Do you ever wonder about why you have heard the message about freedom in your eating, freedom from being tormented about your body and all those things that you struggle with…why you KNOW stuff and feel STRONGLY that “Yes! This is the truth! I believe! I will do it!” and then still walk in defeat? Still don’t quite seem to flesh the thing out?
So many I talk with about Thin Within experience this. I know I did for years. Probably at least 6 years before things “clicked” I knew…really KNEW the truths that God intended for my freedom. Yet it took until 2006 for me to begin to walk in freedom.
Why is that? Why do we embrace it and believe it and then…don’t experience in our reality what God’s Word says we will?
In my Stepping Up study (by Beth Moore), she shares something really profound on page 81. She shares about how she and her husband went to Angola to do some relief work and how they were trying to take in the sights and sounds and smells of living death…starvation, malnutrition…rampant and overwhelming. A friend shared with them that one of the saddest things is that when seed is brought in to plant and harvest, the people of the villages respond to it by EATING THE SEED instead of sowing the seed. She shares how she couldn’t get this thought out of her head and realized that God answered the question above…that some of us eat the seed of God’s word. We are starving and ravenous…we see it as the truth and good and wonderful…and take it in as temporary satisfaction for our “stomachs” if you will. Instead of working it and working it and waiting and waiting….sowing the seed of God’s Word in our lives.
I know what she is talking about because I have done this precise thing. All that time I wrote with the Hallidays, had daily contact and help and support–had to basically write her God-given thoughts on the page for publishing…I “knew” it…I was “eating” that seed…but I wasn’t working it into the soil of my life.
It takes time. And we want instant results, instant gratification…So, if we don’t see results that are measurable (the bathroom scale often enough), we toss it out…we have eaten the seed instead of sown it.
It takes work. It takes faith. It takes belief…God can do these things in us. It requires patience and perseverance…we wait on Him to do it, yet somehow walk with him, get in the soil and do some dirty “work” in our hearts along with him…
If we don’t, we are like those starving people in Angola. Their need would be provided for much better in the long term if they would SOW the seed instead of eating it…Starving, the don’t know how to trust. How like that I am.
Lord help me not just to eat the seed of your Word and have the temporary “satisfaction” of a full belly. But help me, instead, to sow the seed into my life, to be willing to work it, trust, see the thing through…and experience the harvest that you intend the seed to bring. In the precious Name of Jesus. Amen.
Oh Heidi…how guilty I have been of this. Thanks for a great illustration. And may God enable me to wait for His seed to grow and flourish!
Wow, very profound. Thanks for sharing. This illustration will stick with me (just like your brambles story).
Thank you so much for this awesome lesson. I do this, but I’ve never seen it until reading this post. God has used you to open up my eyes today!
Oh, how this spoke to my heart. How often I have done this. Open the eyes of my heart, Lord!
I am thankful for this post Heidi! Thanks for putting it ‘on paper’- or on blog. =)
That doesn’t help me. Sow the seed HOW?