Look Up and See the Harvest

Jesus once stood among friends who were near a field, distracted by daily tasks, failing to look up at the beautiful bigger picture of their Father’s mission.

He corrected them plainly: "Do you not say, 'There are still four months and then comes the harvest'? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest!" (John 4:35). The harvest was never in the distance. It was right in front of them, waiting only for someone to look up and see it.

Mark, a friend of Love Worth Finding, may not have stood unfocused near a field, but he knew what it was to sit at what he described as a table and never look up. Never see the bread. Never taste the bread. Never share the bread.

He loved that table. He was close enough to smell the bread, close enough to hear the conversation, close enough that people assumed he belonged to them fully. And in a sense, he did. He was a child of God. But for years, he lived on what fell from the table rather than enjoying what was set upon it.

"I pulled up to the table with my friends and family," he said of his old, distracted life. "I smiled and would often comment on how good it was, only I never 'dipped a plate.' I just waited for the scraps to fall."

A man fed only on scraps has nothing left over to give away. That truth caught up with Mark the day his pastor asked him to consider teaching a new Sunday School class. The church had grown, and a room full of young adults needed somewhere to sit and learn. Someone needed to feed them.

Mark said no. His excuses sounded reasonable enough on the surface, but underneath, he knew the real reason: he wasn't strong enough. He couldn't hand out bread he hadn't eaten himself.

A few days later, his mother placed something in his hands, seemingly out of nowhere: a set of CDs, a sermon series by Pastor Adrian Rogers on the Book of James. Mark carried those messages around for a while, unopened, just like he was.

Then, one day, he finally listened.

"Adrian Rogers' voice was very captivating," Mark said, "but it wasn't just the sound of his voice. It was the skill and depth with which he could articulate the Word of God." Over the following days, as he made his way through the series, something in him was laid bare. "God showed me just how weak I was. I was weak in Spirit and faith because I was only 'eating' on Sundays."

This is what it looks like when a man finally lifts up his eyes. The field had been white the whole time. Mark simply hadn't looked.

"That series of messages changed my life," he said. "It lit a fire in me to pull up to the table of God's Word every day." For the first time, he understood the shape of his own calling. God hadn't called him to be another Adrian Rogers. God had called him to study, to labor, to preach and teach the Word "passionately and, most importantly, accurately."

So, Mark did the thing he had refused to do before. He took the Sunday School class.

Trace that transformation back, and it runs through more than one heart: Adrian Rogers, faithfully teaching through the book of James decades earlier, with no way of knowing whose life his voice would one day reach; a mother, discerning enough to hand her son a set of CDs instead of a lecture; a pastor, willing to ask a reluctant man to teach before that man believed he was ready. Each of them dropped a seed without ever seeing what it would grow into.

Now the seed was Mark's to plant. A room full of young adults, wondering whether the Word still had anything to say to people their age, was about to find out it does. They’d be taught by a man who, not long before, had been living on scraps himself.

"I wound up taking that Sunday school class," Mark said, "and I began a season of growth that is still continuing today. Thank You, Lord, for saving me and calling me. It's a hard road, but a glorious road."

The harvest Jesus described was never far off. It was always right there.

Using Mark’s metaphor, the table was already set, waiting only for someone to stop admiring the bread from a distance, pull up a chair, and eat. And once a man has truly eaten, he can't help but hand a plate to the next person.