Seeds of Promise

This time of the year is a gardeners delight.  March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day, marks when seeds of hardy green plants like spinach can go in the ground. Over the next two months they will be followed by peas, carrots, beets, and potatoes. We will witness all kinds of seeds sprouting over the next few months. 

Growing food is fascinating! You place this tiny speck in the ground, water it and wait. In time, the earth and sun produce a ready-to-eat meal. In the words of Jesus:

"The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.  The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear." Mark 4:26-28

This little package, this seed, becomes a tomato, or cabbage, or watermelon. “Just add water.”

The chorus of Ben Keeler’s new song, "Deeper Still" by Firstfruits Music (available on Spotify and i-Tunes) goes:

We will rejoice in your great love for us.
We will recount your faithfulness.
When we remember all that you have done,
We will believe your promises.

In the prayer world, promises are seeds. When we pray, we do not create seeds. Prayer is the watering and nurturing of the seed. I don’t have hope because of the prayer. I have hope because of the seed. The seed is the promise. No promise, nothing to pray into. You can water empty dirt all you want. Nothing will grow.

The marvel is we are given a treasure trove of promises, the greatest seed catalog you could want: the Bible. There are promises of every color, shape and size, for every need and every hunger.

But the Bible passages by themselves are not the promises. That would be like cutting out a picture of a melon from a seed catalogue and planting it in the ground. You only get wet paper. The Bible is the catalogue, and you search the promises with a heart of faith. When the spirit of God speaks to your heart regarding a certain passage, you purchase the seed. Oh, the seed costs, but when a believer goes to the cart to checkout, they find the seed paid for by the blood of the Lamb.

Now it’s planting time. Place the seed in your heart and water it with prayer. Don’t be surprised if some of that praying water is tears. One clarification: the germination time is not on the seed package.

Robin Boisvert shared this past Sunday a promise that the Spirit spoke to him in May of 1973: I Tim. 1:12-14, a call to ministry. He has that verse in a frame on his office wall, which has been fulfilled with the past 40 plus years of pastoral ministry.

I received a similar promise in August 1976. I first shared it with my pastor in 1983. Over the next 30 years I would share it with a number of my pastors. I told the Lord more than once: “I’m not going to knock on that door again. It’s too painful hearing no.” But I came to notice over the decades that I had been living my calling: with my children, the men and women at work, Christian Service Brigade, children’s ministry, youth ministry, small group leading, counseling - in all of them I was caring, teaching, discipling.

When doing my taxes in the spring of 2003, I reflected that someday when I retire at 65 I’d have more time to serve in the church. I felt the Lord say at that moment - “Could that be sooner?” That led me on a path over the next two years of arranging to leave my 30 year work career. Shortly after that decision our church started exploring a non-staff pastor program, to which I was nominated. Those two events aligned such that the same week I left the career world was the week I was ordained.

My promise is not yet fully fulfilled. It is still in process. I seek to be faithful to nurturing it in prayer.

What about you? What promises has God spoke to your heart? Abraham is called the father of our faith. He was told he would have a son. It would be 25 years before he would see that promise fulfilled.

Maybe that’s why the chorus of Ben’s song resonates so much with me:

We will rejoice in your great love for us.
We will recount your faithfulness.
When we remember all that you have done,
We will believe your promises.

I see his love and faithfulness in every season, and it helps renew my faith for his promises yet to be fulfilled.