Sow Good Seed.
January 10, 2021
Just Do It, Part 14
In nature, you plant a seed, you care for it, and then it grows. The same is true when growing healthy relationships and a healthy life. Whatever you plant and care for, that is what will grow. How can we begin sowing the kind of seed that will result in a harvest of good, close and loving relationships?
“In relationships, like in farming, what you sow is what you’ll grow.”
Scripture:
James 4:1-12
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but shows favor to the humble.”Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Brothers and sisters, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?
Highlights:
• God uses people to transform other people.
• Are we sowing bad seed and expecting it to produce a good harvest?
• The default setting for human beings when they don’t get what they want is: irritation, frustration, anger, striking out.
• We give God token recognition but give little thought to doing his will at all costs because we have an ingrown focus on our own pleasure.
• Our external conflicts are caused by deep inner desires that aren’t being met.
• Our hearts deceive us, and if we’re not careful our inner turmoil doesn’t just manifest itself in our problems with others, but in our anger and issues with God.
• Our selfishness can twist all of our good, God-given desires into something evil and even destructive.
• We need to develop a healthy suspicion about ourselves.
• If you are continually planting seeds labeled “My Comfort,” “My Convenience,” “My Needs” then you are in for a bad harvest.
• The “my life for yours” principle is the only one on which any life at all is possible. To embrace it is to live, but to reuse it, is to spiritually die and spread death. There it is, Heaven and hell lurking in your living room. - George McDonald
• Death to individual needs gives birth to community and relationship.
• The breakdown of relationships comes when we take on the attitude “I am by own.” But they are built when we say, “my life for yours.”
• Just as the seed that leads to quarreling and strife is stamped selfishness, the seed that leads to peacemaking is labeled humility.
• The way up is down. The way to have true power is to give your power away.
• “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble…Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” – James 4:6,10
• In relationships, like in farming, what you sow it what you’ll grow.
