversary only to remind us that it is not a question of deciding how still to use what he thought, but to think new things. Or at least to learn from him how you can think cleanly, like a man of your own time. After which I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. 

Whatever the precise referents, no Christian ‘harvester’ can ever justly forget that (1) success in reaping normally depends on the work of those who have gone before; and that (2) in those rare instances where sowing and reaping seem to go hand in hand, it is but the foretaste of the eschatological blessings still to come.

THE WAITING HARVEST Matthew 9:37–8 Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is great, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.’ HERE is one of the most characteristic things Jesus ever said. When he and the orthodox religious leaders of his day looked on the crowd of ordinary men and women, they saw them in quite different ways. The Pharisees saw the masses as chaff to be destroyed and burned up; Jesus saw them as a harvest to be reaped and to be saved. The Pharisees in their pride looked for the destruction of sinners; Jesus in love died for the salvation of sinners. But here also is one of the great Christian truths and one of the supreme Christian challenges. That harvest will never be reaped unless there are reapers to reap it. It is one of the blazing truths of Christian faith and life that Jesus Christ needs us. When he was upon this earth, his voice could reach so few. He was never outside Palestine, and there was a world which was waiting. He still wants the world to hear the good news of the gospel; but they will never hear unless others tell them. He wants all men and women to hear the good news; but they will never hear it unless there are those who are prepared to cross the seas and the mountains and bring the good news to them. Nor is prayer enough. Some people might say: ‘I will pray for the coming of Christ’s kingdom every day in life.’ But in this, as in so many things, prayer without

The unholy alliance of science, technology, and industry has given birth to monstrous offspring that threaten the very future of the planet. From factory farming to the harvesting of human eggs, commodified science and technology comes with a utilitarian ethic. Life is cheap. Forests, animals, and people are raw materials. Everyone and everything is expendable.50 Whatever brings the greatest profit is worth the violence. God is calling the church in the night to retrieve the meaning of stewardship first and foremost as caring for the earth.51 Evangelism is not good news until it is good news for all of creation, for humanity, animals, plants, water, and soil, for the earth that God created and called good.

Every seed planted, will yield bountiful harvest.

Cities fell apart in violent conflicts over a single letter: was Christ of the same being with the Father, or of like being, homoousios or homoiousios? Was he from two natures (ek duo), or in two (en duo)? Such language is seriously off-putting for most modern readers, including many educated Christians. And it uses so many technical terms that almost seem to the uninitiated like secret codes. Person? Subsistence? Nature? A critic could be forgiven for comparing the straightforward words of Jesus, with all the everyday analogies and images—sheep and harvests, the sparrows and the lilies of the field, the erring brother and the widow’s penny—to the arcane philosophical language used here. Jesus spoke of love; his church spoke in riddles. I may not be the only modern reader who hears the language of Chalcedon—two but not one—and finds his thoughts occasionally straying to the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A monk offers instructions for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, in a deliberate parody of the Athanasian Creed: First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.

The more we give, the more we are blessed to keep giving.

The fertile land yields its fruits in the sacred time.

God’s timing determines the fruit of the harvest.

Loving Father   The exciting thing about the Christian life is that we, unlike other “religions,” have a living and active God who desires a relationship with us.  That’s something to be excited about!  We aren’t ruled by a dictator, but we are invited into a loving relationship with a personal, caring, and intimate Father.  One of the greatest honors we have is being called to co-labor with Him in the harvest of souls. We have a good Dad and we get to share His goodness with the people around us.  He doesn’t just send us out into the “world” helpless and on our own.  He invites us to go out with Him. He fills us with His presence and gives us gifts to bear fruit.

The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.

Think for but a moment of what God has accomplished through his Christians in the United States. Christians have spent the last couple of hundred years going out as missionaries and bringing the gospel to the lost. There is no corner or place where the message has not been carried, and in some quarters it has been received with such great force that we now find those countries sending missionaries back to evangelize our country. It is well, when we criticize all the sins of the United States, that we also remember all those great Christians who gave their lives sharing the gospel.             But no matter how sugar-coated it is made, the United States stands as far from the gospel as it has in decades. What can be done for an old heart like ours? I do believe the one lesson to be taken from this great awakening is that we must come together in prayer. We must wait upon God, but we wait in expectation, knowing that he loves this people of this world more than we ever could. We have the assurance through the Word, that when we pray God listens, and when we pray for something that he has already commanded us to pray for—that he send more laborers into the harvest field—we may be confident of his answer. Let us look, then, to the harvest fields and see what God might turn our hands toward. How blessed is the God who uses such earthen vessels of clay to proclaim his majesty!

Today, we have a Christianity made easy as an accommodation to an age that is unwilling to face the implication of Calvary, and the gospel of “simply believism” has produced a harvest of professions which have done untold harm to the cause of Christ. —DUNCAN CAMPBELL Do you have a hunger for God? If we don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because we have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because we have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Our soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. —JOHN PIPER The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it. —LEONARD RAVENHILL

The more you give, the more you have much to keep giving.

Thou art my portion, O Lord." Psalm 119:57 Look at thy possessions, O believer, and compare thy portion with the lot of thy fellowmen. Some of them have their portion in the field; they are rich, and their harvests yield them a golden increase; but what are harvests compared with thy God, who is the God of harvests? What are bursting granaries compared with him, who is the Husbandman, and feeds thee with the bread of heaven? Some have their portion in the city; their wealth is abundant, and flows to them in constant streams, until they become a very reservoir of gold; but what is gold compared with thy God? Thou couldst not live on it; thy spiritual life could not be sustained by it. Put it on a troubled conscience, and could it allay its pangs? Apply it to a desponding heart, and see if it could stay a solitary groan, or give one grief the less? But thou hast God, and in him thou hast more than gold or riches ever could buy. Some have their portion in that which most men love--applause and fame; but ask thyself, is not thy God more to thee than that? What if a myriad clarions should be loud in thine applause, would this prepare thee to pass the Jordan, or cheer thee in prospect of judgment? No, there are griefs in life which wealth cannot alleviate; and there is the deep need of a dying hour, for which no riches can provide. But when thou hast God for thy portion, thou hast more than all else put together. In him every want is met, whether in life or in death. With God for thy portion thou art rich indeed, for he will supply thy need, comfort thy heart, assuage thy grief, guide thy steps, be with thee in the dark valley, and then take thee home, to enjoy him as thy portion forever. "I have enough," said Esau; this is the best thing a worldly man can say, but Jacob replies, "I have all things," which is a note too high for carnal minds.

Freedom from suffering is precisely not the result to be expected from remaining on the vine: on the contrary, fruitful branches are “pruned” just as fruitless ones are cast off (John 15:2, 6). Suffering is a part of every life, but for the Christian it is a “fruitful” part of life, bearing a harvest of righteousness (cf. Heb. 12:11). As

Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide.

Christian theism, to those who believe it, commends itself as fact, not theory, by the sheer multiplicity of its bearings. Were it a speculation, it would surely face a single field of enquiry: it would assign the cause of the world, or the principle of duty, or the aim of existence, or the means of spiritual regeneration. If an equal light falls from a single source in all these directions at once, that source must seem to have the richness of a reality, rather than the abstract poverty of an idea.

Discernment and detachment (Jurists and apatheia) are two characters of the mature Christian soul. They are not yet the mark of a mystic, but they bear witness that one is traveling the right way to mystical contemplation, and that the stage of beginners is passed. The presence of discernment and detachment is manifested by a spontaneous thirst for what is good—charity, union with the will of God—and an equally spontaneous repugnance for what is evil. The man who has this virtue no longer needs to be exhorted by promises to do what is right, or deterred from evil by threat of punishment.

View your body as something God has entrusted into your care.

When we no longer have the strength to keep on walking, God will carry us. His strength is enough for you and I.

Dear God, help us to be a living example of being Christ-centered. Purify the areas in our lives where we allowed the world and enemy to gain access. Please direct us into authentic truth so that all may see You in us.

You have the privilege of presenting a picture of what heaven will be like to those around you.

Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this. “When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this.” “God bless the reading of his Word.

harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. 38 Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send