Harvest: The Reason for the Season

Exeter Temple Bible notes
20th October 2013

What is the reason behind our celebrations in the season of harvest. Harvest Festival is open to a huge variety of interpretations.  A vicar, concerned about poor giving in his church might preach on the responsibility of tithing.  A missionary serving in a poverty stricken part of the world emphasises the responsibility to share our resources.  Another leader might be passionate about environmental issues and want to talk on the future of the planet; a radical evangelical church about the need to harvest souls for the kingdom, a revivalist church about maturing in holiness and a Seventh Day Adventist church about the final harvest of judgement at the end of the world! 

                                                                                                                                               The definitive answer about harvest is that it is about reaping.  

Physically harvest is a time to gather in what has been planted, nurtured, matured and finally produced.  Harvest festival is a time to celebrate the coming to fruition of hopes, plans and hard work; a time to remember God’s part in it all and to be thankful. It is a time to be responsible about what we do with what we reap. There is a parallel with what we reap in terms of the quality of our life and in our character.
Belief in a creator God not only helps us to explain the sense of detail and order that we see in the world but also answers the question of our purpose on earth. What is the point of being born, growing up to earn a living, perhaps producing children and then dying? What’s it all about?
A sense of God brings a sense of purpose and a desire to become all that we were meant to be.   Many of us under-achieve mentally and most of us don’t realise just how much our bodies are capable of achieving. 
There is also a part of us that reaches up towards God and seeks to know him. That part of us is also under-developed.  In fact this spiritual part of us has been starved to death by our self-absorption and over concentration on developing those things that satisfy us physically and materially. That is why we need the death and resurrection of Jesus to bring us new life within. Life is really incomplete if we haven’t set out to reach our spiritual potential. 
In Psalm 1, the writer makes a distinction between the wicked and the righteous.  When the psalm talks about the wicked it is not referring to murderers, rapists or drug pushers but the wicked was a term used in those days to refer to anyone who had little or no time for God or who had ruled God out of his affairs and thinking.  The righteous person is seen as someone who makes God the centre of his life, who concentrates on reaping a spiritual harvest in their lives.

1.      Position                                                                                                              

Any farmer or gardener knows that production depends upon how we start and prepare. A good position is often a factor in how well a plant will grow.
The Psalm compares the position of the righteous and the sinner. And keep in mind what is meant by the righteous and the sinner. The righteous man is like a tree that is planted whilst the sinner is like chaff blown by the wind.
When something is planted it is not where it is by accident. It is planted in a certain place for a certain purpose. It might be to provide a shield against the wind maybe to produce fruit or wood but it has a purpose.
The chaff in comparison is a waste product for which no one has any particular plan. The choice is ours. We can either make ourselves available to God for him to place us and position us for his purposes; or we can simply follow the winds and whims of our feelings and desires and take a chance where we end up. 
Psalm 1 says, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.”                The Bible teacher Ray Stedman says that “to walk in the Bible, refers to the decisions we have to make. The crucial question is who is the guiding influence on those decisions?  
To stand is a picture of the people and causes to which we commit ourselves. It is what we base our life upon. 
And to sit speaks of the attitude and disposition with which a person regards life. To sit in the seat of mockers is to become the sort of person who blames everyone but themselves, for all that is wrong. They are cynical of everything and everybody.
All in all, the person who wants to reap a spiritual harvest does not walk, sit or stand according to selfish designs but as v 3 tells us “his delight is in the law of the Lord.
They do not attempt to draw up their own production methods to create a happy life they go to God and follow his plan.

2. Provision

The God centred person is like a tree planted by a good water supply.  But those who try to live without God are like chaff, they have no roots with which to draw up water.
We tend to think that saintly people, who know God and are filled with an infectious kind of joy and peace, are like that because they have that kind of personality or that they somehow have an in-built goodness that they inherited.  Or we think they are like that because they have worked really hard at being religious.  But they would be the first to deny it was any of those things.  It is not a question of ability or aptitude it is simply that they have discovered a source of strength upon which they can draw. 
The hope of the Christian faith is not based upon who can fulfil a list of rules but upon the promise that when we give our live to him, God promises to come and live in our hearts and minds through his Spirit.  Paul talked about the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:27)
Sadly sometimes when we Christians try to share our faith we can appear to be seeking to impose our views on others and create the impression that we are better than others.  But really the motivation is simply to share good news.  We have found a something that helps us live with power and purpose.  If we fail and do not sometimes appear to live any better than the godless that is not the fault of the source of strength it is the fact that we have failed to draw often enough from it.

3. Production
This Psalm is not so much about actions but attitudes. It’s about where you stand, sit and walk in relation to God.   We have a choice in that. Choices do have consequences.  Where you stand, sit and walk in relation to God has an effect upon our life and upon what kind of things we reap.
The life centred on the developing a relationship with God and the life that fails to give that part of life any attention both bring results. The God centred life yields fruit.  The other produces something but it is something that cannot last. 
 “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked will perish.” (v6)
There are some things that last the distance and some things that don’t.  The only thing that will count after we have past the best of our mental and physical powers is character.  If all that the Bible says is true about there being an eternal life, then what will count most of all is the state of our relationship with God. 
1 Corinthians 13 says, “Where there are prophecies they will cease. Where there are tongues they will be stilled, where there is knowledge it will pass away……..But these three remain, faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love.”

The word Paul uses here is agape. This love can only be produced through a relationship with God.  And so if it is the only love that remains and it is only found in God then common sense tells us that we had better be growing it and we had better be rooted and grounded in God in order to produce it.

Harvest is about reaping love and God loves to produce it in our lives.  So much so that when he gets to work in our lives we discover that we reap more than we sow. Gypsy Smith was a small boy when his mother died and he had no hope. But after he gave his life to Jesus he got a vision at age seventeen to be a preacher. At the end of his life he could say. ”God did much more for Gypsy Smith than he ever could have expected.”                                                                                                                                                  In celebrating harvest it is good to give thanks for God’s material provision; we do need to remember our responsibilities in sharing our resources with other but if we are to really reap the benefit from our celebration we need to think about how much we will allow God to govern us, so that our everyday life is a harvest of love. Like Gypsy Smith it will then be possible to say, God did far more with us than could have been expected.

God bless

Alan