Whose Harvest is This?

Please read Luke 10: 1-2 & 9.

In today’s verse Jesus is sending off a larger group of messengers to spread the Word in places he would later visit. When he told the “New 72” to ask the Lord to send out workers, he implied that the ones asking were also to be workers.
I have seen this verse expounded on harshly as a mission’s recruitment tool. It has been used to shame believers for their careless handling of the harvest as though they were apple growers letting their crop rot on the ground under the trees. Clearly not every reader of the gospel is being called by God to become a career missionary. But as with a “deep end” this pool has a shallow end too. It looks more like a wide, easy path that leads in any direction but toward a harvest field. Let’s all pray that we find the narrower way here, even if it is a little bumpy and some thorns lean in from the edges.

Jesus clearly asked the “New 72” to pray about it. To follow Christ’s teaching by principal, we at New Day should be praying about the harvest too. Obviously the harvest is ripe and all around us. Seven out of every ten people you meet in our culture don’t know who Jesus is, or have never had an opportunity or an environment in which to turn their hearts in his direction. As a church, lets consider by faith that a “great door of effective work has been opened” (I Corinthians 16:9). As individuals lets be able to give an answer for the hope we have in Christ.

There is one last little thing that gives me a strange sense of comfort in all this: Look at the last part of verse 2. Our Lord takes possession of the harvest TWICE in one sentence. Something belongs to God besides his loved children who are already in his family. It is his harvest. He died for his harvest. Let’s pray about being available and active in God’s business.


Wayne Lindell