Bringing In The Sheaves

“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed.”  Mark 4:3

When I was twelve, the pianist and organist of my small, southern, country church up and left.  Their departure wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds because the musicians were a married couple who moved because of the husband’s job promotion, but it was traumatic—at least for the one who soon found herself the sole accompanist in the Sunday service—me.  

Thankfully, scattered throughout the hallowed pages of The Baptist Hymnal were a few easy favorites like “At Calvary,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and the oft-requested “Bringing in the Sheaves.”  Maybe it was the lively melody or the catchy rhythm (or the fact that I could actually play most of the notes), but for whatever reason, the congregation sang that song on lots of Sundays.  

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

We all knew what sheaves were.  Though our farming community grew few grains, we had seen plenty of Bible storybook and flannel graph pictures of Ruth gleaning among the sheaves in Boaz’s field, and bunches of sheaves meant a bountiful harvest.

But harvests don’t happen unless someone sows seed which is why, according to the hymn’s first verse, we should sow all day long—morning, noon, and night.  What do we sow?  Seeds of kindness—not good deeds to make ourselves look great, but the seeds of gospel kindness to show off God’s grace.  “When the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy”(Titus 3:4).  And where are we supposed to sow this seed?  Everywhere.

The song doesn’t say so, but Jesus surely did in His story of the sower we read in the book of Mark.  Sitting in a boat on the lake He told the crowd along the shore about a farmer who flung his seed in four places—a hard path, the rocky soil, a patch of weeds, and good, rich dirt.  Some never sprouted, some quickly wilted, some sadly choked, but some grew up and produced a great harvest. 

The sowers job was to spread the seed, and nature took care of the rest.  Don’t get distracted by the details—this was a parable, not a dissertation on farming practices, but the point is that we should be the ones flinging the fabulous truth of God’s grace in all places at all times, and we can trust the perfect nature of our unchanging God to take care of the results.  And when He does, “we shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.”

We can’t bring in the sheaves unless we sow abundantly.

Let’s grab some seed and get busy.