What Will the Harvest Be?

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.” —Hosea 8:7

Prudent individuals look before them to see the result of their actions. Their eyes look beyond the present to the future. They look before they leap. Only the foolish person goes blindly on until, at last, he stumbles and has a desperate and probably fatal fall.

We are all sowing; we cannot help it. No one goes forth in the morning without a seed-basket.

As we are all sowing, the great question we have to consider is, “What will the harvest be?” Every wise individual will ask that question. I may have sown little in my small plot, or I may have walked far and scattered the seed over the wider field committed to my charge—but what have I sown and what will I reap? What sheaves will I gather into the harvest—sheaves of fire that will burn into my soul forever or sheaves of glory that I will bring with rejoicing in the last great day? 

If we have believed in Christ and received eternal life by faith in him, and if we are trying to labor for him, we are sowing blessed seed; and if it comes not up today, or tomorrow, yet divine grace ensures a crop that we will gather in one of these days. Therefore, we may be encouraged to labor on. The farmer waits for the precious fruits of the earth through the long and dreary winter, through the checkered days of spring, through March winds and April showers he waits until at last the golden harvest rewards him for all his toil. What we sow, we will also reap. Our Lord has told us so.—Charles Spurgeon