All around our lives every day are decisions we make with the seeds of promise. Some in our lives personally and some in the lives of others we will touch with our words, decisions and our actions. Though today, they often don’t look so important, the potential of those seeds are there. The Word of God promises they will come up in our lives. Both the good ones and the not-so-good ones. Galatians 6:7 Yes, the potential of the plant is often not seen in the seeds of today.
A few weeks ago I reminded the church I pastor that Tomorrow matters Today. The seed of our future are sown in the furrows of today. Yes, yesterday’s actions, decisions, matter much in tomorrow or our future. And again we often miss the potential of the plant just looking at the seed. It is for this reason that we follow the will and calling of God in our lives. Life changes. Dreams fail to happen. Plans get altered by events, health and finances. Yes, this life will fool you and throw you an unexpected day. But the person who does the will of God will abide forever. Oh you think that statement sound like a fairy tale. Look at who said it and when he wrote it.
His family was fisherman. They were business people. He was no doubt an ambitious young man. He was no doubt a man that not only wanted to get ahead but knew how to get there. His family’s fishing business was pretty large because the writer of the Gospel of Mark tells us that they had people working with them in the family business. He was more-than-likely not the eldest son because when Matthew, Mark and Luke tell of his family he is always mentioned last. His name is John and though the other three gospel writers tell of his calling John for some reason seems to leave it out. But when we get to his letter that bears his name in first John he is an old man. He is in the dwindling years of his life. John seems to look back over the road he has traveled. He no doubt sees things that at the time he really didn’t think they were a big deal. Yet from where he is now looking back he sees how important every day is. John no doubt looks at all that he reached for and maybe felt at a time he just couldn’t live without but looking back from an elder age he now knows they are but dust in the wind. It is probably from this stand point he writes;
And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. 1John 2:17 NKJV
A man that was once a strong, robust business man full of ambition, time has now drew lines all through his body. Time has taken his strength and robbed him of his ability. Time has left him weak and very creased. When John writes his book, Pilate is dead; Herod the Great has been eaten by worms. All the other disciples are now gone the way of a martyrs death and wait for him on the other side of eternity. Jerusalem now lies in waste. What is now left of the nation of Israel was no doubt somewhat scattered. Everything has changed. Everything that John had been tempted to run after is now gone. Everything he had been tempted to seek after in a younger day is now just dust left over from a crumbled dream. Those things that seemed so important to him now seem so frivolous and just a passing thought. The family business without a doubt is now gone. Life in his home town is an economic struggle since Rome’s take-over throughout the land. Yes, life is nothing like he thought it would be in his younger days. Yet John is not caught in all that. John is finishing his course is such fashion as to make Heaven his home.
This is because John remembers a day as if it were yesterday when a man called Jesus walked into his life and said follow me. A tug was placed on his life and a commitment grabbed his heart. That call weathered all the changes in his life and caused him to survive modernism and changing times. That called caused him to survive being boiled in a pot of oil and an island call Patmos. A call that not only came but as Matthew, Mark and Luke recorded, that day, when Jesus said follow me, John left it all and followed Jesus. That day changed everything because the actions of today have a great bearing on how our tomorrows turn out. John started pursuing Jesus and Jesus started pursuing John.
Yes, the potential of the plant of tomorrow is often not seen in the seed of today. Yes, there are a lot of important things that will race through your today. I am not attempting to make light of any of them. But as you rush through your day beware lest you rush past some small seeds that will come up in tomorrow. Yet how those seeds are handled say much about how their hidden potential will be produced. Along that same thinking we may sow some seeds we just soon never come up as we run through our wants and desires. Yet the law of the harvest is still on. What ever gets sown hast to be dealt with after it comes up. Good and bad. “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.” Galatians 6:7-8 NKJV
In 1807 in the town of Stratford, Virginia, there was a baby boy born to the Lee family. His parents called him Robert. The next year deep within Kentucky there was a baby boy born named Jefferson, to the Davis family. That same year in Raleigh, North Carolina another baby boy was born to the Jackson family and his parents named him Andrew. The next year of 1809 a boy was born to a very poor sharecropper family in the hills of Kentucky. The child was called Abraham, his families last name was Lincoln.
No one really noticed save a few family members and friend that these little boys had been born. No one wrote about their births in the great news print of the times. No one declared the promise of these tiny lives to come. No, everyone one was more concerned about a powerful man marching across the east named Napoleon Bonaparte. Reporters empty their ink wells on stories of how he would rule the world. No one even noticed a few little boys toddling around little yards and cabins. Little boys that would one day change the direction of the United States forever. In just a few short years the world conqueror is defeated and lives his last days in prison. There he dies of sickness or poisoning. Yet in the living rooms of some families some little seeds were turning into some mighty plants full of history changing potential.
I challenge you to stop today and look around your life. Are your majoring on some minor things and stunting the growth of some major things? Pay attention to what you are rushing past. The potential of the plant is often not seen in the smallness of the seed. Tomorrow matters Today. The seeds will come up.
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