Getting Our Hands Dirty | AllWorship.com

Don’t be afraid …

to get your hands dirty.

Some people want everything in life to be nice and neat. Sorry, it seldom works that way. In fact, it almost always does NOT work that way. If everything in your life is nice, neat, ordered, clean, and “perfect”, you may need to do a checkup. It could be because you aren’t doing anything!

Living a life worthy of an intimate relationship with Jesus takes work. Hard work. Painful work. Being born again is an event, but living “the life” is a process. How does the process work? Jesus describes it in today’s Scripture passage.

He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” (Mat 13:31-32 NIV)

He describes a growing process. This is familiar to me, seeing that I grew up on a farm. Farming is hard work. It requires you to get your hands dirty–and just about everything else. You have to dig in the dirt. You have to plant seeds and tend them. And then comes the harvest. This is also a lot of work and an often dirty process. Dirty, sweaty, and hot, it is–and that’s on a good day.

Why go to all that difficulty? Because the harvest is oh, so sweet. I grew up eating vegetables that, when placed on the dinner table, were in the ground an hour or so before. The taste is nothing like our modern farming techniques, where the veggies come from who-knows-where, who-knows-when, and the meat is a mystery all its own.

And, to me, knowing what it took to produce those vegetables somehow makes them taste even better. One of my favorite meals in the whole world was my grandmother’s fresh turnip greens, hot cornbread just out of the oven with butter and fresh green onions–all picked a little earlier in the day, with the exception of the cornmeal. (I wonder if God will let grandmother cook that in heaven?)

My purpose in today’s message is to ask you what you are sowing into your life. Do you know? If you are wise, it will be the truth of God’s word, sown, grown, and tended into a harvest of righteousness. Now, the word ‘righteousness’ is one we rarely use today. (I wonder why …) You might think of it as meaning “in agreement with God”.

This is our goal: to grow up into agreement with Him. It only happens by sowing His word in our spirit so it can produce a harvest of righteousness–a relationship in agreement with God. Jesus further describes this process in Luke 8:9-15. It is also described in 2 Cor 9:10, Hebrews 12:11, and James 3:18, among others.

For this to happen, you will have to uproot things in your life. You may have to dig some things out. You will have to eliminate the weeds in your soul. In short, if you want His harvest, you must be willing to work hard and get your hands dirty.

What about it, then? Are you willing? Do you want all Jesus has for you? You can have it, but it will not just fall out of the sky into your lap. You’ll have to work at it. It will be hard. You’ll sweat (spiritually speaking). You’ll have to work at it when you would rather be doing something else.

But when the harvest comes in, it will be oh, so sweet and oh, so worth it. Just like grandmother’s turnip greens, cornbread, and onions were to me after a hard day’s work. So, work hard. You will have all eternity to wash up and rest afterward.