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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Seedtime and Harvest

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

That pie you put in the oven, that's gonna take 30 or 40 minutes to bake.

No matter what you do, you need to give it half an hour or so, or it's not gonna be what you want it to be.

You make the pie, you put it in a hot oven, and you wait.

You hurt your knee, you have to have surgery.

The doctor tells you it's going to be 6 months to a year before you can get back to normal.

You might be jogging in 9 months say, maybe 6, but you're not going to be running 6 or 8 weeks after damaging your ACL.

The married couple who want to have a baby know how long they'll have to wait after conception.

Since the dawn of time, this has taken 9 months.

And wishing that process could be sped up won't change a single thing.

Now Jesus said the same thing about spiritual growth and Understanding that is critical in a life of faith.

Look with me at Mark 4, starting in verse 26.

He said, "...the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow.

For the earth yields crops by itself, first the blade, then the head, and after that the full grain in the head.

But when the grain ripens, immediately he puts in the sickle because the harvest has come.

Jesus is talking about spiritual growth, and he describes that process.

The kingdom of heaven getting into you and becoming more and more a part of you and transforming you is like seed being planted in the ground.

Now every year my wife and I grow a garden.

Sometimes garden might be too grand a word to be honest.

We're gonna get some tomatoes planted, few other things, we'll have sunflowers, just because we love them, and we'll get some seeds in the ground or in little starter pots, and then we Wait.

The seed packet will typically tell you 30 days to harvest, 60 days to harvest, 90 days to harvest.

And there are times along the way that you have to remind yourself that yes, 1 day these little things will actually end up on your dinner table.

A tomato's probably going to take you from 60 to 100 days.

Now radishes you'll get in 20 to 25 days.

But eggplant, more likely 120, maybe longer.

It'll depend a little bit on where you live, but what we know is that these things take time.

In the Bible, Jesus spoke a lot about seeds.

And wanting to find out more about seeds I came to southern Missouri Incidentally about 10 minutes or so from where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo lived for 60 years after moving here from South Dakota I wondered if I could get some insights into the little miracles that are seeds.

So, tell me something interesting about seeds that most of us don't know.

A lot of people don't know that a coconut is a seed.

Another thing that people don't know is that some seeds actually have, they measure temperature and they won't germinate until they've had a period of cold weather because that seed wants to know that it's gone through winter before it will sprout.

Do you notice much variation between seeds?

This seed will function this way, that seed will function that way.

My question, I suppose, really is, they've been programmed differently, right?

Yes, very different genes, very different product when you grow.

You know, you get this out of 1 seed, you get this out of another seed.

And even within cabbages, or even within this species.

You'll have you'll have red cabbages You'll have pointed ones or round ones or flat ones It's all in the the genes that are locked in that seed ready to burst out.

So this cabbage, it's a magnificent thing.

This cabbage started this past late fall as 1 of these.

This is the seed that actually grows this specific variety of cabbage.

So that little thing there, 1 of those tiny seeds grows into that.

Starts like a seed in the ground and grows up.

You know, we were talking about how you can't speed up the process, but you can delay the process.

If you don't give the right conditions, this isn't going to turn into this or it's going to take a lot longer.

Jesus said, for the earth yields crops by itself.

First the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head.

And it's that process that causes some people to stumble.

1, you get some people who feel like all they have to do is come to Jesus and that's kind of everything.

But that's not kind of everything because Jesus wants to prepare you for the harvest.

He wants you to grow and become the most complete reflection of Jesus that heaven can transform you into.

Now the other person who stumbles is the person who fears like they're not good enough for heaven and they never will be.

We'll look at it together in just a moment.

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Seedtime and Harvest

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